The Devil and Miss Jones Is a Relevant and Hilarious Tale

Wealthy & reclusive tycoon John P. Merrick (Charles Coburn) has a thorn in his side. That thrown is the people who work at one of the department stores he owns. These employees are now taking to the streets bellowing about the importance of unions and worker rights. Merrick doesn't know why these people can't just go to wor and be grateful for a job. In an effort to figure out how to undermine their union ambitions, Merrick decides to do a little undercover work. Specifically, he'll go to the store and pose as a new employee. There, he'll earn the trust of his new co-workers, find out who's in charge of unionizing at this department store and squash out this revolution before it even begins.

Sullivan's Travels Does Charming Banter and More Grim Sequences With Equal Levels of Craftsmanship

Rather than serve as a modern-day adaptation of the classic Gulliver's Travels novel or a prequel to a 2010 "comedy" that cost Emily Blunt the chance to be Black Widow, Sullivan's Travels is actually an original story written and directed by Preston Sturges. Like that classic novel though, it is a yarn that spans all kinds of different adventures and takes one man on an extensive journey that reshapes his whole life. This means those looking for only a movie featuring miniature humans will be gravely disappointed. For everyone else, the satisfying comedy and dynamite lead performances of Sullivan's Travels will more than suffice!

People Are Already At War With Themselves Before Any Weapons Are Fired In From Here To Eternity

Remember Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor? The internet, and also Team America: World Police, have turned that movie into such an endless punchline that it feels almost pointless to critique this motion picture once again, but for the purposes of this review, I feel it is imperative to do so. The feature film that Roger Ebert once accurately described as "...a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle" (God bless Roger Ebert) failed to make a compelling drama all about small-scale human drama that transpired before, during and after the real-life attack on Pearl Harbor for too many reasons to count. There's no single solution to all of them, but if Michael Bay and company wanted a better blueprint for how to make a drama that incorporates Pearl Harbor into its plot, maybe they should have looked to 1953's From Here To Eternity for inspiration?

The Great Dictator's Comedy And Message Of Unity Are As Timeless As Ever

As the 1940's began, the world as people had known it was changing rapidly. In the world of entertainment, the advent of color and sound in cinema was altering everything people knew was possible in this medium of storytelling. Films like The Jazz Singer, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs and The Wizard of Oz would ensure that the future of cinema would look radically different from what had come before it, and what had come prior to this age of colorized cinema was a world of movies dominated by Charlie Chaplin, a guy known for making a silent movies even into an age where sound had become the default standard for movies.

Classical Noir's Don't Get Much Better Than The Maltese Falcon

One of my favorite parts of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes (and let me tell you, I have so many favorite parts of that amazing comic strip) were the recurring appearances by Calvin's persona Tracer Bullet, a detective trapped in a black and white noir with omnipresent narration that basically introduced a young Douglas Laman to the trappings of the noir genre. Of course, Tracer Bullet (God, that is such a perfect name for a detective meant to be a pastiche on noir protagonists) was building upon the legacy of many surely detectives before him, including Humphrey Bogart's lead character in the 1941 drama The Maltese Falcon.