Have You Ever Seen

Will Ferrell's popularity peaked right around 20 years ago, but he was about as huge as comedy stars got in 2006. In Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction, he isn't goofing around...although maybe that was to his fans' discontent. And he's not in tragedy or a comedy, but a dramedy...and the man who had always gone big proved he could also play quiet, nerdy and sad. Emma Thompson is a famous author writing & narrating everything ...

The French Foreign Legion called the 3 Geste boys and they trekked off to Africa to end up in William Wellman's tense adventure flick. It's an action-war film that ends with a long, but well-paced siege inside a fort. Gary Cooper is miscast as the title character (he's too old and too American), but he has pretty good chemistry with Ray Milland and Robert Preston, who play his brothers. Susan Hayward is briefly in this too, althoug...

Let's go back to December 2016 when John Lee Hancock's The Founder and Martin Scorsese's Silence were positioned as Oscar contenders. Neither won a gold trophy, but Hancock made the better movie. The Founder is a ...

June started on this podcast with a fast-cutting musical in Moulin Rouge. Now I end the month talking about an old-school Technicolor song-and-dancer...and it was an award-winning mega-smash. The King And I is Walter Lang's crowning achievement as a director and the King is the part Yul Brynner played thousands of times onstage. He won an Oscar for playing this hardheaded chauvinist on celluloid opposite Deborah Kerr's Anna, the he...

The podcast rulebook says you have to cover a plane movie for episode #747, so I went with the daddy of the '70s disaster craze. The planes are 707s in Airport, but oh well. George Seaton writes & directs a ca...

F.W. Murnau didn't live long enough to direct a huge slate of films, but the man bullhorning The Last Laugh also has Nosferatu, Faust and Sunrise on his resume. Like those, The Last Laugh is a silent picture And THIS one infamously uses very few intertitles to explain dialogue or motivations. So Emil Jannings went very big! The story is that he loses his job as the doorman of a swanky hotel, leading to depression and shame. The art...

The key word is charming in the 745th edition of Have You Ever Seen. Only The Lonely has John Candy playing a single Chicago cop who lives with his widowed mother (Maureen O'Hara). He's an extroverted sweetheart who falls for shy Ally Sheedy, but while his bigoted mom might love her son(s), that love is on HER terms. Candy didn't get to play the romantic lead very often (or ever?) before Chris Columbus gave him that chance in the M...

It's as if 007 went to prison for decades, was let out by government guys played by John Spencer & William Forsythe and then he had to help a nerdy Nicolas Cage save hostages on a deserted island. Well, hold u...

The first episode of a non-theme month here in June (and the 743rd overall) gets loud about Baz Luhrmann's bombastic Moulin Rouge. It's the kind of zany project where the director and star of this Paris-set movie are both Australians (Luhrmann and Nicole Kidman) while the co-lead is Scottish (Ewan McGregor) and a Colombian (John Leguizamo) plays the real-life French writer Toulouse Lautrec. Kidman and McGregor are well-matched as g...

I put a jaunty bow on Heroes Month with another multi-movie episode. For #742, I'm mostly talking about John Ford's My Darling Clementine, but there's a bit at the end about John Sturges' Gunfight At The O.K. Corral and George Cosmatos' Tombstone. Clementine stars Henry Fonda as the stoic marshal Wyatt Earp and Victor Mature as the uber-talented but sickly Doc Holliday. Linda Darnell is in the mix too and they're all surrounded by ...

Since it's Memorial Day, I'm tipping a cap to veterans. And I've got another doubleheader in episode #741, with the bulk of the show devoted to Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (where American soldiers battle Somali...

The ongoing effort to review long-ago movie stars has me talking about the dashing Tyrone Power and the beautiful Linda Darnell in The Mark Of Zorro. Gail Sondergaard and Basil Rathbone also have key roles in Rouben Mamoulian's 1940 flick. The Mexican man in black shares ties with Robin Hood and Batman, as the Z Man risks his life to rip off the rich to help out the poor. For an action movie, it's pretty muted, but it IS a good tim...

Call me Snake. Okay, well, that's too cool for me, so just make it Ryan. Either way, this 739th episode gets into the night life and action frenzy that is John Carpenter's Escape From New York. Kurt Russell was already establishing himself as something more than just a Disney kid, then his signature role here cemented it. The eclectic Van Cleef/Borgnine/Harry Dean supporting cast surrounding Russell is effective, but the production...

In anticipation of the theatrical re-release of Top Gun later this week, this 738th episode has me yapping about Tony Scott's blockbuster that put him on the map and made Tom Cruise a megastar. The one about cocky...

Even though it's Star Wars Day, someone else can talk about Luke & Leia. What I have is a  super-long episode about much-older movies: the 1932 Tarzan & the 1924 Pan. Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan star in an exciting, sexy, action-adventure story. They worked with lions and hippos and crocs (and actors in animal suits) and it's all convincingly done, especially since none of the principal photography was ac...

It's Heroes Month! For this 736th episode, cue up the William Tell Overture and get ready for the masked vigilante & his native buddy. That's because the topic of the first of 2 movies today is The Lone Ranger (plus, of course Tonto....and also, hi-yo Silver). Stuart Heisler directs Clayton Moore, Jay Silverheels and Bonita Granville in an enjoyable western with all the necessary thrills and constant danger. For film #2, I spen...

It's another doubleheader in episode #735, this time with 2 unrelated '50s classics. First up, I talk about the offbeat John Huston comedy Beat The Devil. The screenplay he wrote with Truman Capote is very quotabl...

Inside Man is a clever heist film with the twist staring you in the face from the beginning. It's also the first Spike Lee or Jodie Foster film to be reviewed on Have You Ever Seen in quite some time. Foster and Denzel Washington's scenes together are fantastic. The 2 of them, plus Clive Owen, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe and Chiwetel Ejiofor deliver. Ironically, though, for a film with such intensity for 2 straight hours, the...

It's a short one for episode #733 of Have You Ever Seen, as I discuss Anthony Mann's biopic about the best-selling bandleader from the '30s & '40s. Smash hits Moonlight Serenade & In The Mood are Glenn Miller's 2 most-recognizable songs, tunes you'll know the minute you hear them. This is a straight-ahead "based on real people" movie (including his loving wife, Helen), but Mann, who often worked with James Stewart in this e...