By: David Smay

A lost, louche world of hair-tossing karate chops and sexy banter.

By: David Smay

Beneath the flash and fun, a slick of moral quandaries.

By: Mimi Lipson

He may be the best put-on artist since Andy Kaufman.

By: David Smay

He suffers exactly enough to make the joke.

By: Tom Nealon

DAVID CRONENBERG (born 1943) has been lauded for his blurring of boundaries between technology and the individual, but this praise has consistently missed the point, for his films have singularly denied the existence of any […]

By: Katie Hennessey

A high school dropout who learned his trade on the Borscht Belt summer circuit, DANNY KAYE’s (1913-87) first taste of Broadway fame came with the 1941 Gershwin-Weill tongue-twister “Tchaikovsky (and other Russians),” in which he […]

By: Matthew De Abaitua

Few cultural scraps are as redolent of lo-fi VHS genre pleasures than a movie trailer with JOHN CARPENTER’s (born 1948) name above the title and his own analog synth score. Carpenter’s breakthrough was Dark Star […]

By: David Smay

The 1960s was a terrible decade for film and television comedy, but it did produce a stellar class of comedians working the beatnik demimonde: Mort Sahl, Phyllis Diller, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, George Carlin, Bill […]

By: Jason Grote

Writing in 1949, Philip Rahv divided American literature into volatile, rebellious “redskins” and puritan, effete “palefaces.” Although Rahv was dividing the lowbrow from the high, I would assert that, today, our “redskins” are intellectually restless […]

By: Greg Rowland

Ironists don’t understand Wood.

By: Joe Alterio

At one point in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), we find washed-up silent film stars literally and figuratively playing out their last hands. A small ashen-faced man declines to bid on consecutive hands, and with […]

By: Peggy Nelson

Blonde bombshell BRIGITTE BARDOT (born 1934) exploded onto the world stage in the 1950s. A woman with the neotenic features of a child, Bardot’s Bézier curves measured pure sex appeal, and have been templatized by […]

By: David Smay

What is it about GRETA GARBO (1905-90) that set her apart from the other great Hollywood beauties — that makes us fetishize her, if a bit uneasily? She wasn’t a better actress than Sophia Loren […]

By: Patrick Cates

He was a violent husband (to four different wives) who managed his depression by consorting with an astrologer; and a drug-abusing freemason who dealt with his self-induced heart condition by consorting with a psychic healer. […]

By: Katie Hennessey

Though often cast as a lovable father in middlebrow comedies like The Shaggy Dog and the long-running TV show My Three Sons, FRED MACMURRAY (1908-91) was more convincing in noir films. In Double Indemnity (1944), […]