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“Don’t worry. Some of the best movies are made by people working together who hate each other’s guts.”

Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas in The Bad And The Beautiful (1952) is available on Blu-ray from Warner Archives. It can be ordered Here

Appearances are everything in Hollywood. So when conniving moviemaker Jonathan Shields realizes few mourners will show up for the funeral of his equally conniving father, he knows what to do: hire extras. Kirk Douglas gives a magnetic, Oscar®-nominated performance as Shields, who turns talent, charisma and ruthlessness into film success, stomping on careers and creating enemies along the way. Vincente Minnelli directs this winner of five Academy Awards® that’s more than a compelling insider’s look at Tinseltown: It’s an opportunity for buffs to guess which real-life stars and moguls inspired the roles played by Douglas, Lana Turner, Walter Pidgeon, Dick Powell, Best Supporting Actress Gloria Grahame and more.

Robert Walker: Actor in MGM films of the '40s. Robert Walker: Actor who conveyed boy-next-door charms, psychoses At least on screen, I've always found the underrated actor Robert Walker to be everything his fellow – and more famous – MGM contract player James Stewart only pretended to be: shy, amiable, naive. The one thing that made Walker look less like an idealized “Average Joe” than Stewart was that the former did not have a vacuous look. Walker's intelligence shone clearly through his bright (in black and white) grey eyes. As part of its “Summer Under the Stars” programming, Turner Classic Movies is dedicating today, Aug. 9, '15, to Robert Walker, who was featured in 20 films between 1943 and his untimely death at age 32 in 1951. Time Warner (via Ted Turner) owns the pre-1986 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer library (and almost got to buy the studio outright in 2009), so most of Walker's movies have...

Joseph L. Manciewicz's adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar put Marlon Brando in a toga.

Beware the Ides of March. You can expect all manner of bad omens, murders most foul, and pretentious features like this one. The Roman year began in March and it took fifteen days to recover from their new year’s celebration. On this day in 44 BC, give or take a calendar change, Julius Caesar, who ended the Roman Republic after years of internal battles dating back to Romulus and Remus, was assassinated in a conspiracy of about 60 Senators who inflicted 23 stab wounds on the new dictator.

Mark Antony, who was Caesar’s underboss, united the people of Rome and went after the conspirators, finally forming a triumvirate with Lepidus and Octavian to rule the fledgling empire before “going native” in Egypt with Cleopatra. That period in Roman history is one of the most documented...

Luise Rainer as Anna Held, The Great Ziegfeld Best Picture Academy Award winner The Great Ziegfeld (1936) will be screening tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the American Cinematheque's Aero Theater in Santa Monica. Robert Z. Leonard directed this sumptuous MGM production, starring William Powell as theatrical showman Florenz "Flo" Ziegfeld, Myrna Loy as Ziegfeld's wife Billie Burke (the good witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz), and Luise Rainer as Anna Held. For her performance — which amounts to a supporting role, including a highly effective telephone scene — Rainer won the first of her two back-to-back Best Actress Oscars. The following year, she would take home the statuette for her Chinese peasant in Sidney Franklin's The Good Earth. Rainer, by the way, is the oldest Oscar winning performer around. The London resident turned 101 last January. Featuring cinematography by Oliver T. Marsh and others, art direction by Cedric Gibbons, costumes by Adrian,...