The Andy Griffith Show season 3 continues with the existing cast – Andy, Opie, Barney, Floyd and the rest. And they make a very important addition — Andy’s future love interest, Helen Krump!
Read More »The Andy Griffith Show season 3 episode guide
I have to admit being pleasantly surprised by Dear God. Originally I was only going to review it for completeness’ sake, as part of the Tim Conway reviews. I picked it up at my local Wal-Mart for only $4.00. I figured that even a little bit of Tim Conway was worth $4.00. Even if the rest of the movie was a waste. It wasn’t, for several reasons.
Editorial Review of McHale’s Navy, Season One (1962) starring Ernest Borgnine, Tim Conway, Joe Flynn—courtesy of Amazon.com Something of a cross between M*A*S*H* (it’s set in wartime) and Sgt. Bilko (the emphasis in on ensemble acting, with a ringleader and his band of merry pranksters), McHale’s Navy isn’t on a level with those two immortal sit-coms. But this amiable show, debuting on DVD with all 36 black & white episodes from its first season (1962-63) on five discs, stands the test of time surprisingly well. Read More »McHale’s Navy Season 1
In his first starring role (and the film that launched his career), Buster Keaton stars in The Saphead as Bertie Van Alstyne, the spoiled son of a powerful Wall Street financier. Unable to escape the wealth and comfort that are foisted upon him, he pursues individuality in a series of comic misadventures in the speakeasies of New York, at the altar of matrimony, and even on the floor of the American stock exchange. The Saphead was instrumental in establishing Keaton as a bona fide star and greatly influenced his formulation of the Buster persona: a lonely, stone-faced soul thwarted by circumstance yet undauntedly resourceful and indefatigable in his struggle for love and survival within a chaotic world.
Product Description of Steamboat Bill Jr. courtesy of Amazon.comThe last of the independent features made in the prime of Buster Keaton‘s career, Steamboat Bill Jr. is a large-scale follow-up to The General, substituting a Mississippi paddle wheel for the locomotive, and replacing the spectacle of the Civil War with a catastrophic hurricane. Keaton stars as William Canfield, Jr., a Boston collegian who returns to his deep-southern roots to reunite with his father, a crusty riverboat captain(Ernest Torrence) who is engaged in a bitter rivalry with a riverboat king coincidentally, the father of Willie s sweetheart (Marion Byron). Keaton s athleticism and gift for inventive visual humor are in top form, and the cyclone that devastates a town (and sends houses literally crashing down around him) is perhaps the most ambitious, awe-inspiring and hilarious slapstick sequence ever created.
Read More »Steamboat Bill Jr.
In short, Pajama Party is an Annette Funicello beach party movie. But in addition to the gyrating young girls in bikinis,Pajama Party adds large amounts of clown-level zaniness as well. The basic story has 3 intertwining plots – a Martian invasion (led by a clean cut, inept Martian teenager and managed by Don Rickles), a beach party complete with teenage angst, and some inept crooks (including Buster Keaton as an American Indian, still wearing his traditional pork pie hat — with a feather in it). There’s a lot of humor in the movie, with slapstick that borders on the Looney Tunes. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it and hope you do as well.
Episode guide to The Andy Griffith Show season 1 – Andy, Barney (Don Knotts) and Aunt Bee are here… but Helen Crump isn’t … see how it all started
Read More »The Andy Griffith Show season 1 episode guide
In short, The Shakiest Gun in the West is a very funny Don Knotts movie. Set in the American Old West, Don plays the part of Jesse W. Haywood, a recent graduate from Dentistry school. He is going out west to make his fortune. His final exam in dentistry school is funny, as is his boarding the train out West. Along the way, his stagecoach is held up by two robbers (his reaction being very funny in itself). And one of the two robbers is a lovely woman, “Bad Penny” Cushing (Barbara Rhoades). But, she is soon arrested, and given an opportunity for a pardon in exchange for infiltrating a wagon train heading out west …. And to break up a ring of gun smugglers.
In The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, Luther Heggs (played by Don Knotts), is a typesetter for his small town newspaper, the Rachel Courier Express. He aspires to be a reporter however and gets his big break when the editor (played by Dick Sargent of Bewitched fame) asks him to spend the night at the old Simmons mansion that, 20 years before, was the site of a now-famous murder-suicide. The case has aroused local interest not only because of the anniversary but because the nephew of the murdered couple, Nicholas Simmons, has returned to Rachel aiming to tear the mansion down.
Read More »The Ghost and Mr. Chicken