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April 28 movie: Bluebeard's Eighth Wife. This movie was delightful! Directed by Lubitsch and written by Charles Brackett and BIlly Wilder, with terrific acting from stars Gary Cooper, Claudette Colbert, David Niven and Edward Everett Horton. Cooper and Colbert have wonderful chemistry, and they have great material to work with. I was laughing out loud throughout this -- at the jokes, and also just because the movie made me feel so happy. That's the Lubitsch touch.

April 28 movie: Gambling Lady. This movie had a twisty, implausible plot made enjoyable by the stars: Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea. I adore both of them, and together? A treat. Stanwyck is a professional gambler who marries rich, innocent McCrea. Then there's a false murder rap and they're forced apart by a designing woman, and then, well if this were a weeper I wouldn't be smiling while I write this. Which I am. Also starred Pat O'Brien and C. Aubrey Smith, both marvelous.

April 24 movie: Some Came Running. I think I wasn't in the mood to see this movie. It's highly praised, but I didn't like it at all. Frank Sinatra is a war vet with anger issues. Shirley Maclaine is a dumb, classless girl from the wrong side of the tracks who debases herself to Sinatra over, and over, and over. It's really rather unpleasant.

April 21 movie: In Person. Ginger Rogers plays a glamorous actress who has a nervous breakdown and starts wearing an ugly costume (fake teeth, bad wig, etc) so she can go out in public without being recognized. George Brent spends time with her because he feels sorry for the poor ugly girl. Things progress from there as one would expect in a screwball comedy. In general I cannot stand movies about beautiful women pretending to be plain, and this was no exception.

April 19 movie: H.M. Pulham, Esq. I really enjoyed this thoughtful movie about a Boston society man (Robert Young) looking back on the road he didn't take: a New York career and romance with Hedy Lamarr.

April 19 movie: The Heavenly Body. Astronomer William Powell treats wife Hedy Lamarr like an idiot. She gets him back by acting like one. I can't recommend this unless you really, really love one (or both) of the stars.

April 19 movie: Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Now this was funny! I really enjoyed it a lot. I rented it after hearing Neil Patrick Harris on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, discussing his part. Which was indeed hilarious. Though I must concede, I would have enjoyed the movie a lot less if I had watched it in a theater and hadn't been able to fast-forward through the gross-out bodily function scenes (the two girls in the bathroom and the guy with the skin problem).

At first I thought this was basically the same as After Hours but by the end I decided they're totally different. After Hours (if I recall it correctly) is completely nihilist. Harold and Kumar is a much more traditional narrative: they have a goal, they encounter obstacles, they achieve the goal, and they become better people in the process. Nobody is a better person at the end of After Hours.

The DVD menu screen features Harold and Kumar in their car, wondering why the viewer won't pick a damned option already. "Come on, be nice! They got the DVD!" "No, man, this is starting to piss me off!"

April 17 movie: Blazing Saddles. I was disappointed and surprised by the lack of funny in this movie. I saw it decades ago and thought it was one of the funniest things I had ever seen. This time it seemed ... mildly funny. At times. The Count Basie cameo was really cool though.

April 14 movie: The Producers. Speaking of Ziegfeld Follies, the "Springtime for Hitler" number clearly owed a lot to the Ziegfeld Follies. The costumes in "Springtime for Hitler" were no more ludricrous than the costumes in Ziegfeld Girl, except for the whole Nazi angle.

April 13 movie: Ziegfeld Girl. Fun musical / melodrama which follows three women -- Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner -- who join the Ziegfeld Follies. Ziegfeld Follies was this stage show in the late 20s and early 30s featuring women dressed as showgirls walking down stairs. The women go through trials and tribulations, have affairs, experience fickle fame, and walk down a lot of stairs. Also stars Jimmy Stewart, George Sanders, Eve Arden, Edward Everett Horton and Tony Martin.

April 10 movie: The Ascent of Man. Disc 3 includes 3 episodes: "The Starry Messenger," about the trial of Galileo; "The Majestic Clockwork," about Kepler, Newton and Einstein's Theory of Relativity; and "The Drive for Power," about the Industrial Revolution.

"The Drive for Power" includes footage of amazing automata (mechanical dolls) created in pre-revolutionary France. There were automata that drew real pictures, ones with moving eyeballs and even one whose chest rose and fell as it "breathed."

April 8 movie: Ship Ahoy. I love this movie! It's an incredibly silly wartime romantic comedy starring Eleanor Powell and Red Skelton and featuring Nazis on a cruise ship. Highlights of the movie are the soundtrack by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra (who appear in the film, ostensibly as the entertainment on the cruise ship) and a scene where Powell tap dances Morse code.

The Dorsey numbers feature Frank Sinatra, Connie Haines, Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers, none of whom are named in the credits (though Dorsey introduces Haines by name during the movie, also Buddy Rich). Sinatra sings two numbers: "Poor You" and "Last Call for Love." Dorsey also does one of my favorites, "I'll Take Tallulah," but sung by Red Skelton instead of Sinatra. Feh!

April 7 movie: Teacher's Pet. Romantic comedy starring Doris Day as a journalism teacher and Clark Gable as a newspaper editor who believes life experience is the only education worth having.

