Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

Okay, now we're getting into familiar territory, aren't we. Tell me truthfully, now. Is there anyone who hasn't been living in a yurt in Outer Mongolia for their entire lives who doesn't know the plot of this film? (No offense to Outer Mongolians implied, really.) But, for the sake of the two or three people out there who haven't seen the movie, I'll fill you in. The rest of you will just have to bear with me. It's Thanksgiving Day. New York City. 1946. A man (Edmund Gwenn), portly, elderly, with a white beard and twinkly eyes shows up at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and agrees to stand in for an inebriated Santa Clause. Everyone is captivated by him, and he's hired to be Macy's store Santa for the Christmas season. There's only one problem. This gentleman, who has been living at an old-folks home on Long Island for a while now, claims that he really IS Santa Clause. The one and only Santa Clause. Says his name is Kris Kringle. Won't say how old he is. Says his next of kin are Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen...you know the rest. And he's a delight to everyone who meets him, including Susan Walker (Natalie Wood), daughter of Macy's parade organizer, Doris Walker (Maureen O'Hara). He boosts Macy's Christmas sales by telling customers where to go to find things that Macy's doesn't carry. At first, this shocks the management, but when delighted customers start spending more at Macy's, Kris gets a raise. Yes, everyone loves Kris. Everyone, that is, with the sole exception Mr. Sawyer (Porter Hall), the store's personnel manager. An amateur psychiatrist, he decides that Kris is delusional and dangerous and must be put away for everyone's safety. When Kris bops Sawyer on the head during an argument, Sawyer convinces Doris to have him taken to Bellevue for a psychiatric evaluation. Disheartened, Kris fails the test on purpose. Now it's up to Doris' neighbor and would-be suitor Fred Gailey (John Payne) to get Kris out of the Asylum. This leads to a hilarious court case, with Gailey using a branch of the US Government itself to prove his claim that Kris cannot be insane because he actually is who he claims to be - Santa Claus. And while all of this is going on, Fred is trying his best to woo the once-bitten-twice-shy Doris, and Kris is doing his best to convince both Doris and Susan that not only does Santa Clause exist but also that Kris is the real McCoy. Many "miracles" great and small occur during the course of the story, but none greater or more important than Doris and Susan finding out that they can believe in things that don't make any rational sense.

Miracle on 34th Street is a delightful Christmas movie that's all about the power of faith, the idea that sometimes you just have to believe in something even if it doesn't make sense to do so. The story is charming, just the kind of thing people need and want to see during the holiday season. Ed Gwenn is the perfect Santa Clause, portly, with his lovely white beard and his soft voice. He is the perfect embodiment of old St. Nick. In fact, he looks like he could have been the model for countless Coca Cola ads. Maureen O'Hara is great as the divorced single mother, trying to raise her daughter to be rational and level-headed. And eight-year-old Natalie Wood is utterly charming as little Susan, just learning how to believe in things that most children her age believe whole-heartedly. Most of the other characters are portrayed by Hollywood's stable of peerless character actors - something that seems to be missing in Hollywood these days. If there's one weak spot in the film, it's John Payne playing the would-be suitor. Leading men are terrible parts in films of this nature, because there's just not a lot you can do with them. He's handsome and he's smart and he's successful, but he doesn't get the great lines that the character actors or even Doris and Susan get, so he just sort of hangs around and helps to move the action forward, but he's not exactly memorable. On a trivia note, all of the footage or the parade was taken at the actual 1946 parade, in which Ed Gwenn was the official Santa Claus and performed all of the official duties associated with that position. Yes, that's really Gwenn addressing the crowd from the top of the marquee in front of Macy's.

There have been several remakes of Miracle on 34th Street, including a so-so made-for-TV version in 1974 with Sebastian Cabot, and a horrendous butchering of the story in 1994 starring Richard Attenborough. Best to avoid all of the remakes - they cannot compare to the original. Neither can the colorized versions that are widely available. To me, they look like those hand-tinted photographs from by-gone days. No black-and-white film should ever be colored. It's a travesty. Miracle on 34th Street was filmed in glorious black-and-white, and that's how it should be viewed. The film is rated G and it has a runtime of 96 minutes.

White Christmas (1954)

Yet another Christmas movie that starts in World War II, Michael Curtiz's White Christmas was the top grossing movie for 1954 and an instant holiday classic. A sort of a remake of Holiday Inn, it was supposed to reunite Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, but Astaire turned down the part saying he had retired. The screenplay was then rewritten for Donald O'Conner, but when he dropped out, Danny Kaye was tapped for the film. The rest, as they say all too often, was movie history. The film follows the adventures of Bob Wallace (Crosby) and Phil Davis (Kaye), two song and dance men who hook up during the dark days of WWII and go on to become famous as directors and producers of their own variety show. After closing down their show for the Christmas holiday, Bob and Phil go to see a potential act for their show, the Haynes sisters, Betty (Rosemary Clooney) and her younger sister Judy (Vera-Ellen). Phil and Judy hit it off right from the start, but Bob and Betty need a little encouragement, so Phil wrangles Bob into joining the girls in Vermont, where they're performing at the Columbia Inn. When they arrive at the inn, Bob and Phil discover that it's owned by their old commanding officer, General Tom Waverly (Dean Jagger). The boys are delighted to see him, until they find out from the receptionist, Emma (Mary Wickes), that the inn is losing money. See, it's not snowing. In Vermont. During ski season.

Well, Bob and Phil can't let an old pal from the army down, so they bring all of the cast and crew from their show to Vermont to rehearse over Christmas. But there are bigger problems brewing. General Waverly is feeling forgotten. After all, he's a general, one of the men who won the greatest war of all, an important leader, and he's stuck running a failing hotel and nightclub. So Bob and Phil come up with another great idea - they'll get as many men as they can find from the general's old division to come up to Vermont to show the general that he's not been forgotten. In the process of arranging all of this, though, Betty thinks Bob is going to use the general's hard-luck story to make a fortune for himself. Which he'd never do. But she won't listen to reason. After much misunderstanding and several testy moments, everybody gathers onstage to praise General Waverly. And as Bob and Betty and Phil and Judy sing "White Christmas," it starts to snow outside. The general is happy, the inn is saved, our two happy couples are headed for marital bliss, and everyone lives happily ever after, which is how a Christmas movie should end. Well, shouldn't it?

