"I've got that nice, tired old feeling," says Pa Frake near the end of the gentle, sunny 1945 film, State Fair. The Rodgers and Hammerstein music, commissioned while Oklahoma was still making musical-theater history, feels tired too, like the result of a hastily written score. The state of Iowa just can't seem to inspire the same quality music as its more memorable, southern cousin. Remember that State Fair gem "All I Owe Iowa"? Still, it is R and H, and "It Might as Well Be Spring" is here as well as some other decent ditties. There's a country-mouse feeling as the Frake family journeys to the big city for the annual harvest celebration. Young daughter Margy (Jeanne Crain) has her eye on something more exciting than her bore of a fiancé, while... Learn More
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It used to be called "miscegenation," and it hasn't been a scandalous or taboo subject for several decades now. (Every other prime-time TV series seems to have an interracial romance going, and nobody bats an eyelash.) These welcome social changes have stranded Elia Kazan's 1949 weepie about a light-skinned African American woman (played less than convincingly by lily-white Jeanne Crain) who tries to "pass"---and falls in love with a white man. Director Douglas Sirk mined similar territory, and got a lot more juice out of it, in Imitation of Life. To his credit, perhaps, the director of On the Waterfront just doesn't have cheap soapsuds in his blood, and he makes the fatal mistake of taking a solemn and high-minded approach to this overheated material. The picture isn't even... More Info About This DVD Actor(s): Jeanne Crain - Ethel Barrymore - Ethel Waters Director(s): John Ford - Elia Kazan DVD Release Date: 10 January 2006
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"I've got that nice, tired old feeling," says Pa Frake near the end of the gentle, sunny 1945 film, State Fair. The Rodgers and Hammerstein music, commissioned while Oklahoma was still making musical-theater history, feels tired too, like the result of a hastily written score. The state of Iowa just can't seem to inspire the same quality music as its more memorable, southern cousin. Remember that State Fair gem "All I Owe Iowa"? Still, it is R and H, and "It Might as Well Be Spring" is here as well as some other decent ditties. There's a country-mouse feeling as the Frake family journeys to the big city for the annual harvest celebration. Young daughter Margy (Jeanne Crain) has her eye on something more exciting than her bore of a fiancé, while... More Info About This DVD Actor(s): Jeanne Crain - Dana Andrews Director(s): Walter Lang DVD Release Date: 15 November 2005
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Before he made the classic All About Eve, writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz made this clever story about three wives who spend an afternoon at a children's picnic mulling over a letter all three had just received, from a woman who says she's just run off with one of their husbands. As the wives--a former farm girl (Jeanne Crain), a radio soap opera writer (Ann Sothern), and a social climber from the wrong side of the tracks (Linda Darnell)--mull over the troubles of their marriages, each begins to think that she's the one left behind. A Letter to Three Wives doesn't have the crackling show-biz milieu of Eve, but it has the same mix of snappy dialogue and topnotch performances. The tone ranges from florid sentiment to unblinking cynicism, yet Mankiewicz... More Info About This DVD Actor(s): Jeanne Crain - Linda Darnell - Ann Sothern Director(s): Joseph L. Mankiewicz DVD Release Date: Released the 22 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A wonderful story based on a real family with 12 children. It shows the changing times in the early 1900s--shorter skirts, shorter hair, "modern" thinking--against the "old set" ways, and the strength of family members supporting each other. It is funny, touching, sad and heartening. I loved them both. (The books are great too!) More Info About This DVD Actor(s): Jeanne Crain - Myrna Loy Director(s): Henry Levin DVD Release Date: Released the 03 August 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Myrna Loy charms as the Gilbreth family matriarch in this enjoyable 1952 sequel to Walter Lang's comedy Cheaper by the Dozen, based on the autobiographical novel by Frank Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey. Picking up from the somber ending of Cheaper, in which Frank Sr. (Clifton Webb) dies, leaving behind his wife, Lillian (Loy), and 12 children, Belles focuses on the family's slow recovery and aspirations for a future. Lillian's qualifications as an engineer are dismissed--sometimes humiliatingly--by sexist men, though she finally receives a training position with the plain-speaking Sam Harper (Edward Arnold) and the respect of a major university. Meanwhile, eldest daughter Ann (Jeanne Crain) is wooed by a young doctor (Jeffrey Hunter), and the other Gilbreth... More Info About This DVD Actor(s): Jeanne Crain - Myrna Loy Director(s): Henry Levin DVD Release Date: Released the 16 March 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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After winning consecutive best director Oscars (for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve), Joseph Mankiewicz turned his attention to this extremely curious social comedy. Cary Grant plays a famous, idealistic gynecologist whose mysterious past is questioned by a vindictive colleague (Hume Cronyn). Meanwhile, the doctor falls for a pregnant patient (Jeanne Crain), whose unmarried status is daring for a movie of 1951 vintage. The title is an all-too-apt description of Mankiewicz's chatty style, but it also carries sinister echoes of the McCarthy era--specifically, an attempted right-wing purge of the Director's Guild, I which Mankiewicz was the main target. This subtext lends interest beyond the movie's rather tame romance. The Grant character, named Doctor Praetorius (no... More Info About This DVD Actor(s): Cary Grant - Jeanne Crain Director(s): Joseph L. Mankiewicz DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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