Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on May 15, 2023

This post is part of the CMBA Spring Blogathon - Big Stars on the Small Screen: In Support of National Classic Movie Day. Check out all of the participating blogs and posts by visiting the Classic Movie Blog Association's post about the blogathon!Big Stars on the Small Screen: Classic Movie...   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on March 22, 2023

The 1950s proved a challenging time in the movie industry as television became a full-fledged competitor for audience attention, and Frank Tashlin confronts the issue with satiric glee in his 1957 comedy, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which Tashlin wrote, directed, and produced with only the most   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on February 20, 2023

It's time to quit Twitter.I joined Twitter over a decade ago to connect with classic movie fans, writers, fellow LEGO enthusiasts, and other people who shared some of my eclectic interests. It was, for many years, a satisfying experience that introduced me to films, books, and people I would not...   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on February 20, 2023

Once considered lost, The Queen of Spades (1949) is an example of buried cinematic treasure that was luckily rediscovered so that we can enjoy it again today, an ironic twist since it's a tale about the fickle turns of Fortune's wheel. The plot comes from a short story of the...   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on February 9, 2023

Warning: This review contains spoilers for The Suspect (1944). Director Robert Siodmak weaves Victorian sensibility with noir energy in the justifiable homicide story of The Suspect (1944), which sees a mild-mannered Charles Laughton driven to murder by his extremely disagreeable wife. It's an unusu   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on February 2, 2023

Long before The Twilight Zone came the 1945 British anthology film, Dead of Night, which weaves together a collection of eerie tales within a framework that gathers a small group of people in an English country house. While it's not exactly a horror movie, it does offer plenty of weird...   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on January 25, 2023

The truly delightful Theodora Goes Wild (1936) is an underappreciated gem of the screwball genre, one that ought to be much better known today among fans of classic romantic comedy. Its stars, Irene Dunne and Melvyn Douglas, are A-listers performing at their comedic best in this outing, although dir   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on January 1, 2023

Happy New Year! Here's my annual post listing every movie I watched in the previous year. Getting the Criterion Channel rather late in 2022 helped me add more new-to-me classics to my list - it's far and away my favorite streaming service at the moment, and I plan to continue...   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on December 17, 2022

Fred MacMurray and Marjorie Main most famously appear together in the 1947 comedy classic, The Egg and I, but Murder, He Says (1945) offers an earlier pairing that pits the two against one another as hapless city slicker and unscrupulous backwoods crook. This comic mystery from director George Marsh   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on December 15, 2022

I've seen a lot of unusual classic movies, but You Never Can Tell (1951) might be in a class all by itself when it comes to animal themed reincarnation private detective mystery comedies. Directed by film writer Lou Breslow, this offbeat picture stars Dick Powell as a murdered German Shepherd...   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on November 17, 2022

While not on par with the greatest of the screwball comedies, The Divorce of Lady X (1938) delivers a thoroughly engaging British take on the genre with notable performances from two iconic stars. Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon lead a fairly small cast in this second adaptation of Gilbert Wakefie   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on November 7, 2022

Director Anatole Litvak's Out of the Fog (1941) delivers on the promised atmosphere, with fog heavy piers and dark alleys providing a moody setting for this story of Brooklyn's waterfront working class, but the tone veers away from true noir thanks to the sympathetic and often very funny characters   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on November 4, 2022

Henry Hathaway directed the very solid Fox noir, The Dark Corner (1946), which features genre standouts like Mark Stevens, William Bendix, and Clifton Webb, but most viewers will be drawn to the picture for Lucille Ball, an actress not normally known for noir roles but perfectly at home as the...   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on October 31, 2022

Happy Halloween! This year I decided to celebrate spooky season with a LEGO tribute to one of the greatest horror movies ever made, Nosferatu (1922). Max Schreck created an iconic character as the creepy, plague carrying Count Orlok, the film's replacement for Count Dracula (because they couldn't ge   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on October 6, 2022

Uncle Deadly made his first appearance in the Vincent Price episode of The Muppet Show in 1977, but the four decades since have seen him evolve considerably from a periodic secondary character to a core member of the ensemble with major roles in several of the more recent Muppet productions,...   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on September 20, 2022

We signed up for Paramount Plus to watch Star Trek, which is probably why most people subscribe to the streaming service, but it has turned out to be a very interesting opportunity to watch classic movies that don't necessarily appear on other streamers. Classic movie fans still mourning the loss...   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on August 25, 2022

With his distinctive English voice and intensely intelligent manner, Claude Rains made himself at home in a wide variety of memorable roles, although he was more often the heavy or a supporting character instead of a leading man. Born in London in 1889, the actor grew up in the English...   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on June 1, 2022

People who know me in real life or who read this blog frequently already know that I love combining my passions for LEGO and movies. As a Gen Xer I have a particular soft spot for the original Star Wars trilogy, and of course I love Carrie Fisher as Princess...   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on April 28, 2022

When it first arrived, Disney's 2021 reboot of the various films based on 101 Dalmatians was widely discussed as yet another "prequel" to a well-known Disney property, but in order to appreciate Cruella fully you have to stop thinking about it as a prequel and instead consider it as an...   read more

Virtual Virago Posted by Jennifer Garlen on April 10, 2022

Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant only made four movies together, but each one is worth watching for the formidable duo and the ways in which they are markedly different from one another. Two of their collaborations, Bringing Up Baby (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940), are highly regarded and m   read more