White Christmas holds a special place in my heart. I first saw the movie in December 1970, just a few months after my grandmother had died, and the film reminded me of her in some strange way. Maybe it was the set design, maybe it was the music by Irving Berlin, maybe it was the presence of actors who hailed from my grandmother's day. Whatever it was, this film became part of my mental backdrop against which my life has played out. That's what great films do. They seep inside of you and form a part of your subconscious metaphor of the world, the archetype against which you measure everything else in your life. I could have picked a lot worse movies to do this with. I mean, imagine if it had been Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space! But White Christmas is a fun, happy, carefree movie, another of those films that would be better termed a "holiday movie" than a "Christmas movie." It really has nothing to do with Christmas other than the time of year during which it is set. But who really cares about that. There's singing and dancing and beautiful sets and gorgeous costumes and wonderful music by Irving Berlin and its all wrapped up in a luscious widescreen technicolor package (called VistaVision) that will knock your socks off.

White Christmas is filmed in VistaVision and it has a runtime of 120 minutes.

The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)

Okay, so maybe William Keighley's The Man Who Came to Dinner isn't exactly a "Christmas movie' per se, but it does take place at Christmas time, and it is a movie, so it fits in my book. Besides, it is also one of the most deliciously, wickedly funny movies ever made. Sheridan Whiteside (Monty Woolley) and his personal secretary, Maggie Cutler (Bette Davis) travel from New York City to Ohio for a dinner at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley (Grant Mitchell and Billie Burke). As he is walking up the front steps, "Sherry" falls and injures his back. Much to Sherry's dismay, the doctor says that he must rest until he heals completely. In short order Sherry takes over the Stanley's home, ordering them about as if they were servants and generally wreaking havoc upon everyone who comes within his sights. When Maggie falls in love with Brett Jefferson (Richard Travis), the editor of the local paper, Sherry calls in his friend, the gorgeous actress Lorraine Sheldon ( Ann Sheridan), to lure Jefferson away from Maggie. When she discovers the plot, Maggie quits, leaving Sherry high and dry.

In a panic, Sherry calls on another actor, Beverly Carlton (Reginald Gardner), to drag Lorraine away from Jefferson. That plot fails, an infuriated Lorraine becomes more determined than ever to take Jefferson away from Maggie, and Maggie is more determined than ever to quit Sherry's employ. What's more, Mr. Stanley gets a court order evicting Sherry and his entire entourage in one hour. At the last moment, Sherry's old friend Banjo (Jimmy Durante) shows up and removes Lorraine from the picture in a fashion that I won't divulge. Sherry then turns the tables on the Stanleys when he discovers that Mr. Stanley's sister, Harriet (Ruth Vivian) is a notorious ax-murderer, a bit of knowledge the Stanley's are eager to suppress. Sherry blackmails the Stanleys into letting him stay a while longer. He also forces them to loosen their grip on their two children, who want to follow their own paths in life, not their parents'. When Sherry finally leaves, he takes with him the Stanleys' servants, who are more than eager to go with him. As he waves goodbye, Sherry slips on the ice yet again. You can guess the rest.

So what does any of this have to do with Christmas? Nothing whatsoever. Isn't that great? All of the madness simply takes place at Christmas time. In fact Sherry is forced to deliver his annual Christmas broadcast from the Stanleys' living room as his nurse and doctor attempt to herd a flock of penguins and a boys choir sings in the background. It's all madness and fun, and it's all Monty Woolley. Yes, Bette Davis may have gotten top billing, but this is Woolley's movie from start to finish. Davis plays second fiddle to him all the way through. And how could she not? I don't think anyone in movie history has gotten such great dialogue, with the possible exception of Groucho Marx. Referring to Harriet Stanley, Sherry declares, "She's right out of The Hound of the Baskervilles." When he hires the Stanley's servants from them, the Stanley's protest that they've been with them for year, to which Sherry retorts, "I'm commuting their sentence." And he refers to Maggie as "this aging debutante...[whom] I retain in my employ only because she is the sole support of her two-headed brother." But most of his acerbic wit is reserved for his nurse, poor Miss Preen (Mary Wickes in her first screen role). He tells her at one point, "Go in an read the life of Florence Nightingale and learn how unfitted you are to your chosen profession," and at another time he tells her, "My great aunt Jennifer ate a whole box of candy everyday of her life. She lived to be 102, and when she had been dead three days, she looked better than you do now." Face it, you just can't compete with lines like those, especially when you're playing a love-struck secretary.

Then only other character that even begins to compete with Sherry, is that of Banjo, who was based on Harpo Marx. Jimmy Durante has great fun with him. In fact, most of the characters in the movie were based on famous people. Sheridan Whiteside's character was based on noted film critic Alexander Woollcott, who was a good friend of the authors of the stage play, Moss Hart and George S. Kauffman. The character of Maggie Cutler was based on Algonquin Round Table member Dorothy Parker, Lorraine Sheldon was based on Gertrude Lawrence, and Beverly Carlton was based on Noel Coward. Even Harriet, Mr. Stanley's the ax-murdering sister, was based on a famous person - Lizzie Borden.

So, no, there's not a lot in this movie about Christmas. It's just a whole lot of fun, and it's a nice break during the chaos that occurs around Christmas. The Man Who Came to Dinner is rated G and has a runtime of 112 minutes. It is filmed in glorious black-and-white, of course.

Holiday Inn (1942)

Oh yeah! It's Christmas movie time. And I decided to start out my pantheon of Christmas films with this little nugget from 1942. Mark Sandrich's Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, and Marjorie Reynolds, with music by the great Irving Berlin. This film has it all folks. Singing, dancing and romance. It's the movie that first introduced the classic song White Christmas. It's the first movie I know of that deconstructs itself, pulling away the third wall, letting us see the actual sound stage on which the film is filmed while it is filming. And it's funny, with Crosby quipping such one-liners as, "Right now we've got the ledger in an iron lung." My fifteen-year-old daughter laughed her head off while watching it the other night. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most racist movies you will ever see, with Crosby and Reynolds performing in black face, and incomparable Louise Beavers forced to sing about how Abraham Lincoln "set the darkies free." Some of these scenes will literally set your teeth on edge. But bight down and bear through it. Remind yourself that performers like Beavers and Hattie McDaniel paid their dues and paved the road for the likes of Denzel Washington and Halle Barry. Besides, the rest of the film is worth the watching.

