Film stars Whoopi Goldberg, Liev Schreiber, Quincy Jones, and more spoke with IMDb on the 2016 Oscars red carpet about their early IMDb credits and the movies that inspired them.
A right-wing folk singer becomes a corrupt politician and runs a crooked election campaign. Only one independent muck-raking reporter is trying to stop him.
Director:
Tim Robbins
Stars:
Tim Robbins,
Giancarlo Esposito,
Alan Rickman
A play that chronicles the war in Iraq through satire and commedia dell'arte masks., which pokes fun at neo-conservatives such as Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld.
Director:
Tim Robbins
Stars:
V.J. Foster,
Brent Hinkley,
Jay R. Martinez
Dorothy Parker remembers the heyday of the Algonquin Round Table, a circle of friends whose barbed wit, like hers, was fueled by alcohol and flirted with despair.
Director:
Alan Rudolph
Stars:
Jennifer Jason Leigh,
Campbell Scott,
Matthew Broderick
Anything can happen during a weekend at New York's Waldorf-Astoria: a glamorous movie star meets a world-weary war correspondent and mistakes him for a jewel thief; a soldier learns that ... See full summary »
In the early years of the 20th century, Matt Masters takes his rambling Wild West Show to Europe. His decision is prompted by his desire to find Lili Alfredo, who disappeared fourteen years... See full summary »
Director:
Henry Hathaway
Stars:
John Wayne,
Rita Hayworth,
Claudia Cardinale
Montgomery Cliff (in his last role) plays James Bower, an American physicist visiting West Germany who's recruited by a shady CIA agent, named Adam, to help them with the defection of a ... See full summary »
Based on the best-selling novel by Irving Wallace that was inspired by the Kinsey Report on the sexual mores of suburban women, the film follows the personal (read sexual) lives of four ... See full summary »
Director:
George Cukor
Stars:
Efrem Zimbalist Jr.,
Shelley Winters,
Jane Fonda
In 1930s New York Orson Welles tries to stage a musical on a steel strike under the Federal Theater Program despite pressure from an establishment fearful of industrial unrest and red activity. Meanwhile Nelson Rockefeller gets the foyer of his company headquarters decorated and an Italian countess sells paintings for Mussolini. Written by
Jeremy Perkins <jwp@aber.ac.uk>
Director Tim Robbins co-wrote the song "Cobbler in Despair" and co-produced the song "Croon Spoon". "Croon Spoon" was sung by Susan Sarandon and Eddie Vedder from the rock group Pearl Jam. See more »
Goofs
The opening scene takes place in "Fall 1936", but the newsreel says Italian forces are "poised to invade" Ethiopia. The invasion actually took place in October 1935. See more »
Quotes
Bertolt Brecht:
But where are the artists? Artists are the worst whores of all!
See more »
Crazy Credits
This film was edited on old fashioned machines. See more »
While it was fun seeing "Cradle Will Rock" with my mother-in-law who had some memories of the time period, I also did a huge paper on the WPA Arts Projects in graduate school (I recommend Jerry Mangione's book on the Federal Writer's Project as a good introduction) and am quite familiar with the personalities and facts involved so was curious to see it as a docudrama.
But we plus my parents felt the film was too agit-prop and the 20% of it that's over-the-top (aw come on, Hearst -- "Citizen Kane" foreshadowing, Rockefeller and a steel magnate at a Versailles costume party at the climax?) weakens the historical telling of a confluence of happenings -- the strangulation of the Federal Theater Project as a precursor victim to McCarthyism through the Dies Committee (including actual testimony wherein Christopher Marlowe was accused of being a Commie, as were the classic Greek dramatists) and Nelson Rockefeller's benighted sponsorship and then destruction of the Diego Rivera murals at Rockefeller Center.
Effectively written and directed by Tim Robbins is how passionately political the artists were, not as "card carrying Communists" per se, but as committed anti-Fascists and unionists in every aspect of their personal lives--as equally committed as they were to the magic of the theater as a communication device.
It does go over the top (including Susan Sarandon as an elegant Jewish courier to Mussolini selling stolen Old Masters), it is effective to show how TPTB were sympathetic to and profited from alliances with the fascists and how much they hated That Cripple in the White House.
Amidst the politics, the art for art's sake oversize egos of John Houseman and Orson Welles are also well portrayed, if a shade as buffoons compared to the grimness of everyone else around them, most of whom needed these WPA jobs to keep from starving (there's a toss away line that barely explains that FDR had to throw the Theater Project to the wolves in order to save his whole alphabet soup of programs for the vast majority).
It's also a bit over the top in painting those who testified at the Committee as probably crazy, but who knows. The Vanessa Redgrave character is silly but I guess it's making a point that Radical Chic is not new.
The climax of the factual occurrence, the one and only original performance of Marc Blitzstein's "ThreePenny Opera"-inspired political musical "Cradle Will Rock" is a delightful recreation, and from what I've read, true to the real story. This is definitely a very un-1990's story.
(Additional recommended background reading: "Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century" by Michael Denning (Verso, 1998, 556 pages)
(originally written 1/2/2000)
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While it was fun seeing "Cradle Will Rock" with my mother-in-law who had some memories of the time period, I also did a huge paper on the WPA Arts Projects in graduate school (I recommend Jerry Mangione's book on the Federal Writer's Project as a good introduction) and am quite familiar with the personalities and facts involved so was curious to see it as a docudrama.
But we plus my parents felt the film was too agit-prop and the 20% of it that's over-the-top (aw come on, Hearst -- "Citizen Kane" foreshadowing, Rockefeller and a steel magnate at a Versailles costume party at the climax?) weakens the historical telling of a confluence of happenings -- the strangulation of the Federal Theater Project as a precursor victim to McCarthyism through the Dies Committee (including actual testimony wherein Christopher Marlowe was accused of being a Commie, as were the classic Greek dramatists) and Nelson Rockefeller's benighted sponsorship and then destruction of the Diego Rivera murals at Rockefeller Center.
Effectively written and directed by Tim Robbins is how passionately political the artists were, not as "card carrying Communists" per se, but as committed anti-Fascists and unionists in every aspect of their personal lives--as equally committed as they were to the magic of the theater as a communication device.
It does go over the top (including Susan Sarandon as an elegant Jewish courier to Mussolini selling stolen Old Masters), it is effective to show how TPTB were sympathetic to and profited from alliances with the fascists and how much they hated That Cripple in the White House.
Amidst the politics, the art for art's sake oversize egos of John Houseman and Orson Welles are also well portrayed, if a shade as buffoons compared to the grimness of everyone else around them, most of whom needed these WPA jobs to keep from starving (there's a toss away line that barely explains that FDR had to throw the Theater Project to the wolves in order to save his whole alphabet soup of programs for the vast majority).
It's also a bit over the top in painting those who testified at the Committee as probably crazy, but who knows. The Vanessa Redgrave character is silly but I guess it's making a point that Radical Chic is not new.
The climax of the factual occurrence, the one and only original performance of Marc Blitzstein's "ThreePenny Opera"-inspired political musical "Cradle Will Rock" is a delightful recreation, and from what I've read, true to the real story. This is definitely a very un-1990's story.
(Additional recommended background reading: "Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century" by Michael Denning (Verso, 1998, 556 pages)
(originally written 1/2/2000)