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Megalopolis director Francis Ford Coppola has joined Letterboxd, the social cataloguing service where members can rate and review films and keep track of what they’ve watched. I’m a little addicted. Coppola has shared a list of twenty films that he would recommend to any cinephile or aspiring filmmaker, which you can check out below.

French Cancan (Jean Renoir) The Bad Sleep Well (Akira Kurosawa) The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra) Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg) The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey) The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis) The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa) Tokyo Story (Yasujirō Ozu) The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau) The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg) Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan) Punch Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson) Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg) Sunrise (F.W. Murnau) Joyless Street (G.W. Pabst) A Place in the Sun (George Stevens) The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese) After...

Barbara Stanwyck is an early-Hollywood icon. The actor overcame a challenging childhood to become a performer of remarkable range, equally praised for her work in screwball comedies, Westerns, and film noirs. Unfortunately, the Big Valley star’s personal life was as fraught as some of her more complicated characters, but her artistic legacy made her a wealthy woman and a timeless on-screen presence.

Barbara Stanwyck grew up an orphan and began working as a pre-teen Barbara Stanwyck in ‘The Big Valley’ | ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images

The youngest of five children, Barbara Stanwyck was born Ruby Catherine Stevens on Jul. 16, 1907, in Brooklyn, New York. Tragedy struck early in her life. Her mother, Catherine, died after a drunk passenger pushed her off a moving streetcar in 1911. Two weeks after the funeral, Stanwyck’s father, Byron, left to join a work crew digging the Panama Canal and...

It’s a wonder movie from the 1930s, a political fantasy that imagines a Utopia of peace and kindness hidden away in a distant mountain range — or in our daydreams. Sony’s new restoration is indeed impressive. Ronald Colman is seduced by a vision of a non-sectarian Heaven on Earth, while Savant indulges his anti-Frank Capra grumblings in his admiring but hesitant review essay.

Lost Horizon (1937)

80th Anniversary Blu-ray + HD Digital

Sony

1937 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 133 min. / Street Date October 3, 2017 / 19.99

Starring: Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt, Edward Everett Horton, John Howard, Thomas Mitchell, Margo, Isabel Jewell, H.B. Warner, Sam Jaffe, Noble Johnson, Richard Loo.

Cinematography: Joseph Walker

Film Editors: Gene Havelick, Gene Milford

Art Direction: Stephen Goosson

Musical director: Max Steiner

Original Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Written by Robert Riskin from the novel by James Hilton

Produced and Directed by Frank Capra

Frank Capra had a way with actors and comedy...

The retrospective Frank Capra, The American Dreamer is showing April 10 - May 31, 2017 in the United Kingdom.Frank CapraFrank Capra has fallen badly out of fashion in recent decades. While still well-known for the extraordinary Depression-era purple patch that produced It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), the critics have rarely been kind. His work is routinely derided as “Capra-corn” for its perceived sentimentality and “fairy tale” idealism while the man himself is written off in favour of contemporaries Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch.Elliot Stein, writing in Sight & Sound in 1972, attacked Capra’s “fantasies of good will, which at no point conflict with middle-class American status quo values”, arguing that his “shrewdly commercial manipulative tracts” consist of little more than “philistine-populist notions and greeting-card sentiments”. Pauline Kael found him “softheaded,” Derek Malcolm a huckster hawking “cosily absurd fables.” To an extent,...

'A Beautiful Mind' with Russell Crowe. '31 Days of Oscar' on TCM: 'The Wind and the Lion,' 'The Man Who Would Be King' Turner Classic Movies' “31 Days of Oscar” continues on Saturday, Feb. 6, '16, with more recent fare – as in, several films released in the last four decades. Among these are The Wind and the Lion, The Man Who Would Be King, A Beautiful Mind, Swing Shift, and Broadcast News. John Milius' The Wind and the Lion and John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King are both 1975 releases featuring “Westerners” (i.e., white people) stranded in “exotic” and potentially dangerous locales (i.e., places inhabited by dark-skinned non-Christians) in the distant past: the former in early 20th century Morocco; the latter in a remote region in colonial India in the late 19th century. (That particular area, Kafiristan, is located in today's Afghanistan.) The thematic similarities between the two films end there,...

Greta Garbo movie 'The Kiss.' Greta Garbo movies on TCM Greta Garbo, a rarity among silent era movie stars, is Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” performer today, Aug. 26, '15. Now, why would Garbo be considered a silent era rarity? Well, certainly not because she easily made the transition to sound, remaining a major star for another decade. Think Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, William Powell, Fay Wray, Marie Dressler, Wallace Beery, John Barrymore, Warner Baxter, Janet Gaynor, Constance Bennett, etc. And so much for all the stories about actors with foreign accents being unable to maintain their Hollywood stardom following the advent of sound motion pictures. A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer star, Garbo was no major exception to the supposed rule. Mexican Ramon Novarro, another MGM star, also made an easy transition to sound, and so did fellow Mexicans Lupe Velez and Dolores del Rio, in addition to the very British...

Earlier this month, Paul Thomas Anderson's feverishly anticipated "Inherent Vice" (read our review here) made its debut at the New York Film Festival. In addition to screening the film for the first time anywhere in the world, organizers brought Anderson out for a masterclass, which we detailed at length right here. But if you want to hear the words from the man himself, now you can. Cory Everett snagged the audio from the talk and has posted it online. For the talk, Anderson brought a handful of clips from a wide range of films, television shows and music videos —"Police Squad!," Neil Young's "Journey Through the Past," Alex Cox's "Repo Man," Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest," Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown," Frank Capra's "The Bitter Tea of General Yen" and more— as a conduit through which to discuss "Inherent Vice." It's well worth a listen,...