Jim Hardy (Crosby), Ted Hanover (Astaire) and Lila Dixon (Virginia Dale) are an entertaining trio, singing and dancing their lives away. But Ted wants to retire and live on a farm in Connecticut. Ted is engaged to Lila, who wants fame and fortune, so she decides to jilt Jim on Christmas Eve and stay with Ted. Jim goes off alone to live the good life on the farm. But farm living isn't all it's cracked up to be, and before the year is out Jim is in a sanitarium for his nerves. When he gets out, he's got a great idea for his farm. He'll turn it into Holiday Inn - a restaurant and dance hall that's only open on holidays. He hires up-and-coming singer and dancer Linda Mason (Reynolds) to perform with him, and the place opens to rave reviews on New Year's Eve. Unfortunately, Lila breaks off her engagement with Ted on New Year's Eve too, and a besotted Ted shows up at the inn, dances a fabulous number with Linda, before passing out cold on the dance floor. When he comes to the next morning, he remembers he found a great new dance partner, but he doesn't remember what she looked like. Now all of the pieces are on the board and the game is in motion. Ted tries to figure out who the mysterious dancing lady is, and Jim tries to foil his attempts at every turn. Once Ted learns that Linda is his "new partner," he tries everything in the world to get her away from Jim. In the end, Jim's own desperation causes him to sabotage Linda's opportunity to try out in front of a Hollywood talent scout, and she leaves Jim for Ted and Hollywood.

That's all I'm going to tell you about the story. If you want to see how it's all resolved and who wins the girl in the end, you're going to have to watch the movie. You won't be sorry you did. The dancing sequences are simply astounding. Astaire's Fourth of July dance alone makes the entire film worthwhile. Then there are the wonderful songs by Berlin, who truly was one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived. Listening to his music, it's easy to see why for the first half of the twentieth century popular music was jazz. And then there are all of the jokes and one-liners. Finally, there are the performances, all of which are first-rate. Walter Abel as Ted's agent Danny and Irving Bacon as Gus the driver almost steal the show from Crosby and Astaire. Trust me, if you like good movies, you're gonna love this film.

Holiday in is rated G. It's filmed in glorious black-and-white, and it has a runtime of 100 minutes.

To Have and Have Not (1944)

Howard Hawks' To Have and Have Not spawned one of the greatest Hollywood romances of all times as well as one of the greatest lines ever uttered on screen. Adapted from Ernest Hemingway's novel of the same title, the film stars Humphrey Bogart as Harry "Steve" Morgan, a charter fishing boat captain. Based in Martinique, and so under the authority of the Vichy government in occupied France, Steve and his sidekick Eddie (Walter Brennan) try to eek out a living while dealing with crooked customers, avoiding the local authorities and dodging gun battles between resistance fighters and government agents. When his most recent customer dies before paying Steve, he's forced to take work transporting resistant fighters to the island. Into this mix of bullets and intrigue steps Marie "Slim" Browning (Lauren Bacall), a down-on-her-luck cabaret singer who's just trying to earn enough money to get back home to America. This was the first on-screen pairing of Bogart and Bacall and the electricity between them is palpable. Steve is loner and a tough guy, but Slim may be tougher than him. She casts her line and reels him in by simply telling him he can have her. "You don't have to say anything," she says, "and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow." And hence history was made. But things don't go all that easily for Steve and Slim. The French Resistance fighter that Steve is transporting panics when he should keep his cool and gets himself all shot up. Then Steve has to operate on the guy and remove the lead from him. Meanwhile, the authorities are circling in for the kill. They try to get information out of Eddie by plying him with booze, but Eddie's a lifelong drunk and he can take a lot of booze. Finally, in true Bogart fashion, the evil Vichy agents are defeated and Steve, Slim and Eddie escape on Steve's boat, bound for Florida and happily ever after.


Apparently, Hemingway had bet Hawks that Hawks could never make a film of To Have and Have Not. Hawks rose to the challenge and did so, but only by cutting out most of the novel and substantially rewriting the rest. He focused on a single incident at the book's beginning, expanding and embellishing it to get a full-length movie. The setting was moved from Cuba to Martinique, and the time was moved to after the war had started. In the book, Steve hauls illegal immigrants to Florida, while in the movie he's hauling resistance fighters. He's also a much nicer guy in the movie. This film also has the distinction of being the only movie to have been co-written by two Nobel-prize winning authors: Ernest Hemingway wrote the novel on which it was based, and William Faulkner wrote the screenplay. In spite of this high literary pedigree, it turns out - according to the IMDB - that most of the dialogue was actually improvised by the actors on camera. That's okay, though. It all works out great. As does the presence of the great Hoagy Carmichael as Cricket, the pianist at the local bar. In fact, this film was my introduction to Carmichael at the ripe young age of twelve, and I have been a fan of his music ever since. And all of this is wrapped up in a cracking good yarn with bad guys you can hate and good guys you can sympathize with. You can't do better than that.

To Have and Have Not is rated G and is filmed in glorious black and white. It has a runtime of 100 minutes.

The African Queen (1951)

Meet Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart). Charlie's a happy man. He's got it all figured out. Charlie owns a small steam launch called the African Queen. Charlie and the Queen make a living ferrying passengers, freight and mail up and down the Ulanga River in German East Africa. Charlie is living the good life...or so he thinks. Then World War I breaks out and everything changes. Suddenly, all of the non-German residents are enemies. When the Germans raid a mission run by the Reverend Samuel Sayer (Robert Morely) and his sister Rose (Katherine Hepburn), Charlie comes to evacuate them. Unfortunately, he's too late to save the reverend, who dies of fever. When Charlie tries to take Rose back up river to safety, she comes up with a counter plan. She wants to sail downstream to Lake Tanganyika and destroy the Louisa, a German gunboat that plies the waters of the lake. Charlie tries to point out the impossibility of the trip: there's a German fort to get past; there are rapids; there's a dense swamp. Rose is adamant, though. They must do this for England. Reluctantly, Charlie agrees, and they argue their way down river. When Charlie gets drunk soon after they start out, Rose dumps all of his alcohol overboard. By the time they've made it past the fort and shot the rapids, both Charlie and Rose have changed. They begin to see each other in a new light. Yes, they fall in love. And the harder their journey becomes, the deeper in love they fall. By the time they finally - and miraculously - reach the lake, they are a committed pair. Charlie fashions crude torpedoes out of dynamite and oxygen cylinders, and they head out onto Lake Tanganyika to sink the Louisa. Unfortunately, a storm sinks the African Queen instead. Picked up by the Louisa, Charlie and Rose beg the ships captain to marry them before they are executed as spies. As the doomed couple say "I do," the Louisa strikes the half submerged hulk of the African Queen, detonating the torpedoes. The Louisa sinks, and Charlie and Rose swim off to safety.