As a romance this didn't work for me at all. Gable is so much older than Day that I found his attentions towards her creepy and enjoyed the movie better when I pretended they weren't happening. As a professional comedy, this movie was spectacular. A funny and insightful look at clashing perspectives about what journalism means and what it should accomplish, and two talented, stubborn but not unreasonable people who gradually learn that their own way isn't the only way.

There's a great scene early on where Gable pretends to have no experience and signs up to be a student in Day's journalism class, so he can show her up. He argues with her in front of the class, until she tells him to go write a sample story. Day reads the story in front of the class, obviously preparing to rip it, and him, apart. When she sees how good it is, she apologizes to him in front of everyone and says it's the best story she's ever seen in a class. Instead of smirking with a "gotcha" triumph, Gable has the decency to look ashamed of himself. That's the moment when I knew I loved this movie.

One very, very shallow comment: Doris Day had an incredible ass. Gable spends much of the movie ogling it, which, creepy, but I can understand why. I was ogling her ass too. (My use of the past tense is in no way intended as a judgment on the current state of Miss Day's ass. I haven't seen a photo of her from the rear in decades, so I can't say.)

April 6 movie: Dark Victory. Wrapping up the Bette Davis birthday tribute with another one of her best.

April 6 movie: The Bride Came C.O.D. Extremely silly movie starring Bette Davis as an heiress running away to get married, and James Cagney as a private pilot hired by her father to prevent the marriage by kidnapping her and taking her back home to Texas. The plane runs out of gas and they crash-land outside a ghost town, and then it's basically the same as It Happened One Night. With many scenes of people falling ass-first into cactus patches.

That description makes the movie sound terrible, and it was. I still enjoyed it. I was thrilled to see it because I had tried to record it ages ago, and then someone died (I think maybe Ingmar Bergman) and TCM pre-empted all that day's programming, so I never got to see it until now. It was silly good fun. Davis gets the best line: "You're not even good enough for the cuss words I know!"

April 5 movie: All About Eve. What an amazing movie this is. Bette Davis is perfection, as is George Sanders and of course Thelma Ritter. Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill and Marilyn Monroe also turn in excellent performances. The weak spot for me is Anne Baxter. She doesn't ruin the movie or anything, she's a fine enough actress. But "fine enough" just isn't enough on the same screen with the likes of Davis and Sanders. I wonder what this movie would have been like if someone like Patricia Neal had played Eve.

April 5 movie: Stardust: the Bette Davis Story. It's Bette Davis' 100th birthday today, and they're showing her movies all day on TCM. Including this documentary from a couple of years ago. Lots of great clips, including one of my favorites from The Cabin in the Cotton: "I'd love to kiss you, but I just washed my hair!"

It was interesting to compare this to the Davis biography I read a couple of months ago. Davis' oldest daughter comes off particularly badly here. The daughter apparently wrote a nasty Mommie Dearest style biography then became a premillenial dispensationalist. And told a reporter, after Bette died, that she didn't care because her mother hadn't been part of her life anyway. That's Christian compassion for you.

April 5 movie: Now, Voyager. I adore this movie.

April 4 movie: The Ed Sullivan Show: Tribute to the Red, White and Blue. Patriotic clips from the Ed Sullivan show. I rented this because it included a "rare performance by Irving Berlin," about whom I'm doing a tribute show on May 11. Well, Irving Berlin's song was recorded in 1968, when he was 80 years old and his voice was shot. And for the second half of the song he's backed by about a hundred Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Blech!

Otherwise the clips have some great moments, notably Kate Smith singing "God Bless America" and the drill teams of the Army and Navy doing amazing tricks with bayonets. And ridiculous as well, especially a couple of Vietnam-war era numbers. First Loretta Lynn did "God Bless America Again," a spoken word piece about how troubled America was, and how God should take her by the hand and get rid of those damned hippies. Well that was the gist of it.

Second was an astonishingly offensive number by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, admonishing antiwar protesters to quit their yapping or else. I quote the refrain: "If you don't love it, leave it! Let this song I'm singing be a warning. When you're running down our countrymen, you're walking on the fighting side of me." The song also included a couple of anti-immigrant jabs about how Roy and Dale love America because it's the country of their birth.

April 2 movie: Nova: The Great Escape. Great documentary follows archeologists uncovering Stalag Luft III, the real-life site of the events fictionalized in The Great Escape. The archeologists find "Dick," the third tunnel which the Nazis never discovered. Inside they find supplies like the air tunnel and a lantern (made from powdered milk cans) and a forged government stamp (made from a shoe sole). Three survivors of the escape attempt are interviewed about their experiences and then brought to the dig. The best moment in the show is when the archeologists show the tunnel entrance to the soldiers, and one of them (in his 90s at this point) silently but clearly mouths the words "son of a bitch!"

March 31 movie: The Howards of Virginia. Revolutionary War era melodrama starring Cary Grant and Martha Scott. Grant plays a rough pioneer in buckskins and a crazy accent; Scott is a refined Virginia lady. The best acting in the movie is by Cedric Hardwicke as Scott's Tory brother.

March 31 movie: Bop Girl Goes Calypso. Bad. This movie was bad. A rock-n-roll singer meets an egghead professor who proves, scientifically! through the use of science! (actually by measuring decibels of applause) that rock and roll is on the way out, and calypso is the next big thing. The only reason to watch this movie is a couple of performances by Lord Flea.