Above: Swedish one sheet by Gösta Åberg for Broken Lullaby (Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1932).

This rather unusual Swedish design, a mélange of various type and illustrative styles, is a poster for one of Ernst Lubitsch’s lesser known and most atypical films: Broken Lullaby (a.k.a. The Man I Killed). A dark film about a French soldier tormented by the memory of a German soldier—and fellow musician—whom he killed in Wwi, it screens this weekend and next in New York at Anthology Film Archives as part of "Auteurs Gone Wild," a tantalizing series programmed by Notebook contributor David Phelps.

The series includes nine refreshingly less-than-obvious works—all on 35mm—by such canonical figures as Hitchcock, Chaplin, Cukor, Capra, Lang and Von Sternberg. Phelps has chosen to shine a light on these authors’ least representative films: films that have been overlooked because they don’t fit the mold, because...

A 9-film series of not-quite-classics (on 35mm), "Auteurs Gone Wild" runs at Anthology Film Archives from March 20-30, 2014; what follows are the director's cut of the program notes (with production stills of the auteurs themselves, mid-wild)—

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If the Hollywood auteurs were the ghosts in the studio machine, what would they look like exorcised? Rather than author, the word "auteur" might have referred to a kind of rhetorician working within genre codes that, once decoded, would only reveal his own commentary on them. But what would happen if this auteur cleared his throat, managed a sip of water, and tried speaking in his own tongue? Typically, the critics who had authored the auteur as a placeholder and retroactive justification for their own generic interpretations would have to snub such attempts to break out of genre molds to go strange, personal places. For the irony is that these works, kind of laboratory...

Film buffs rejoice! Vintage Books is going back to the source material that inspired a number of iconic Hollywood films. As part of Vintage Movie Classics, the publisher–founded in 1954 by Alfred A. Knopf–is re-issuing four classic novels in March: Show Boat, Cimarron, Back Street and Alice Adams. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, The Bad Seed and Drums Along the Mohawk will follow over the next few months. The stories, of course, remain the same -- the covers and forwards are what differ -- but this re-issue could be just enough of a

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For a dyed-in-the-wool film buff, getting a chance to see movies that haven’t been in circulation for decades is always enticing. Beginning tonight, UCLA Film & Television Archive is presenting a series called Columbia in the 1930s: Recent Restorations. Alongside established titles like Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) and Howard Hawks’ The Criminal Code (1931) you’ll find other films that are virtually unknown: Attorney for the Defense (1932), East of Fifth Avenue (1933), By Whose Hand? (1932), Men in Her Life (1931), and Lover Come Back (1931). Stars include Edmund Lowe, Constance Cummings, Pat O’Brien, Lee Tracy, and Charles Bickford. I can hardly wait! I...

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Above: Us poster for Forbidden (Frank Capra, USA, 1932)

In honor of the month-long retrospective of the films of the great Barbara Stanwyck starting today at Film Forum in New York, I thought I’d select my favorite Stanwyck posters. Brooklyn-born Ruby Catherine Stevens made 85 films over 37 years in Hollywood so there is an awful lot to choose from. But the remarkable thing about looking back at these posters is how artists seemed to have had a hard time capturing her likeness. The poster for one of her earliest films, Capra’s 1932 Forbidden, above, captures her beautifully, but the poster for Stella Dallas (1937), her first Oscar-nominated role (she never won, shockingly), seems to be of a different actress entirely. As for the sexed-up illustration on the flyer for The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), in that she looks more like Jean Harlow. Some of my favorite posters for her films are the Swedish and Danish designs,...

Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films for a Nasty-Ass World! runs from today through Thursday at the Roxie in San Francisco and Dennis Harvey has a fun preview in the Bay Guardian. A snippet: "March 4 offers a shocking double dose of pure white femininity finding themselves in, ahem, 'Yellow Peril' — miscegenation being something Hollywood could only begin to embrace a few decades later. Frank Capra's atypically erotic The Bitter Tea of General Yen, with Barbara Stanwyck alllllmost surrendering the white flag to a 'charismatic Chinese warlord' (Swede Nils Asther, eyes narrowed), has become a minor classic since flopping in 1933. No such luck for The Cheat (1931), a remake of Cecil B DeMille's 1915 shocker that was part of Paramount's brief, failed attempt to make stage sensation Tallulah Bankhead a movie star. Her gambling-addicted socialite gets branded (literally) in lieu of repayment not by the original's Far East businessman (dashing Sessue Hayakawa...

Brigitte Helm in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (top); Jack Holt, Fay Wray in Frank Capra's Dirigible (middle); Walter Huston, Barry Fitzgerald, Roland Young, Louis Hayward, Judith Anderson in René Clair's And Then There Were None (bottom) London's BFI Southbank will be screening several Frank Capra efforts today and on Saturday, in addition to films based on Agatha Christie's works and the restored Metropolis. Most notable among those screenings is probably a 1986 British television production named Shades of Darkness: Agatha Christie’s The Last Séance. Directed by June Wyndham-Davies, the 50-minute show stars Jeanne Moreau in a "suitably spooky, at times surreal" supernatural tale about spiritualism. Frank Capra will be represented with Dirigible (1931), an early adventure tale set in the South Pole that features Fay Wray sandwiched between popular late-'20s players Jack Holt and Ralph Graves; The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), an overbaked interethnic romance-drama-tragedy starring...