Back to Golden Days

I started this blog six years ago as a way to share my passion for classic films and the Old Hollywood era. I used to watch dozens of classic films every month, and every time I discovered a new star I liked I would go and watch their entire filmography. But somewhere along the way, that passion dimmed down. For instance, I watched 73 classic films in 2016, and only 10 in 2020. The other day, I found this film with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. that I had never heard of, and for some reason it made me really excited about Old Hollywood again. It made me really miss the magic of that era and all the wonderful actors and actresses that graced the silver screen. And it also made me think of all the reasons why I fell in love with classic films in the first place. I came up with 80 reasons, which I thought would be fun to share with you. Most of them are just random little scenes or quirky little quotes, but put them together and they spell Old Hollywood to me. This is part one of the 80 reasons w...

  Directed by Henry King, The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926) begins with a woman (Vilma Bánky) burying her husband in the desert. She and her young daughter, Barbara (Carmencita Johnson), then get back in their covered wagon and continue to head West. At the same time, Jefferson Worth (Charles Lane) and his party — which includes Tex (Clyde Cook) and Pat Mooney (Erwin Connelly) — are also travelling West. They all run into a violent sandstorm and try to take cover. Once the storm clears, Mr. Worth and his companions find Barbara clinging to her dead mother in the sand. Mr. Worth decides to adopt the girl and raise her as his own daughter. Fifteen «sun-parched» years pass and Barbara Worth (Vilma Bánky) is now a grown woman beloved by her childhood friend, Abe Lee (Gary Cooper), a young engineer who surveys the desert with his father, Henry, the Seer (Paul McCallister). Mr. Worth wants to build a dam on the Colorado River to bring irrigation to the vast arid land he owns. To ...

The most attractive man who has ever lived, otherwise known as Gary Cooper , was born Frank James Cooper, in Helena, Montana on May 7, 1901. He was the youngest of two sons of English immigrants Alice (née Brazier), a homemaker, and Charles Henry Cooper, a prominent lawyer, rancher and eventually a Montana Supreme Court justice.   Wanting her sons to have an English education, Alice enrolled Frank and his brother Arthur in Dunstable Grammar School in Berdfordshire, their father's birthplace, where they where educated from 1910 to 1912. At Dunstable, Frank studied Latin and French, in addition to taking several courses in English history. While he readily accepted the school's «conservative political beliefs and code of dutiful self-sacrifice as well as it admirable emphasis on discipline, loyalty, patriotism, honor and pluck,» Frank never adjusted to its formal uniforms and constricted landscape.   I didn't like England, particularly, although I did admire the extraordi...