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Has any young actress ever had a year Katharine Hepburn experienced in 1933? After making her film debut in 1932’s “Bill of Divorcement” with John Barrymore, the 26-year-old with the preternatural cheekbones demonstrated her versatility in three exceptional motion pictures 90 years ago. The great Kate soared high as famed aviatrix who has a tragic affair with a married member of Parliament in Dorothy Arzner’s daring pre-code romantic drama “Christopher Strong.” Next up was “Morning Glory,” for which she won her first of four best actress Oscars-and of course was a no-show at the ceremony- as an eager young actress. And Hepburn ended the year with “Little Women,” the acclaimed box office hit which made $100,000 during its first week at Radio City Music Hall, based on Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel.

Most “little women” have read Alcott’s autobiographical coming-of-age novel that was published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. Set...

Black Tuesday (1954).Hugo Fregonese’s best films are fueled by desperation, a clean and potent but highly flammable form of energy. Just as fight-or-flight adrenaline sharpens our senses and reflexes, his filmmaking reaches heights of rigor and intensity when his characters are in the tightest spots—locked up, on the run, or under siege. Often facing death, they are also sentenced for life to be themselves: fate in his films is not a capricious external force but an expression of character. As a pensive Jack the Ripper says in Man in the Attic (1953), “There are no criminals. There are only people doing what they must do because they are who they are.”But who was Hugo Fregonese? Watching his films, it is hard not to speculate on the link between their compulsive themes of escape and restless wandering and his own refusal or inability to settle down. Born in Argentina...

The best part of Baywatch was that everyone on screen seemed completely invested in making it a good movie. It isn’t a good movie— it isn’t even particularly close to being a good movie— but the cast is willing to push as hard as they can to make it better. Baywatch is elevated from the train wreck I’m sure it is on the page in to a simply bland, kind of mediocre, film. Baywatch is a reasonably charming medley of punchless comedy, unintelligible story, and a generous amount of scantily clad pretty people. It’s the kind of movie to see on an exceptionally hot day, or if your first choice movie is sold out and you’ve already put in so much effort to park at the mall.

I paid careful attention to the story in Baywatch and I’m still not entirely sure what was going on.

Another 3-D breakthrough, this time for a Paramount musical rescued from oblivion and remastered by the 3-D Archive. Rhonda Fleming and Gene Barry star in a blend of songs and Alaskan adventure filmed in downtown Hollywood. The depth effects are great, but the big surprise is Teresa Brewer, the radio star turned one-shot movie musical wonder. Her voice resurrects memories of pop vocals just prior to the arrival of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Those Redheads from Seattle

3-D Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1953 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 90 min. / Street Date May 23, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 34.95

Starring: Rhonda Fleming, Gene Barry, Agnes Moorehead, Teresa Brewer, The Bell Sisters, Guy Mitchell, Jean Parker, Roscoe Ates, John Kellogg, Sheila James Kuehl, Dub Taylor, Max Wagner.

Cinematography: Lionel Lindon

Film Editor: Archie Marshek

Original Music: Sidney Cutner, Leo Shuken

Written by Lewis R. Foster, Geoffrey Holmes (Daniel Mainwearing) and George Worthing Yates

Produced by William H. Pine,...

Erik Charell. His credits include script contributions to the Hope-Crosby comedy Road to Morocco and the Tony Martin musical Casbah. To learn this after seeing his only two features as director, The Congress Dances (1931) and Caravan (1934), is like discovering there was a guy called Orson Welles who made Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons and spent the rest of his career writing gags for Abbott & Costello.Perhaps Charell wasn't an artist of quite Welles' status. But he'd made a big name for himself in operetta, and both his films are in this mode, though the operetta-film is the genre that time forgot. As out-of-vogue as musicals are, despite anything Damien Chazelle can prove to the contrary, they are the height of fashion compared to actual filmed operettas.The Congress Dances is set in Vienna as pre-wwi world leaders meet and get distracted by romance, except Conrad Veidt as master diplomat...

Gabriel Over the White House

DVD-r

The Warner Archive Collection

1933 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame / 86, 102 min. / Street Date October 20, 2009 / available through the Warner Archive Collection / 17.99

Starring: Walter Huston, Karen Morley, Franchot Tone, Arthur Byron, Dickie Moore, C. Henry Gordon, David Landau, Samuel S. Hinds, Jean Parker, Mischa Auer.

Cinematography: Bert Glennon

Film Editor: Basil Wrangell

Original Music: Dr. William Axt

Written by: Carey Wilson, from a book by T. F. Tweed

Produced by: William Randolph Hearst, Walter Wanger

Directed by Gregory La Cava

A Review Revisit.

