The magnificent Ambersons 1942 - A mutilated but still a thrilling cinematic experience

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: Orson Welles (Fred Fleck, Robert Wise - additional sequences, uncredited)
Main Cast: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead, Orson Welles

"Orson Welles' followup to Citizen Kane (1941) was utterly different from Kane in style and texture, but just as brilliant in its own way. Writer/director Welles does not appear on camera, but his voiceover narration superbly sets the stage for the movie's action, which fades in valentine fashion on Amberson Mansion, the most ostentatious dwelling in all of turn-of-century Indianapolis. At the time of its production, Orson Welles was the big noise among new young filmmakers, but not a very profitable one. His first movie, Citizen Kane, had generated press and praise, but not profits. RKO, never a profitable studio and in danger of receivership for much of its history, needed The Magnificent Ambersons to be a hit. Welles had shot Ambersons true to Booth Tarkington's novel and elicited sterling performances from his cast. But Tarkington's story - which Welles deeply loved, having previously dramatized it on radio with himself in the role of George Amberson Minafer - centered on an insufferable prig, selfish, nasty, and vain. Preview audiences came away disliking the movie because they disliked its central character, brilliantly portrayed by Tim Holt. RKO drastically recut the movie, poisoning its relationship with Welles (and with composer Bernard Herrmann, who came to Welles' defense and ended a promising career at the studio). Holt's George Amberson Minafer was, in many ways, the antecedent of Laurence Harvey's Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a character described by the closest thing he has to a friend as 'impossible to like'. And audiences weren't much more ready for Harvey's character in 1962 than they were for Holt's in 1942." - www.allmovie.com

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Mississippi 1935 - A rare Crosby classic

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026723/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
IMDB rating: 6,9

Director: A. Edward Sutherland
Main Cast: Bing Crosby, W. C. Fields, Joan Bennett, Gail Patrick

"In this comedy with musical numbers set in the Old South, Bing Crosby plays a singer from Philadelphia named Tom Grayson, who has fallen in love with Southern heiress Elvira Rumford (Gail Patrick). Tom wants to marry Elvira, but a man called Major Patterson (John Miljan) has announced his desire to do the same, and he challenges Tom to a duel to decide who will have Elvira's hand. Tom is not at all agreeable to this idea, which leads Elvira's father (Claude Gillingwater) to proclaim Tom to be a coward and deny him permission to wed his daughter. Elvira's sister Lucy (Joan Bennett), who is infatuated with Tom, thinks that he's merely being sensible, but Tom thinks that Lucy is too young for a serious relationship. In need of work and not especially welcome in the Rumford's community, Tom takes a job performing on a riverboat piloted by the blustery Commodore Orlando Jackson (W.C. Fields). One night, Tom finds himself in a barroom brawl with a man named Captain Blackie (Fred Kohler), who dies accidentally from a shot fired by his own gun. Hoping that his infamy will draw crowds, Jackson begins billing Tom as 'The Singing Killer'. Tom comes to realize that Lucy may be the right woman for him after all, but Lucy is not interested in a man with blood on his hands, and now Tom must convince her that he's not a killer at all. Noted gambling aficionado Fields has a hilarious poker-playing bit, and he steals most of his scenes from the rest of the cast. Mississippi was loosely based on the play 'Magnolia' by Booth Tarkington." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/mississippi-v102575/

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Alice Adams 1935 - Hepburn as Tarkington's loveliest heroine

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026056/?ref_=nv_sr_1
IMDB rating: 7,1

Director: George Stevens
Main Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Fred MacMurray, Fred Stone, Evelyn Venable, Hedda Hopper, Hattie McDaniel

"Alice Adams does a credible job of transferring Booth Tarkington's popular Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen, even if it adds a happier ending than the one in the book. A significant part of the credit belongs to director George Stevens, who keeps the film briskly paced without sacrificing character development and atmosphere. Filmed during the Great Depression, Alice Adams takes a satirical view of the 1920s, reminding 1935 audiences of some of the shallowness of those 'better days'. Hepburn's performance dominates the film, and the supporting cast functions mostly as props, though Fred MacMurray, Hepburn's nominal co-lead, manages to shine in moments. The film received two Oscar nominations, for Best Picture and for Hepburn's performance. Alice Adams was the first major directorial assignment for George Stevens, as well as one of the few Katharine Hepburn vehicles of the 1930s to score a hit with the public." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/alice-adams-v1471/

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