By: Lynn Peril

“There has never been anything like this before in human society.”

By: David Smay

He generated fields of pure unexpected looniness.

By: David Smay

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

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: 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: 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: 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), […]

By: Greg Rowland

All hail the Mighty Fin! For was it not JIMMY FINLAYSON (1887-1953), third banana in 33 Laurel and Hardy films, who offered us emancipation through his unique enactment of The Double Take & Fade Away? […]

By: Sarah Weinman

The thing about KIM CATTRALL (born 1956) is that when she was young she was middle-aged, and in middle age found her youth — that is, she was playing Samantha Jones in lowbrow movies years […]

By: Peggy Nelson

Known as “that ugly girl who can’t dance,” NORMA SHEARER (1902-83) was a self-made urchin who became the Queen of (Pre-Code) Hollywood, personifying the “she’s gotta have it” ethos. Stylish, independent, and opinionated, her characters […]

By: David Smay

Most Western filmgoers didn’t discover the greatest female action star in the history of film until Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — or when she blew Pierce Brosnan off the screen in Tomorrow Never Dies. But […]

By: Lynn Peril

Clad in a leather jumpsuit, tiny waist offset by enormous bosom, her performance in Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) transformed what could have been a run-of-the-mill B-movie into a parable of female power […]