Gary Dennis’ New York City Movie Place

There are reasons why people became movie stars and every one of them has at least one performance to prove it. Ginger Rogers proved it alright in 1940 with her performance as the title role in Kitty Foyle. This is also a her Oscar performance and ( I believe ) her first non musical […]

This is the Jihad of all “indictment of Hollywood”, “this business of ours called show chews them up and spits them out” and “this town is mean in spite of the palm trees” pictures ever made. It angered a few people, studio heads who came to believe that director Billy Wilder had bitten hard […]

Joan Crawford was always good at playing a victim. A victim of love, circumstance, mental illness, mean sisters and mean daughters. In Mildred Pierce she is great at playing the victim—a victim of love and of a mean daughter. This was her first picture at Warner Brothers after being let go by […]

I love this picture. It was a constant employee selection, on the screen at the store. You have double the Bette, how great is that? Nobody was better at playing evil, wicked, b - word, women that Bette Davis. Not only does she give a great performance as one of the meanest sisters ever played […]

This picture falls into a category that we made up at the store. It is called tawdry noir.
This picture is the epitome of tawdry noir. It is also a great movie and was a regular on the screen at Movie Place.
The story follows three kids and the paths they take. Young, orphaned and wealthy, […]

Joan Crawford was always good at playing a victim. A victim of love, circumstance, mental illness, mean sisters and mean daughters. In Mildred Pierce she is great at playing the victim—a victim of love and of a mean daughter. This was her first picture at Warner Brothers after being let go by […]

This picture is one of those pictures that is great but could have been greater. Sometimes referred to as a “film noir”, it is a great tawdry melodrama where the stakes are high - mental illness and murder.
A woman is found in a diner after collapsing, she has been wandering the streets searching […]

I love this movie. I watched it constantly in the store. Actually this is one of my favorite movies with “Place” in the title. It is up there with Summer Place, Place in the Sun and In A Lonely Place. It is incredibly tawdry. In fact it falls into the catergorey “dictionary tawdry”.
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The under […]

This is a remake of an earlier picture that starred Claudette Colbert but now it gets the Douglas Sirk treatment. Coney Island, 1947, war widow and actress Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) meets up with a homeless African American single mother Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore). Both woman have daughters close to the same age and both […]

Architect Larry Coe (Kirk Douglas) is missing something in life. He has a wife and family and a successful practice. It’s not until he becomes embroiled in an affair with beautiful Maggie Gault (Kim Novak), a neighbor with her own family, that he finds what he has been missing. She is in a […]