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With the announcement for the 76th Primetime Emmys set for July 17th, let’s travel back 70 years and revisit the winners of the 6th Emmy Awards held Feb. 11, 1954 at the venerable Hollywood Palladium and telecast on Khj. New categories introduced that year included best new program and supporting actor and actress in a TV series. Prior to 1954, performers were nominated as individuals, but this year the program for which they were nominated was also included. NBC was nominated for 36 Emmys, while CBS placed second with 30 and ABC trailing far behind with just three.

CBS’s cherished “I Love Lucy’ won its second Emmy for best comedy series, while Vivian Vance took home her only Emmy for the show for her supporting role as Ethel Mertz. The other nominees for comedy series were CBS’ “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show,” NBC’s “Mr. Peepers,” CBS’ “Our Miss Brooks,” and CBS “Topper.

Periodically throughout the animated sci-fi sitcom "Futurama," the couch potato characters will sit in front of their 31st-century TV and take in an episode of "The Scary Door." "The Scary Door" is the future's take on "The Twilight Zone," complete with a Rod Serling-like announcer (played by Maurice Lamarche) explaining the weird ironies about to be witnessed. Naturally, the twist endings in "The Scary Door" go beyond irony and dive headfirst into absurdity. 

In one episode, a gambler dies and awakens in an afterlife casino. He wins once and figures it must be Heaven. He wins twice and figures that it must be Hell; what gambler wants to win every time? But then he realizes that his afterlife casino is actually on a plane ... and there's a monster on the wing of the plane. When he calls someone for help, he realizes that he is also Adolf Hitler. He...

John Wayne often saved the day in dozens of Westerns and war dramas, but there were plenty of great movies where The Duke wasn't the hero. As far back as the late '20s, John Wayne was getting into gunfights, but after he shot to stardom in the '30s with Stagecoach, he became a superstar on the silver screen and a larger-than-life hero that upheld justice by deciding right from wrong with a pair of six-shooters. After his career stabilized, he was able to experiment a little with his on-screen persona and occasionally share top billing or even play a villain.

From the '40s until the '60s, it was rare for actors to branch out too much from the role they occupied with the big studios, who felt audiences were used to only seeing them one way. Some of the best performances of Wayne's career came from being allowed to add nuance,...

Lewis John Carlino’s family-oriented Mafia tale was filmed four years before The Godfather: Kirk Douglas is a loose-cannon capo who bosses his own brother Alex Cord and won’t listen when his fellow kingpins talk about modernization. Irene Papas and Susan Strasberg are married to the mob, while veteran hoods Luther Adler and Eduardo Ciannelli provide the menacing atmosphere. Director Martin Ritt was supposedly not thrilled with the project yet it’s a polished, involving crime-time drama set both in New York City and Palermo, Sicily.

The Brotherhood

Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] #119

1968 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 96 min. / Street Date April 27, 2022 / Available from / £34.95

Starring: Kirk Douglas, Alex Cord, Irene Papas, Luther Adler, Susan Strasberg, Murray Hamilton, Eduardo Ciannelli, Joe De Santis, Connie Scott, Val Avery, Val Bisoglio, Alan Hewitt, Barry Primus, Michele Cimarosa, Louis Badolati.

Cinematography: Boris Kaufman

Art Director: Tambi Larsen

Film Editor: Frank Bracht

Original Music: Lalo Schifrin

Written...

Billy Wilder directed Sunset Blvd. with Gloria Swanson and William Holden. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett movies Below is a list of movies on which Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder worked together as screenwriters, including efforts for which they did not receive screen credit. The Wilder-Brackett screenwriting partnership lasted from 1938 to 1949. During that time, they shared two Academy Awards for their work on The Lost Weekend (1945) and, with D.M. Marshman Jr., Sunset Blvd. (1950). More detailed information further below. Post-split years Billy Wilder would later join forces with screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond in movies such as the classic comedy Some Like It Hot (1959), the Best Picture Oscar winner The Apartment (1960), and One Two Three (1961), notable as James Cagney's last film (until a brief comeback in Milos Forman's Ragtime two decades later). Although some of these movies were quite well received, Wilder's later efforts – which also included The Seven Year Itch...

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye

Written by Harry Brown

Directed by Gordon Douglas

USA, 1950

Seven people stand on trial for murder in a court of law, but one man is missing, a convict named Ralph Cotter (James Cagney). Had he lived to see his day in court, he would have paid the highest price for his crimes. After a few minutes in which the prosecutor woos the jury with proclamations regarding justice and enemies of the public, the film fades back to tell the full tale, beginning with how Ralph, career crook, escaped prison with help from the inside from a corrupt guard, an escape which costs the lives of two guards and a fellow convict whose sister Holiday (Barbara Payton) partook in the escape plan as well, even shooting one of the prison employees. A free man (of sorts), Ralph temporarily settles in with Holiday and partner Joe ‘Jinx’ Raynor (Steve Brodie...

Tony Awards 2013: Stage-Movie connection ranges from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Kinky Boots to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (photo: Emilia Clarke, Cory Michael Smith in Breakfast at Tiffany’s) [See previous post: "Tony Awards 2013 Nominations: Tom Hanks, Sigourney Weaver Among Potential Contenders."] Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, possibly up for a 2013 Tony Award in the Best Revival of a Play category, was made into an Academy Award-nominated movie in 1966. Mike Nichols directed Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal, and Sandy Dennis, from a screenplay by Ernest Lehman. Taylor and Dennis won Oscars as, respectively, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. In this latest Broadway revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the stars are Tracy Letts, Amy Morton, Madison Dirks and Carrie Coon. Peter Masterson’s 1985 film version of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, another possible Best Revival nominee, earned Geraldine Page a Best Actress Academy...

Film Noir Classic Collection: Vol. 5, has dusted off eight films of the celebrated genre and adapted them to DVD format. Collections like these, which bring older films to newer light, are godsends regardless (to a degree) of which films are selected, because as timeless as some of these stories and performances might be, the barrier of being stuck in an old format can bury them forever. And these stories deserve to be told. If you watch a few well made noir thrillers you will no doubt see the seeds that were planted in the heads of crime-thriller filmmakers the likes of Martin Scorsese or Michael Mann. Though there are better films in the noir genre that this collection could have culminated, there are also a lot worse. Any fan of noir films or old mysteries and thrillers will be pleased at what this box set has to offer.

Desperate (1947)

Directed...

(Actor Richard Erdman, left)

by Jon Zelazny

The craft of acting in the 20th century breaks neatly into two distinct phases: before Marlon Brando and after Marlon Brando. He first conquered Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947. Three years later—and sixty years ago—he made his first movie.

The Men (1950) is a grim drama set in a Va paraplegic ward. Brando is the bitter new arrival; Jack Webb and Richard Erdman play the patients who become his best buddies.

A native of Enid, Oklahoma, Erdman spent his teenage years in vaudeville, and began his Hollywood career in 1944. He most recently appeared on the NBC series "Community."

Richard Erdman: Brando and I went out to Birmingham General Hospital in Van Nuys, where all the war paraplegics were still being treated, and we stayed there a few days, learning how to use wheelchairs, and how to get in and...

Main Street Theater concludes its 2008-2009 season with Clifford Odets' masterpiece Awake and Sing! Originally produced on Broadway in 1935 with Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Luther Adler, and other members of the Group Theatre, Main Street's production has previews May 2, 3, and 6 and opens Thursday, May 7, and runs through June 7 at Main Street Theater - Rice Village, 2540 Times Blvd. (There is no performance Friday, May 8.)...