Well, that - in a nut shell - is the story. It doesn't sound like much when you read it that way. You have to experience it. The African Queen is simply one of the finest movies ever made. Based on the novel by E. M. Forester, and directed by John Huston, it is the only movie for which Humphrey Bogart won an academy award during his long career. It is also a movie that nearly killed everyone involved in the making of it. The movie was shot largely on location in Africa, and dysentery, malaria, contaminated water and wild animals were a constant danger. The only members of the cast and crew who didn't get sick were Bogart and Huston who lived on a diet of baked beans, canned asparagus and Scotch whiskey. Bogart famously said, "Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead." Katherine Hepburn was so sick with dysentery during the filming that a bucket had to be kept just off camera for her to throw up in between takes. Now that's dedication. And that dedication brought forth a movie worth watching again and again. Bogart's portrayal of the lazy, drunken Allnut is one of the finest of his career, and his Oscar was well deserved. Hepburn is fantastic as the straight-laced Rose Sayer, who can't help but fall in love with her surly, pickled companion. It's fun to watch the relationship between the two characters grow and blossom into a deep abiding love. And the scenery and cinematography are amazing as well. It's just hard to imagine what Huston and his crew had to do in order to film this movie. They had to build a raft in order to float all of the camera equipment to get shots inside of the Queen when it was out on the water.

All in all, The African Queen is just a great visual feast, as well as being a whole lot of fun to watch. The movie is rated G, and it's filmed in Technicolor (it was, in fact, Katherine Hepburn's first color movie). Runtime is 105 minutes, and it's worth every second.

l'Avventura (1960)

What would you do if your best friend disappeared? Search for her? Call the cops? Panic? All of the above? Sure you would. If you were a normal person, that is. But that doesn't happen in Michelangelo Antonioni's l'Avventura (The Adventure). When Anna (Lea Massari) disappears while she and her friends are exploring a tiny island near Sicily, her friends aren't exactly distraught. In fact, it's more like they're simply put out. How dare she go missing? Anna's friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) and her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) make a half-hearted search for her. They send for the police. Anna's father shows up. Even he's irritated at being called away from his important business for such a tedious matter. Soon, everyone gives up the search and goes home. And before the day is out, Sandro is putting the moves on Claudia. Anna is never found. In fact, she's quickly forgotten, as Sandro and Claudia go in search of fun and pleasure. "What?" you ask. "Can they be so thoughtless?" Well, yes, they can and they are. Claudia and Sandro check into a hotel together. Claudia is tired and wants to go to bed, preferably with Sandro. He, on the other hand, has already started to lose interest in her, and he heads downstairs to join the party that is already in progress. Come morning, Claudia comes downstairs and finds Sandro in the arms of a prostitute. She runs away. He chases her. In the final scene, Sandro sits crunched on a bench facing a stone wall, Claudia stands over him looking out to sea. You don't gotta be Freud to figure that one out.

And really, that's all there is to this movie. Someone goes missing and nobody really cares. Nothing much is done about the disappearance, and no one's especially concerned about that either. We never see, or hear from, Anna again, and no explanation is ever given for her mysterious vanishing act or her closest friends' bizarre behavior following it. Everybody just goes back to their wealthy, idle, bored lives. And in those last three words you have the entire crux of l'Avventura. Wealthy, idle people who are so utterly bored that they can't even raise an emotion when one of their own goes missing. All they can think of is finding something that they think will relieve their boredom. They don't have relationships, because those are apparently too boring; instead, they just have sex, and they try to make that suffice. They have big, empty holes inside of them where their souls are supposed to be. They spend their time grabbing anything that they think will give them pleasure and stuffing it into that empty space trying to fill it up. They might as well try to mop up the ocean with a sponge. Their boredom consumes everything they touch, like some stomach parasite that sucks all of the nutrition out of the food you eat before your body can use it. This is ennui (ahn-wee), a feeling of utter weariness and discontent that results from satiety, when everything and everyone bores you, when nothing in the world holds any interest at all, when you go through your entire life on autopilot.

Antonioni - like Fellini - picked up on the horrendous ennui and alienation that gripped Italy (and the rest of Europe) in the late fifties and early sixties, something that the US is only now having to deal with. A new upper class had emerged, professionals in their thirties and forties with lots of money and lots of time on their hands. They also had lost their moral bearings and were adrift in an endless sea of relativism and agency. They could do what they wanted and their money would protect them. But they were alienated from everything and everyone, even from themselves. They could have sex when and where and with whom they wanted, and never mind the consequences. Antonioni shows us what some of those consequences are as Claudia and Sandro struggle for something meaningful in a world where life itself has lost its meaning.

Gabrielle Ferzetti gives a strong performance as Sandro, striving for something without even knowing what it is. And Monicca Vitti became a superstar on account of her performance as Claudia, who seems to have a slightly better grasp on what's important in life. Even so, she's the one-eyed queen in Sandro's sightless world. And all of this is filmed against that stark, gritty black and white that is the hallmark of Italian cinema. The pacing is slow, deliberate, as Antonioni carefully unwraps the souls of his characters. Dialogue is sparse. This isn't a talky film; its an observational one. Claudia and Sandro are placed in one situation after another, each one fraught with enough ethical dilemmas to keep a first year philosophy class going all semester. Having lost interest in their friend's disappearance, what will the protagonists do next? Will they move on with their lives? Or will they remain trapped in the same tiresome, dead-end existence. If you aren't sure, I direct your attention back to the final image of the film. It speaks volumes without saying a single word. Therein lies Antonioni's genius.

l'Avventura is NOT RATED. While the film has no objectionable scenes, it does deal with adult situations that may not be suitable for children. On the other hand, it's doubtful that children would even sit through the 143-minute running time. You should, though. It's worth every second of it.

