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Vanity Street.Broke and homeless, a young woman hurls a brick through the window of a drugstore, hoping to go to jail because at least “they feed you there.” Instead of arresting her, a kindly cop gets her a job as a showgirl at the theater next door; soon she’s wearing furs and fending off passes from top-hatted stage-door Johnnies. So it goes in lightning-paced B movies such as Vanity Street (1932), directed by Poverty Row maestro Nick Grinde. The plot may be flimsy, but Max Ophuls could have been proud of the long, breezy tracking shot that glides past the windows of the drugstore, packed with a motley crowd of chorus girls, costumed actors, and burlesque comedians. This casually terrific sequence is representative of the treasures that were to be found in the retrospective honoring the 2024 centenary of Columbia Pictures at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. Most of the films were short.

The movie: "Bringing Up Baby"

Where you can watch it: HBO Max

The pitch: David Huxley is a fussy paleontologist doing his best to handle increasingly strange situations, all caused by a beautiful and eccentric young heiress named Susan Vance. Starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn as the ridiculous romantic pair, it was sadly a commercial flop, in large part due to Hepburn being declared "box office poison" by the Independent Theater Owners of America only a short time before its release. The movie has thankfully earned a reappraisal in the years since, as Howard Hawks' madcap direction and Grant and Hepburn's incredible onscreen chemistry makes this one of the funniest romantic comedies ever made. It's also absolutely filthy, with more sneaky dirty jokes packed in than anyone can really catch on a single viewing.

"Bringing Up Baby" is a mile-a-minute screwball romance where all of the characters are totally...