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I find it impossible to believe anyone called Hobart Henley could ever be a great film director, but on the other hand, I also find it impossible to dislike a film director called Hobart Henley. It's too much fun reading his name in a credits sequence.Henley had been an actor, which seems to account for his preposterous, alliterative name, except it seems that really was his name, not a stage contrivance. He directed numerous silent films from the teens on, all of them obscure, but his late-career outpouring of a few cute pre-Codes is better remembered. Night World (1932) is enjoyable, and Roadhouse Nights (1930) is remarkable for being the only official adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (unofficial source material for Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing...), only you wouldn't know it because it reached the screen as a Jimmy Durante musical. The only thing it has...

'Ben-Hur' 1959 with Stephen Boyd and Charlton Heston: TCM's '31 Days of Oscar.' '31 Days of Oscar': 'Lawrence of Arabia' and 'Ben-Hur' are in, Paramount stars are out Today, Feb. 1, '16, Turner Classic Movies is kicking off the 21st edition of its “31 Days of Oscar.” While the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is being vociferously reviled for its “lack of diversity” – more on that appallingly myopic, self-serving, and double-standard-embracing furore in an upcoming post – TCM is celebrating nearly nine decades of the Academy Awards. That's the good news. The disappointing news is that if you're expecting to find rare Paramount, Universal, or Fox/20th Century Fox entries in the mix, you're out of luck. So, missing from the TCM schedule are, among others: Best Actress nominees Ruth Chatterton in Sarah and Son, Nancy Carroll in The Devil's Holiday, Claudette Colbert in Private Worlds. Unofficial Best Actor...

Claudette Colbert movies on Turner Classic Movies: From ‘The Smiling Lieutenant’ to TCM premiere ‘Skylark’ (photo: Claudette Colbert and Maurice Chevalier in ‘The Smiling Lieutenant’) Claudette Colbert, the studio era’s perky, independent-minded — and French-born — "all-American" girlfriend (and later all-American wife and mother), is Turner Classic Movies’ star of the day today, August 18, 2014, as TCM continues with its "Summer Under the Stars" film series. Colbert, a surprise Best Actress Academy Award winner for Frank Capra’s 1934 comedy It Happened One Night, was one Paramount’s biggest box office draws for more than decade and Hollywood’s top-paid female star of 1938, with reported earnings of $426,944 — or about $7.21 million in 2014 dollars. (See also: TCM’s Claudette Colbert day in 2011.) Right now, TCM is showing Ernst Lubitsch’s light (but ultimately bittersweet) romantic comedy-musical The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), a Best Picture Academy Award nominee starring Maurice Chevalier as a French-accented Central European lieutenant in...

Jean Dujardin, The Artist Best Actor Academy Award nominee Jean Dujardin — for Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist — is a first-time Oscar nominee and only the fourth Frenchman to be shortlisted for an Academy Award in the acting categories. Dujardin's predecessors were Best Actor nominees Maurice Chevalier for the Ernst Lubitsch musicals The Big Pond and The Love Parade (1929-30); Charles Boyer for Clarence Brown's Conquest (1937), John Cromwell's Algiers (1938), George Cukor's Gaslight (1944), and Joshua Logan's Fanny (1961); and Gérard Depardieu, the only actor nominated for a French-speaking role, for Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Cyrano de Bergerac (1990). None of those three performers ended up taking home the Best Actor Oscar statuette, though at the 1959 Academy Awards ceremony Chevalier was awarded an Honorary Oscar "for his contributions to the world of entertainment for more than half a century." (Not coincidentally, that was the year he failed to be nominated for Vincente Minnelli...

2012 Oscar Predictions Best Actress: Tilda Swinton, Glenn Close. [Photo: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley in The Descendants.] Like in the Best Actress 2012 Academy Award race, there are three shoo-ins for the Best Actor shortlist: George Clooney, Jean Dujardin, and Brad Pitt. Clooney will be in the running for Alexander Payne's The Descendants, Dujardin for Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist, and Pitt for Bennett Miller's Moneyball. Clooney has already won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his sleazy U.S. spy/weapons dealer in Stephen Gaghan's Syriana (2005). In the acting categories, he was also nominated as Best Actor for Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton (2007) and Jason Reitman's Up in the Air (2009). This year, Clooney's own Golden Globe-nominated political drama The Ides of March serves as further evidence of the actor-director's "worthiness." (Clooney was a Best Director Oscar nominee for the 2005 black-and-white drama Good Night, and Good Luck, which also earned David Strathairn a Best Actor nod.