If you get a sense of déjà vu watching ANNA AND THE KING OF SIAM, then you may be more familiar with the story’s more popular incarnation, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, THE KING AND I. The 1946 film, based on Margaret Landon’s memoir, stars Irene Dunne as Anna, an English widow who comes to Siam to [...]

Few films are as raw and powerful as Elia Kazan’s ON THE WATERFRONT. Marlon Brando stars as Terry Maloy, an ex-boxer who questions his guilt over his part in a mob death and blows the whistle on union corruption on the New Jersey docks. Terry became one of Brando’s signature roles and he leads an [...]

In 1953, Oscar decided to make up for the embarrassment of 1952′s Best Picture THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (though a guilty pleasure) by awarding its top prize to the stellar FROM HERE TO ETERNITY. The film was only the second film since GONE WITH THE WIND to receive 13 nominations, yet fell just short the record set [...]

Elliot Goldenthal always seems to produce his best work when he’s collaborating with his real life partner, director Julie Taymor. And such was the case with his Oscar-winning score to FRIDA (2002). Selma Hayak lustily portrays the tortured life of painter Frida Kahlo in the captivating biopic, from Frida’s humble beginnings, her marriage to legendary revolutionary [...]

Film is the ideal medium to showcase the visual arts. The lives and work of Frida Kallo (FRIDA), Van Gogh (LUST FOR LIFE) and Jackson Pollock (POLLOCK) have all had varying success in film. While not every painter’s life is necessarily worth exploring, there is something indefinable and inspirational about the visual creation of a [...]

Billy Wilder’s DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) wasn’t the first film noir, but it was the beginning of a new phase in Miklos Rozsa’s already stellar career. Adapted from James M. Cain’s classic crime novel, Fred MacMurray stars as insurance salesman Walter Neff, Barbara Stanwyck is the sultry housewife Phyllis who convinces him to bump off her husband for the [...]

Alfred Newman conquered film music yet again with 1947′s CAPTAIN FROM CASTILE. The colorful score combines the robust energy of its Spanish and Mexican locales for the tale of Pedro De Vargas (Tyrone Power), a young Castillian aristocrat who runs afoul of the Inquisition and joins Cortez’s (Cesar Romero) adventures in the New World discovering Aztec treasures. The [...]

Ask any film score fan for one of Oscar’s greatest injustices and they’ll point to Anne Dudley‘s 1997 win for THE FULL MONTY. This sleeper hit surprised many by also picking up a Best Picture nod in this tale of six out-of-work steelworkers in a once-thriving English suburb who decide to strip to earn a [...]

A major player back in its day, but largely forgotten today, SEPARATE TABLES tells the stories of the long-term residents at an English seaside hotel during the off-season. The cast of characters includes a retired British military official (David Niven) harboring a dirty secret, a mousy woman (Deborah Kerr) who is secretly in love with [...]

Long before Thornton Wilder’s Dolly Levi, there was Jane Austen’s EMMA. Austen was all the rage in the mid-1990s, a trend that began with Ang Lee’s SENSE AND SENSIBILITY and the BBC’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE miniseries. In EMMA, Gwyneth Paltrow stars in her breakout title role as a matchmaker with the best of intentions, whose meddling [...]