Tomorrow Is Forever (1946)

The year is 1917. America has finally entered WWI. Young John McDonald (Orson Welles) signs up to do his patriotic duty. His pregnant wife, Elizabeth (Claudette Colbert) isn't so sure that this is such a good idea. He tells her not to worry, that the war will be over in no time and he'll be back home with her. She's not so sure. Maybe she has a premonition. John walks out the door, never to walk back into it. Fast-forward twenty four years. America is on the verge of another world war. Elizabeth has been happily married to Lawrence Hamilton (George Brent) since John disappeared. She has two sons: Drew (Richard Long) and Brian (Sonny Howe). Brian is Lawrence's son; Drew is John's. Lawrence has raised him as his own son, however, so he doesn't know that he's not. One day, a man comes into Lawrence's factory to look for a job. His name is Erik Kessler. He's a chemist. He fled Germany with his young daughter Margaret (Natalie Wood). Lawrence hires Kessler. What nobody knows is that Erik Kessler is John McDonald. He was severely injured during WWI, his body crippled, his face disfigured. Instead of going home, he stayed in Germany. He didn't want to burden his young wife with a crippled husband. Better, he decides, if she thinks he's dead. He became a chemist, lived his life. Margaret was the daughter of John/Erik's best friend, Dr. Ludwig (John Wengraf), the surgeon who saved his life. When the doctor was killed by the Nazis, John/Erik adopted Margaret.

When Elizabeth first meets John/Erik, she finds him oddly familiar, but she can't place where she's seen him before. Besides, she has other problems. Her son Drew wants to enlist in the war. Elizabeth fears a repetition of the tragedy with John and refuses to let him. One rainy night, when Lawrence is out of town, Drew runs away with some of his buddies to enlist. Not able to reach Lawrence, Elizabeth turns to John/Erik for help. He goes out into the stormy night and catches up with Drew at the train station. He tries to convince the boy to wait until he has finished school before enlisting. After some serious arm twisting, Drew finally agrees and accompanies John/Erik home, still not knowing that the man in the cab with him is his true father. Later, John/Erik takes ill from being out in the storm. To his dying breath, he insists that he is Erik Kessler, even though Elizabeth knows that he is really her long, lost husband, John McDonald. Referring to Lawrence, John/Erik tells Elizabeth, "Here is the one you wait for. No other man is your husband." After John/Erik dies, Elizabeth and Lawrence adopt Margaret.

Irving Pichel's Tomorrow Is Forever is one of the finest films that Orson Welles ever made. Sure, he's great in Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil, but he's never played a more tender role than that of Erik Kessler. He is simply fantastic. His character is a broken, sad man, and the depth of passion that Welles is able to evoke with just the slightest movement of his sad eyes is unbelievable. And Claudette Colbert is fantastic as Elizabeth, the woman whose dead husband walks back through her front door one day. As the film progresses, and you watch Elizabeth slowly figuring out who Kessler is, your heart aches for these two souls, but mostly for John/Erik. And that's due entirely to the strength of Welles' performance. George Brent puts in a strong performance as Lawrence Hamilton, the man whose entire world stands on the brink of destruction, and Richard Long is great as the hot-headed Drew, the young man who wants so badly to get into the war, not understanding - as his parents do - just how destructive war can really be. Natalie Wood (this was her 3rd film) is charming as little Margaret, who knows far more about the destruction of war than Drew does. And therein lies the message of this film and the reason that it still works so well today. Tomorrow Is Forever was made just as America was emerging from its second world war in less than three decades. Americans knew well then what Americans are just finding out again - war destroys lives.

Tomorrow Is Forever is rated G. It is filmed in glorious black and white and has a running time of 105 minutes.

The Quiet American (2002)

"I can't say what made me fall in love with Vietnam - that a woman's voice can drug you; that everything is so intense. The colors, the taste, even the rain. Nothing like the filthy rain in London. They say whatever you're looking for, you will find here. They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived. The smell: that's the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange for your soul. And the heat. Your shirt is straightaway a rag. You can hardly remember your name, or what you came to escape from. But at night, there's a breeze. The river is beautiful. You could be forgiven for thinking there was no war; that the gunshots were fireworks; that only pleasure matters. A pipe of opium, or the touch of a girl who might tell you she loves you. And then, something happens, as you knew it would. And nothing can ever be the same again."

Thus begins Philip Noyce's The Quiet American, starring Michael Caine as Thomas Fowler, a world-weary foreign correspondent stationed in Saigon, and Brendan Fraser as Alden Pyle, a young and idealist CIA agent working undercover to defeat the communist movement in the north. The year is 1951, and the French still control Viet Nam. Ho Chi Minh's communist forces are gaining ground, though. The French are losing their hold. But other people don't want the communists to take over Viet Nam. The Americans want to set up another government in the south to take over from the French. And that's where Pyle comes in. He's working to set up a third party, not French, not communist, who can take over when the French decide to leave. Pyle wants to establish a democracy in Viet Nam, and he doesn't seem too worried about how many people get killed along the way, as long as there's a democracy. Fowler asks him one of the most obvious questions: "What happens if you give them a democracy and they vote for Ho Chi Minh?" Would the Americans allow that? Pyle doesn't know the answer. But slowly, his belief in what he's doing begins to crumble as the body county begins to rise. Meanwhile, Fowler is beginning to think that Pyle and the Americans need to be stopped, not for the good of the French but for the good of the Viet Namese. He arranges with an associate who is connected with the communist underground to arrange a meeting with Pyle at a restaurant. Pyle never makes it there. Sadly, removing Pyle won't, as we all know, stop the Americans from getting involved in Viet Nam. It would take us another twenty years and over 50,000 American lives to learn that lesson.

