Very few characters have struck the chord of man’s imagination with more resonance than Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, for in his duality he represents the struggle of good and evil within the individual. It …

When Columbia first announced its purchase of Clifford Odets’ Group Theatre play Golden Boy, it seemed a strange choice, because that studio had never favored dramas of strong social significance. Odets was not hired to …

When Queen Christina opened, at the end of 1933, Greta Garbo had not appeared in a film for eighteen months, and rumors were circulating that she was ready to give up the screen—something which was …

For many years, critics and historians tended to see Love Me Tonight as an unsuccessful imitation of the great director Ernst Lubitsch. In recent years, however, this extraordinarily stylish musical has come into prominence and …

A Cold War commentary on Soviet-American relations, Rouben Mamou­lian’s Silk Stockings also develops the theme of an individual’s emotional awakening and lightly satirizes the popular entertainment of the 1950′s. Based on the film Ninotchka (1939) …

In 1920, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., virtually invented the swashbuckling film with The Mark of Zorro. There were period and costume films before that, and some of them included a perfunctory duel, but they were merely …