Fantastic Classics

Julie is an edge-of-your-seat suspense thriller featuring Doris Day in one of her few dramatic roles. Day plays the title character of Julie Benton, a woman who is trapped in a volatile marriage to a insanely jealous man, Lyle Benton (played by Louis Jourdan). The first half of the film is about Julie's harrowing escape from her husband. Having being threatened that she would be murdered if she ever tried to leave him, Julie risks her life to get away. The second half of the film sees Julie return to her former career as a flight attendant, only to find herself on a plane with her homicidal husband as a passenger. As he reaches his breaking point and shoots the flight crew, there's no one left to land the plane except for Julie. The climax of this strange but thrilling movie was a precursor to Karen Black's iconic performance in Airport 1975 (who also plays a flight attendant who has to land a plane in the middle of crisis). It's a shame that Day didn't make more d

The always-charming Judy Holliday gives a brilliant performance in this romantic comedy from 1954. Produced four years after her career-making and Academy Award winning performance in Born Yesterday , Holliday proves (yet again) in It Should Happen to You that she was a force to be reckoned with. The fact that she's one of my favorite actors from classic films is no secret. As many have mentioned before, I will echo the sadness that her life ended way too soon (she died at the age of 43). It's a cinematic tragedy that she didn't make more movies. Here, Holliday plays fame-obsessed Gladys Glover, a down-on-her-luck woman who has recently been fired. To her luck (and his), Gladys meets a documentary filmmaker in Central Park named Pete Sheppard (played by Jack Lemmon in his first major screen performance). The plot focuses on Glady's climb to fame. Along the way, Gladys discovers that being famous is not as easy as it looks, experiencing many pitfalls in her humbling jou

Movies don’t get much creepier than this fantastic classic from 1960. Director Wolf Rilla takes his time introducing us into the strange world of this sinister tale. In this case, we are in the British village of Midwich, where something strange has just happened: the residents of the village lose consciousness for four hours. When they awake, several women have been impregnated. Even more bizarre, all of the women give birth on the same day. The children themselves possess telepathy, all have a similar look (large eyes, blonde hair) and speak as of telling a cautionary tale. The children become the objects of fear and speculation by their fellow villagers. What follows is chilling to the point of terrifying. Peeling back the many layers (include the symbolic ones), Rilla masterfully creates beautiful suspense on the screen with help from cinematographer Geoffrey Faithfull, whose aesthetical choices are stunning. Visually this film has become iconic, known for its glowing eyes effect.