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They Shall Have Music
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The More the Merrier
: essential video:Portly Charles Coburn makes a cute if unlikely cupid in George Stevens's smart 1943 romantic comedy. Jean Arthur is girl next door and big-city sophisticate rolled up in one bubbly package as Connie Milligan, a single woman in Washington D.C. who sublets a room in her small apartment during the wartime housing crisis. Her new roommate, the deadpan eccentric Mr. Dingle (Coburn, who won an Oscar for his rascally performance), dislikes her stiff, bureaucratic beau and takes it upon himself to find her an appropriate boyfriend, namely the soft-spoken ...
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Come & Get It (1936)
: :Wisconsin lumberman Barney Glasgow (Edward Arnold) makes his fortune by marrying his business associate's daughter to cinch a lucrative partnership, thereby sacrificing the one he truly loves, Lotta Morgan (Frances Farmer). Lotta marries Barney's close pal Swan Bostrom (Walter Brennan) and they beget Lotta Bostrom (also Frances Farmer) who bears a striking resemblance to her mother. Years later, when the elder Lotta is no longer with us, Barney and his son (Joel McCrea) both fall for the young Lotta, causing Barney to work out his troubling sense of loss. This rousing ...
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Sullivan's Travels
: essential video:Writer-director Preston Sturges's third feature, 1941's Sullivan's Travels, remains the antic auteur's most ambitious screen effort. Having added the producer's stripe to his duties, Sturges combines breezy romantic comedy, arch Hollywood satire, and social essay into a single, screwball story line. The titular pilgrim is John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), an Ivy League grad who's enjoyed a meteoric rise as the director behind escapist movies like Ants in Your Pants of 1938, but is now determined to raise his sights toward more exalted, serious-minded cinematic art. His proposed breakthrough, ...
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Stars in My Crown
: essential video:Writer-director Preston Sturges's third feature, 1941's Sullivan's Travels, remains the antic auteur's most ambitious screen effort. Having added the producer's stripe to his duties, Sturges combines breezy romantic comedy, arch Hollywood satire, and social essay into a single, screwball story line. The titular pilgrim is John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), an Ivy League grad who's enjoyed a meteoric rise as the director behind escapist movies like Ants in Your Pants of 1938, but is now determined to raise his sights toward more exalted, serious-minded cinematic art. His proposed breakthrough, ...
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Union Pacific
: :'The legend of Union Pacific is the drama of a nation, young, tough, prodigal and invincible, conquering with an iron highroad the endless reaches of the West.' This stemwinder of a foreword strikes the pseudo-biblical/American Empire keynote for Cecil B. DeMille's 'history' of building the transcontinent railroad. Only the bombast--and Arthur Rosson's second-unit direction--rises to the film's epic mission. The mustache-twirling villainy is right out of 19th-century melodrama, and the romantic triangle of Joel McCrea's railroad troubleshooter, Barbara Stanwyck's aggressively 'Oirish' postmistress-on-wheels, and their black-sheep chum played by newcomer Robert Preston ...
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Foreign Correspondent
: essential video:The first of Alfred Hitchcock's World War II features, Foreign Correspondent was completed in 1940, as the European war was only beginning to erupt across national borders. Its titular hero, Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea), is an American crime reporter dispatched by his New York publisher to put a fresh spin on the drowsy dispatches emanating from overseas, his nose for a good story (and, of course, some fortuitous timing) promptly leading him to the 'crime' of fascism and Nazi Germany's designs on European conquest. In attempting to learn more ...
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Primrose Path
: essential video:The first of Alfred Hitchcock's World War II features, Foreign Correspondent was completed in 1940, as the European war was only beginning to erupt across national borders. Its titular hero, Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea), is an American crime reporter dispatched by his New York publisher to put a fresh spin on the drowsy dispatches emanating from overseas, his nose for a good story (and, of course, some fortuitous timing) promptly leading him to the 'crime' of fascism and Nazi Germany's designs on European conquest. In attempting to learn more ...
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Our Little Girl (Col)
: essential video:The first of Alfred Hitchcock's World War II features, Foreign Correspondent was completed in 1940, as the European war was only beginning to erupt across national borders. Its titular hero, Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea), is an American crime reporter dispatched by his New York publisher to put a fresh spin on the drowsy dispatches emanating from overseas, his nose for a good story (and, of course, some fortuitous timing) promptly leading him to the 'crime' of fascism and Nazi Germany's designs on European conquest. In attempting to learn more ...
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South of St Louis
: essential video:The first of Alfred Hitchcock's World War II features, Foreign Correspondent was completed in 1940, as the European war was only beginning to erupt across national borders. Its titular hero, Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea), is an American crime reporter dispatched by his New York publisher to put a fresh spin on the drowsy dispatches emanating from overseas, his nose for a good story (and, of course, some fortuitous timing) promptly leading him to the 'crime' of fascism and Nazi Germany's designs on European conquest. In attempting to learn more ...
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