In their attempt to wheedle the money out of a sanitary napkin heiress (Stockard Channing in her film debut), Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson jump into the roles of befuddled, sometimes outsmarted, and pathetic men […]
In the era of the Motion Picture Production Code, depictions of homosexuality were verboten, classified under the Code’s rather vague catch-all category of “sex perversion.” While those making films prior to 1934 enjoyed more freedom […]
“God, but this film is beautiful,” Roger Ebert once said of Gregory La Cava’s 1936 satirical screwball comedy My Man Godfrey. “This movie, and the actors in it, and its style of production, and the system […]
George Stevens’ 1938 screwball comedy Vivacious Lady is a shining example of what the Studio System–with all its codes, and censorship and contracts–got right. A rollicking rom-com that is bursting at the seams with everything […]
Film critic James Agee wrote after seeing Preston Sturges’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) that “the Hays office must have been raped in its sleep.” Indeed, it’s difficult to think of a post-code film that feels […]
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