The unique political fantasy Gabriel Over the White House has become painfully topical lately. This is an update of a 2009 review. To my knowledge nothing has changed with the product — I saw a re-promotion of Twilight Time’s 1984 disc and thought, Gabriel is twice as relevant and at least as scary.

Unstable times in America have produced some pretty strange political-religious message pictures.

Lady in the Death House

Written by Harry O. Hoyt

Directed by Steve Sekely

U.S.A., 1944

Surrounded by friends and colleagues and sharing drinks, psychologist and criminologist Charles Finch (Lionel Atwill) shares his thoughts on a recent adventure that involved two lovers, the brilliant Dr. Dwight ‘Brad’ Bradley and state attorney’s secretary, Mary Kirk Logan (Jean Parker). The two met at a party one night but, unbeknownst to most, Mary and her younger sister Suzy (Marcia Mae Jones) owe a gangster a lot of money in a dirty blackmailing scheme. On the night when the thug comes to Mary’s apartment for a large payment, he is somehow murdered by a nasty thump on the head, despite that Mary had locked herself in her room. Now the dishevelled woman is guilty of killing the loan shark and awaiting the electric chair…with Brad being the state executioner! Finch...

Katharine Hepburn movies. Katharine Hepburn movies: Woman in drag, in love, in danger In case you're suffering from insomnia, you might want to spend your night and early morning watching Turner Classic Movies' "Summer Under the Stars" series. Four-time Best Actress Academy Award winner Katharine Hepburn is TCM's star today, Aug. 7, '15. (See TCM's Katharine Hepburn movie schedule further below.) Whether you find Hepburn's voice as melodious as a singing nightingale or as grating as nails on a chalkboard, you may want to check out the 1933 version of Little Women. Directed by George Cukor, this cozy – and more than a bit schmaltzy – version of Louisa May Alcott's novel was a major box office success, helping to solidify Hepburn's Hollywood stardom the year after her film debut opposite John Barrymore and David Manners in Cukor's A Bill of Divorcement. They don't make 'em like they used to Also, the 1933 Little Women...

John Kerr dead at 81: actor who played suspected gay teenager in the play Tea and Sympathy and in the Hollywood movie adaptation Kerr, best known for playing the sensitive (and suspected to be gay) adolescent opposite Deborah Kerr (no relation, different pronunciation -- see below) in Tea and Sympathy both on Broadway and in the movies, died of heart failure at Huntington Hospital in the Los Angeles "suburb" of Pasadena this past Saturday, February 1. Kerr was 81 years old. (Picture: Publiicity shot of Kerr ca. 1955.) Born John Grinham Kerr on Nov. 15, 1931, in New York, he was part of a show business (chiefly stage) family. His mother was theater actress June Walker, among whose Broadway credits are The Farmer Takes a Wife and the role of Lorelei Lee in the 1926 production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes); Walker was also featured in a few movies, e.g., as Robert Montgomery's love interest...

Each week within this column we strive to pair the latest in theatrical releases to worthwhile titles currently available on Netflix Instant Watch. This week we offer alternatives to The Three Stooges, Cabin in the Woods & Lockout.

The classic comedy team gets a reboot at the hands of the Farrelly Brothers. Will Sasso, Chris Diamantopoulos and Sean Hayes co-star.

Craving more classic comedy teams?

Duck Soup (1933) The iconic Marx Bros. front this comedy classic. Here Groucho plays Rufus T. Firefly, the recently appointed dictator of the country Freedonia. Masterful slapstick and sharp political satire ensue. Chico, Zeppo, and Harpo Marx co-star.

Laurel & Hardy: Flying Deuces (1939) One of the most critically heralded comedy double acts, Laurel and Hardy made an art out of slapstick. In this winsome misadventure they parody the war stories that were all the rage with a wacky tale of two American idiots who get caught up in...

Joan Bennett, Spring Buyington, Frances Dee, Jean Parker, Katharine Hepburn in Little Women (top); Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck in Remember the Night (bottom) The digitally remastered Remember the Night (1940), written by Preston Sturges, directed by Mitchell Leisen, and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, is the highlight of Turner Classic Movies‘ Christmas movie series this month. But there are other goodies — or potential goodies — as well. One such is It Happened on 5th Avenue (1947), a minor Allied Artists (ex-Monogram) comedy directed by former WB contractee Roy Del Ruth, and featuring Don DeFore, former Rko star Ann Harding, and Gale Storm. The story centers on a hobo and his buddies who take over a mansion while the [...]...