But The Quiet American isn't really about any of this. While all of this political intrigue has been going on - and there's a lot of it - a love triangle has also been in the works between Fowler, his girlfriend Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), and Pyle. Fowler and Phuong live together. Fowler would love to marry her, but he can't. He's already married, and his wife won't grant him a divorce. Phuong's mercenary sister (Pham Thi Mai Hoa) doesn't like this situation one bit. She wants to get Phuong married to one of the rich foreigners, so there will be someone to take care of the family financially. And Pyle seems like just the man to do it. And he doesn't need a lot of encouragement. He's more than willing to steal Phuong away from Fowler, to save her from the corrupt Englishman. In Pyle's mind saving a country and saving a girl are one and the same thing. Of course, he's very gentlemanly about it. He even asks Fowler ahead of time if it would be okay for him to steal Phuong away. Fowler, thinking the guy is a few fries short of a Happy Meal, tells him to go ahead and try. So Pyle tries. And he succeeds, much to Fowler's great dismay. All of which throws Fowler's subsequent actions into a different light. Does he set Pyle up because of his political beliefs? Or does he do it because Pyle stole Phuong away from him? And are the two even separate? Is it even possible to disconnect the people from the country. Here are two foreigners fighting over a indigenous woman that both want to possess. Is that any different than two foreign governments fighting over a third country that they want to possess? Or is all politics personal, and vice-a-verse?

Based on Graham Greene's 1955 novel of the same title, The Quiet American is beautifully filmed, superbly acted, deliberately paced. For a war movie, there's surprisingly little war going on. Only two very short battle scenes, and one car bombing. The rest is politics and an achingly painful love story. And this gives me another chance to rant and rave about the rating system in this country. The highly secretive MPAA ratings board seems to have no criteria whatsoever for handing out ratings. The Quiet American is rated R. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. It says "for violence and some language." Did you see The Lord of the Rings Trilogy? Then you saw ten times more violence than this film contains. And as for the language, it was nothing compared to the language in most of the utterly inane comedies that come out every year with PG-13 ratings. Personal opinion? Americans don't come up smelling like roses in this film. In fact, America is shown as the country that caused the carnage in Viet Nam. Special news flash for those of you who haven't heard. We did. And I think the ratings board penalized the film for saying so. IMHO. Decide for yourself.

The Quiet American is filmed in color and has a running time of 101 minutes.

The Barefoot Contessa (1954)

Everybody knows the big Bogart films: Casablanca, The African Queen, Key Largo, To Have and Have Not. But Bogart made a lot of other films during his thrity year career in Hollywood. A few of those are stinkers. Most are pot boilers. And some are absolute gems. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The Barefoot Contessa falls into the latter category. At least in my book it does. And let's face it, my book is the only one I care about. Bogart plays Harry Dawes, a washed up movie director hired by millionaire Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens), who fancies himself an artistic kind of a guy and wants to produce a movie. They fly to Madrid along with Oscar Muldoon (Edmund O'Brien), Kirk's PR maven, to audition a dancer they've heard about named Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner). Maria turns down all of Kirk's and Oscar's propositions, then changes her mind when Harry comes to talk to her. She makes the movie, she becomes a star, and she and Harry become best friends. Watch where you're going now. It really is possible for a man and a woman to be just friends. Besides, Harry has met and married the lovely Jerry (Elizabeth Sellars), and she's helped him get his life and his career back on track. Well, after several major movie hits, Maria begins to tire of both Hollywood and Kirk Edwards. So she and Oscar give Kirk the bum's rush and take up with millionaire playboy Alberto Bravano (Marius Goring). They go yachting about the Mediterranean for a while, until Maria begins to tire of Bravano too. He is, after all, a consummate bore. When Bravano starts abusing Maria in a Monte Carlo casino, she's rescued by Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi). He soon falls for Maria, and the feeling is mutual. Before you can say noblesse oblige, wedding bells are ringing. But marriage to the count isn't all that she dreamed it would be. The count has a secret of his own. Seems his equipment isn't quite in working order. Something to do with a grenade during the war. And he neglected to tell Maria before they were married. Ooopsy! And all those hunky young pool boys and Gypsies hanging about. What's a countess to do? Conclusions? Draw your own. Let's just say that the entire film is narrated in flashbacks from Maria's funeral. And the count's the guy wearing the cuffs. Jealousy, alcohol and a shotgun are always a bad mixture.

For Humphrey Bogart fans, The Barefoot Contessa is something of an anomaly. Here, Bogie isn't playing a gangster, or a bum, or a prisoner, or a good man gone wrong trying to do the right thing. Harry Dawes is just a nice guy who happens to work in a not very nice world. Along the way, he tries to be nice to, and help out, other people. He befriends and makes a star out of a lovely girl from Madrid. Ava Gardner sizzles as Maria, the barefoot dancer who never wanted anything more than to be truly loved. She gets just about everything in life but that. Edmund O'brien does a great job as the ever-worried Oscar, always hustling, always looking for an angle, always trying to keep one step ahead of his clients and the vox populi. Warren Stevens is delightful as the money-obsessed Kirk Edwards, who thinks he can buy anything, including love. And Rossano Brazzi puts in a memorable performance as the world-weary count, carrying his dirty little secret around with him, until it drives him crazy in the end. And here's where the film makes an interesting departure from a lot of movies that preceded it - Mankiewicz casts real Europeans to play Europeans. This is one of the hallmarks that sets movies of the 1950s apart from those of the 30s and 40s. Had The Barefoot Contessa been made a decade earlier, all of the parts would have probably been played by American or English actors. Think of Britishers Claude Reins and Sydney Greenstreet as the French Inspector Renault and the Italian Farari in Casablana. You get the picture. But realism was finally starting to creep into Hollywood. America's isolationism was over. People wanted real, foreign locales and real foreigners in them. About time too. Makes for much better movies.

The Barefoot Contessa is rated G and is filmed in Technicolor. Running time is 128 minutes.

Red Dirt (1932)

Victor Flemming's Red Dirt is a saucy little pre-code romp about a no-nonsense plantation owner and a prostitute on the run. Although it is laughably tame by today's standards of "show it all and let the public sort it out," this was pretty risqué stuff for it 1932. For those of you who don't know, the Production Code was a lengthy set of guidelines and restrictions that governed what you could and couldn't show in a motion picture. It included such things as how long a kiss could last, how much of a woman's body could be uncovered and even moral issues such as the fact that all murderers had to receive their just deserts by the movie's end. The code was in effect from 1930 to 1968; although, the strictest version of it was in force from 1934 to 1955. Red Dirt is one of the films that helped create the stricter version of the code. It also helped make the careers of Clark Gable and Gene Harlow. This movie is all about sex. That's the only way to put it. Every scene drips with innuendo, as Harlow, Astor and Gable do a sexual dance so carefully choreographed that not one inch too much skin is shown, not a single scene of actual intercourse. But we're left with no doubt whatsoever about what's going on off camera.

