Christmas, season of peace and good will to all men, when families congregate by the hearth to eat, drink and rejoice in the warmth of each other’s company. Unless you’re a Plantagenet, in which case you’d best keep your wits sharp and a blade handy. It’s December 1183 and Henry II (Peter O’Toole), King of […]
Free Bird: ‘Christopher Strong’ (1933)
The curiously-titled Christopher Strong is really all about Lady Cynthia Darrington, an aviator and aristocrat with a hankering for danger, a cavalier disregard for convention and quirky fashion sense. Katharine Hepburn plays Cynthia. Of course I had to see it. The film opens in London at a scavenger hunt for the well-heeled. Female contestants are […]
The Six People You Meet in a Screwball Comedy
Watch enough screwball comedies and you might notice a pattern: the same people turn up over and over again. I don’t just mean actors—though Carole Lombard, Cary Grant, Jean Arthur and Melvyn Douglas were ubiquitous—but characters. Blame it on endless plot recycling or the assembly-line nature of the studio system, but in the thirties and […]