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Sometimes a Great Notion
: :Paul Newman, an American original, would seem to be the perfect choice to direct a film adaptation of the second novel by another American original--Ken Kesey. But Kesey's novel, written under the influence of both LSD and growing fame, was a mishmash, and Newman's film can't rescue it. It also seems strange to see the ultraliberal Newman starring as a strike-busting logger who honors a contract on principle, rather than observe union concerns, bringing all sorts of misery down on ...
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Grapes of Wrath (1940)
: essential video:Ranking No. 21 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films, this 1940 classic is a bit dated in its noble sentimentality, but it remains a luminous example of Hollywood classicism from the peerless director of mythic Americana, John Ford. Adapted by Nunnally Johnson from John Steinbeck's classic novel, the film tells a simple story about Oklahoma farmers leaving the depression-era dustbowl for the promised land of California, but it's the story's emotional resonance ...
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Nine to Five
: :With a nod to Preston Sturges's classic dark comedy Unfaithfully Yours (about a man who fantasizes about murdering his possibly philandering wife), this 1980 cotton-candy-feminist-vendetta film concerns a monstrous boss (Dabney Coleman) whose more capable underlings dream of ways of punishing him. That much of the film is particularly fun, but the rest of it descends into silliness when the women stumble onto a real-life opportunity to teach him a lesson. Fonda, the biggest star in the film at the ...
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The Rounders
: :Burt Kennedy wrote several of the finest Westerns ever for director Budd Boetticher in the late '50s--marvels of austere, subtle storytelling. Yet on his own, writer-director Kennedy tended to very broad comedy-Westerns. The Rounders, based on a novel by Max Evans, falls somewhere between Support Your Local Sheriff (high) and Dirty Dingus Magee (low). Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda play two bronc busters in the pickup-driving West who, by their own admission, 'ain't exactly the smartest cowboys that ever lived.' ...
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Best Man (1964)
: :Burt Kennedy wrote several of the finest Westerns ever for director Budd Boetticher in the late '50s--marvels of austere, subtle storytelling. Yet on his own, writer-director Kennedy tended to very broad comedy-Westerns. The Rounders, based on a novel by Max Evans, falls somewhere between Support Your Local Sheriff (high) and Dirty Dingus Magee (low). Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda play two bronc busters in the pickup-driving West who, by their own admission, 'ain't exactly the smartest cowboys that ever lived.' ...
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Sex and the Single Girl
:Description:A sex farce very loosely based on 'Sex and the Single Girl' by Helen Gurley Brown
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Trail of the Lonesome Pine
: :Landmark films never lose the ozone-snap excitement of their special historic moment. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine was the first feature shot outdoors in three-strip Technicolor, and its exhilaration in forest and lake, mountain and cloud remains as fresh and privileged today as it must have been in 1936. Director Henry Hathaway, already a seasoned veteran, had a fine pictorial eye along with sturdy storytelling instincts; he knew just how to place his cast in dynamic settings without getting ...
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How the West Was Won
: :The first feature film to be photographed and projected in the panoramic three-camera Cinerama process, this epic Western is almost as expansive as the West itself, chronicling a pioneering family's triumphs and tragedies in numerous episodes spanning three generations and a half century of westward movement. Divided into five segments directed by veteran Hollywood filmmakers Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, and the legendary John Ford (and including uncredited sequences directed by Richard Thorpe), the film was one of the most ambitious ...
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On Golden Pond
: essential video:Writer Ernest Thompson, who came up with the original stage play of On Golden Pond and adapted it for film, is lucky to have two giants of the screen give dignity and breadth to his sometimes trite dialogue. Henry Fonda, in his last role, plays a prickly English professor at the disagreeable age of 80. Visiting his summer house by a Maine lake with his wife (Katharine Hepburn), the old man forges an unlikely bond with a lonely ...
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Midway
: :Six months after the Japanese destroyed the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, the Americans discovered the Japanese were planning to seize the Naval base at Midway Island--a perfect staging point for invading Hawaii or the mainland. Outnumbered four to one, the Americans won a surprise victory and shattered the backbone of the Japanese Imperial Navy. This 1976 film feels more like a history lesson than a drama, but World War II buffs will appreciate the attention to historical fact ...
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