Set in French Indo-China (Viet Nam), the Red Dirt centers on Dennis Carson (Clark Gable), the owner of a rubber plantation. Denny is struggling through a dusty, dry monsoon season, and not feeling any too happy about his prospects for the coming year. When the monthly supply boat arrives from Saigon, it brings with it Vantine (Gene Harlow), a prostitute who got in trouble with the law and decided to head up river until things cooled off. When Vantine first arrives at the plantation, Denny is angry at her for barging in and wants nothing to do with her. But there's no denying the electricity between these two. The air around them is practically crackling with it. Soon, with the help of the primitive bathing facilities at the plantation, Denny succumbs to Vantine's rather obvious charms, and they engage in a romance that's so hot it threatens to burn the jungle down. The fun is short lived though. The next supply boat brings a wet blanket to throw all over the party. Gary Willis (Gene Raymond), Carson's new surveyor, arrives with his sleek, sophisticated wife Barbara (Mary Astor) in tow. Well, Gary wastes no time in coming down with malaria, and Denny wastes no time trying to get Barbara to come to his room and check out his etchings, much to Vantine's dismay. By the time Gary has recovered, Denny has stolen Barbara from him. His only problem now is how to get rid of the useless husband. The answer presents itself in a tiger hunt. Denny will take Gary with him to hunt a tiger that's been terrorizing the locals. At the crucial moment, Denny will delay firing for just a second or two, while el tigre does his dirty work for him. Problem is that Denny's really a descent guy at heart, and he can't bring himself to let Gary take one for the team. In the end, Gary and Barbara head for home, and Denny and Vantine settle back into their scorching affair once more.

I love this film. I know I say that a lot, but that's only because I mean it. I love any film with Gable in it. And Red Dirt is one of his best. It lifted him above the pack of "actors" and made him a "movie star." Didn't hurt Harlow's career any either. Both of them are fun to watch as they trade insults and innuendos, barbs and embraces. Mary Astor is both aloof and alluring as the high-society gal who decides to go slumming withe her husband as visits the wilderness and leaves her lover with a bullet to remember her by. Nothing says "I Love You" like a well-placed slug! And Gene Raymond is appropriately sexless and ineffective as the cuckolded Gary, who's simply no match for Gable's virile manliness. After all, who's gonna want a surveyor who drops like a rock whenever anyone sneezes, when they can have the muscly guy who chopped a plantation out of the jungle single handed? Well, maybe he did have a little help. Like several hundred Viet Namese peasants. But still, you get the idea. Which brings me to another interesting thing about this film - it shows an image of Viet Nam from the Western perspective, when it was a French colony to be exploited for its resources. Always interesting to see what folks here in sunny SoCal thought was really going on in places like that back in the day. You can see where a lot of the world's current problems began. Interestingly, Red Dirt was remade in 1953 as Mogambo, with Gable reprising his earlier role, and Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly playing the parts of the prostitute and the society dame. I'll leave it to you to guess which of the two is the better film.

Red Dirt is unrated and is presented in its original black and white format. Running time is 83 minutes.

Le Notti Bianche (1957)

Le Notti Bianche, which translates into English as "sleepless nights," is an exquisite little movie from Luchino Visconti about two lonely people who meet, who dance the dance and part again in a strange city. I'm not an expert on Visconti's work, but I do know a good film when I see one, and this is one of my favs. Mario (Marcello Mastroianni) is new in town. He's come here for work, has no family in town, and no friends outside of work. He lives by himself in one room of a boarding house and spends his nights walking the streets, watching other people interacting with their friends and family. One night, he sees a young girl standing on a bridge, weeping. Mario approaches her, is smitten by her, introduces himself, and starts trying to court her. Natalia (Maria Schell) isn't interested in being courted though. She's in love with a man who used to rent the attic room in the building where she lives. He went away a year ago, but he promised to return. So Natalia waits for him every night on the bridge. But Mario is desperate, and he's sure he can steal Natalia from the past. So he amuses her. He distracts her. He tries to get her to fall in love with him. They go dancing. The dance turns into a wild, sexual act. Many have compared it to the party scene in Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Visconti places the dance in a public space though, and it ends in a brawl outside. In the end, Mario loses, and Natalia's love returns. Mario stands alone, and as the snow begins to fall, so do his tears.

Le Notti Bianche is a slow and deliberate movie. Those who are accustomed to faced-paced movies, full of snappy dialogue and car chases and the obligatory bedroom scene will be quite disappointed in this film. The only bedroom scenes involve Mario getting ready for work - all striped pajamas and toothpaste - and Mario sick in bed. Not very sexy, but terribly realistic. And that's one of the things I love about this movie - the way in which Visconti places the starkly realistic right alongside the utterly dreamlike. Mario is a real person, with a real personality, and with very real problems. We all understand loneliness and the desperation to find someone to belong to. Visconti gives that loneliness and desperation form in the character of Mario. You can feel the ache in him as he walks along the city street, jostled by the other people out having a good time. You can feel it in him as he struggles with whether or not to go with the prostitute - it would be so easy, a moments pleasure, the illusion of a relationship. That's something, isn't it? No, not for Mario. He wants the real thing, and he's found a girl that he thinks he can have it with. In the end, he's left with only himself and the snow and the empty city.

And speaking of the city, I love this one. It reminded me very much of The City of Lost Children - the bridges, the water, the stairs, the constant fog. This set was a work of art. I read that Visconti had the multilayered city set built on the sound stage. No CGI city here. This one is real. It has texture, brick and mortar, water and glass. You can feel the city as the camera moves through it. There's grime here, and perpetual damp. There are homeless people and rats and garbage. This is a real city, designed for the real people who will inhabit it for the space of time that it takes to watch the film. But in that space of time, I came to love this place. And against the backdrop of this gritty town, Visconti performs a love story - always a work of fantasy and imagination - using these realistic people. The result is a purely fascinating movie about the nature of love in the modern world.

Le Notti Bianche is rated G and has been restored to glorious black and white. Running time is 97 minutes.

