Three significant early Paramount comedies make an appearance in our Great Global Search, Horse Feathers and Monkey Business starring the Marx Brothers and It’s A Gift with W.C. Fields. Groucho and company are nothing less than essential but in the grand scheme of things, Fields’ dysfunctional family portrait stands apart from its contemporaries as one of the greatest comedies of…

1955’s Artists and Models, directed by Frank Tashlin, neatly satirizes the cold-war paranoia of the fifties (and the McCarthy hearings in particular) by focusing on a similar witch hunt, the war against comic books. Tashlin’s film, starring Dean Martin as a failed “fine” artist reduced to drawing for comic books and Jerry Lewis as the fella who reads…

Most movie trailers boil down a film to its essence, resulting in 2½ minutes of unbridled sensationalism. That’s pretty much a trailer’s raison d’être and we love ’em for it. But what if the entire movie was like that? Such is the case for another of the films in our Great Global Trailer Search, 1960’s The…

A former vaudevillian, the great comedian Fred Allen found his fame in radio but was unable to navigate a suitable transition to TV (“Television is a medium,” he once observed, “because it is neither rare nor well done.”). He made a few casual appearances in movies but only once, in 1945, did he take full…