Movie-A-Day #242: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994).
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley – proto-feminist, grandmother of modern horror, and the Romantic movement’s fly-on-the-wall – was born on this day in 1797. Her creations, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, have touched a nerve deep inside culture that continues to be felt today. Of the countless films either interpreting her novel or inspired by it, Universal’s is the classic and Hammer’s is the most interesting series, although Kenneth Branagh’s sensitive ’90s version is the most faithful to the source material.
Movie-A-Day #241: Notorious (1946).
Happy birthday to Ingrid Bergman. She made a lot of great movies, but it’s hard to beat the way she sizzled with Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s “Notorious.”
Movie-A-Day #240: Seven (1995).
Director David Fincher is 49 today. His blockbuster version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” isn’t due out until Christmas, so while we’re waiting let’s revisit one of his fantastic earlier films, “Seven.” (Or, “Se7en” if you want to be really particular about it.) Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Gwyneth Paltrow… and a box.
Movie-A-Day #239: Pretty Poison (1968).
Happy 68th birthday to the wonderful Tuesday Weld. Although she started out as a fresh-faced teen starlet, she started making the move to more subversive films in the late 1960s, among the best of which was great black comedy/thriller “Pretty Poison.” She does some of her best work in this one opposite Anthony Perkins as his sweet-seeming, but secretly unhinged, girlfriend.
Movie-A-Day #238: Man of a Thousand Faces (1957).
Lon Chaney died on this date in 1930, bringing to an end his remarkable career as a special effects makeup maestro and the first horror film icon. The biopic “Man of a Thousand Faces,” starring James Cagney as Chaney, is kind of syrupy and maudlin, but it will have to do until a better film of his life comes along.
Desuko Movie Spot. 