The Trouble with Harry (1955)

The trouble with Harry Worp isn't so much that he's dead; it's that no one's quite sure how he died. Or who killed him. Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) thinks he might have shot Harry. Jennifer Rogers (Shirley McClaine in her film debut) hit him over the head. So did Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick). Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), a local artist, stumbles upon the body, just as Captain Wiles is trying to drag him into the woods. Sam is sympathetic. He's even willing to help get rid of the corpus delicti. Shovels are procured. The digging begins. Soon Harry is safely tucked away underground. But not for long. When the good captain accounts for all of his bullets and realizes that he didn't shoot Harry, he insists they dig him back up. And so they do. Then Sam meets Jennifer, and it's love at first sight. Jennifer tells Sam that Harry was her husband. She's been trying to get away from him. He's been quite insistent that they stay together. While he was insisting his way into her house, she whacked him over the head, and he stumbled away. Jennifer thinks the hit on the head must have killed Harry. She thinks they should just put him back in the ground and forget about him. So Jennifer and Sam and Captain Wiles bury Harry again. Then Miss Gravely tells the captain that she thinks that she might have killed Harry. He stumbled toward her while she was hiking, grabbing at her, knocking her down. She pulled off her hiking boot and clubbed him over the head with it. She's worried that she killed Harry. She wants him dug back up so that she can go to the police. Sam decides that they need to find out exactly how Harry died first. So they dig him up, clean him up, and call the doctor. He'll tell them how Harry really died. I won't though.

The Trouble with Harry was one of director Alfred Hitchcock's favorite movies, and it's easy to see why. It's and absolutely delightful film; although, American audiences didn't feel that way in 1955. It received poor reviews here. Europe received it better. The film ran for a year in England and Italy, for a year and a half in France. This is not a fast-paced movie, filled with intrigue and chase scenes and shoot-outs and explosions. It's a deliberate film that takes its time unfolding its story. The Trouble with Harry is more about the characters than it is about the crime, and the characters are wonderful. Sam is a bohemian artist who doesn't give a fig for conventions. Captain Wiles talks of his life sailing the world when in fact he was merely a tug boat captain on the East River. Miss Gravely is a middle-aged spinster who proves that you're never too old to fall head-over-heels in love. And Jennifer is a quirky young mother who wants to live her life in her own way. All four of these are brought together over the corpse of Jennifer's husband. The Technicolor cinematography brings the beautiful New Hampshire countryside to life. Interestingly, after the long exterior shots were filmed, the weather turned bad, so the rest of the filming had to be done on a sound stage. The crew collected as many of the Autumn leaves as they could and shipped them back to Hollywood, where they were painstakingly glued onto artificial trees to capture the feel of a New Hampshire Autumn. If you're in the mood for a quirky, romantic murder mystery, this one should fill the bill. Call it a black comedy or a morbid romance. Either way, The Trouble with Harry is a great movie.

The Trouble with Harry is rated G. Running time is 99 minutes.

Man's Favorite Sport (1964)

When it comes to the great outdoors, no one knows more than Roger Willoughby (Rock Hudson). Willoughby is the country's premiere expert on outdoors sports. He work's for Abercrombie & Fitch (the original A&F that sold high-end sporting goods, not the modern teen fashion shack). He teaches customers how to camp and hunt. He's written a best-selling book about fishing. Willoughby is the go-to guy for anything to do with nature. There's only one slight problem. Willoughby has never set foot in the woods. He lives in San Francisco. He's never been camping, doesn't hunt, and can't fish. In fact, he couldn't tell a trout from a salmon if his life depended on it. But as long as he can keep up the pretense of knowing, he'll be fine. Or so he thinks. Enter Abigail Page (Paula Prentiss) and Easy Mueller (Maria Perschy). These two finagle Willoughby's boss, Mr. Cadwalader (John McGiver) into entering Willoughby in a fishing contest to drum up business for the store. Sure that willoughby can't possibly lose, Cadwalader informs his outdoors expert that he's going into the outdoors.

Willoughby knows, of course, that he can't fish. He confides in Abigail. She tells him not to worry, that she and Easy will go along and help him out. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell just which of the three is more inept in the woods. Willoughby arrives at the lake loaded for bear, and runs smack into John Screaming Eagle (Norman Alden) a wise-cracking Native American who tries to make a touch on Willoughby. From here, the antics really get going. Willoughby can't do anything right. He can't even set up a tent, so he stays in a cabin at the lodge instead. When he tries to fish, he gets his line tangled in the trees, snags dead branches in the water, and nearly drowns himself on several occasions. Abigail and Easy devise a way to get Willoughby out of the tournament by pretending that he's got a broken arm. Unfortunately, when the cast dries, he can't lower his arm. Abigail removes the cast with a skill saw! And right in the middle of the whole mess, Willoughby's fiance shows up from Texas, wanting to know what he's doing with Abigail and Easy.

The biggest shocker of all, though, is that Willoughby actually wins the tournament with no help at all. Of course, he didn't actually catch the fish. They more or less committed suicide, by jumping on his hook when the line was tangled in some branches, by getting caught in his waders when he fell in the water, and several other means that have nothing to do with fishing. Because of this, Willoughby feels he can't accept the trophy. It just wouldn't be sporting. So he confesses everything. Of course, Cadwalader fires him on the spot, much to the dismay of his best customers. They lobby for Willoughby's reinstatement. Cadwalader finally gives in. But where's Willoughby? And where's Abigail?

Howard Hawks' Man's Favorite Sport is one of my favorite movies. It's one of the last in a long line of screwball comedies that stretch all the way back tot he advent of talking film. The dialog is fast-paced and witty, and the situations that Willoughby finds himself in are hilarious. Rock Hudson puts in a solid performance as the beleaguered Roger Willoughby, but the true star of the show - in my opinion - is Paula Prentiss, who gives one of the best performances of her career. She does sexy and funny at the same time and pulls off both brilliantly. Most of the rest of the actors are simply caricatures who act as foils for Abigail and Willoughby. If you're looking for a movie that's lighthearted and just plain fun, I highly recommend Man's Favorite Sport. I first saw it forty-one years ago and fell in love with it. It hasn't lost any of its appeal since then. See if you don't agree.

Man's Favorite Sport is rated G and is filmed in Technicolor. Running time is 120 minutes.