Comedy

<p>James Cagney and Bette Davis star as a less-than-scrupulous private detective and the woman he loves--who has just left him for an even less scrupulous employer. Jimmy Corrigan (Cagney) is jealous when his operative and sweetheart, Joan Martin (Davis), goes to work for his...

<p>In Elmer the Great and two more baseball-themed hits, fan and former semi-pro player Joe E. Brown wound up and pitched winning comedy. In Eleven Men and a Girl, he swaps horsehide for pigskin and -- surrounded by the 1929 All-American football team, who...

<p>The Dirty Dozen amateurs! Inglourious Basterds wimps! Meet the fearless foursome who first made the Fatherland cry uncle: the Invasion Quartet! While recuperating at an English military hospital, two gung-ho officers enlist a reluctant lieutenant and a stiff upper-lipped colonel into joining them on...

<p>Jean Arthur teams with William Powell in a playful murder mystery that proves Myrna Loy isn't the only beautiful, fluty-voiced comedienne who can trade banter and hunt killers with the suave star of The Thin Man series. The yarn begins when a jockey heads...

<p>When Georgiana Summers learns that the peroxide man-eater who stole her husband is planning a romantic weekend with a new love, she hatches a giddy plot to expose the rendezvous and win back her ex. But will she be so busy trying to regain...

<p>Two artists who know all about translating America into Americana -- Arthur Freed, who produced Meet Me in St. Louis, and Rouben Mamoulian, who directed the original Broadway production of Oklahoma! -- work some turn-of-the-century magic again with Summer Holiday. This Technicolor -glorious version...

<p>"Don't sell that stock. I see a better market for it soon." A radio clairvoyant gives his rapt audience advice from the spirit world. But the clairvoyant is really the leader of a gang of thieves, the advice is a code to where the...

<p>There's only one thing faster than wiseacre Sandy Norton's motor mouth -- his swell new speedboat! Brash, high-spirited William Haines takes the helm in a snappy action-comedy about an ex-sailor with a nifty boat-engine design who talks his way into a job with a...

<p>Bulldog-faced, bullmoose-framed Marie Dressler would never win a beauty contest, but her powerful turn as a blowzy sot in Anna Christie opposite Greta Garbo won her a legion of devoted fans. In The Girl Said No, her next film, she again hit the bottle....

<p>There's nothing more volatile than an idea in small-town 1895 America, especially for eager inventor Joe Belden. He's making a horseless carriage that runs on an explosive cleaning fluid called gasoline -- a "gas-o-mobile." Why, it's enough to make John Q. Citizen flip his...

<p>With those gams and that voice, High "C" Susie packs 'em in at a Bowery honkytonk located several blocks and a world away from where her Beantown family thinks she's singing: the grand opera house. Then her prim and disapproving sister comes to town...and...

<p>This season in Paris, Red is all the rage! Red Skelton headlines a joyful Technicolor remake of Roberta as a New York producer who inherits a failing Parisian fashion house. His partners are Howard Keel and Gower Champion and the lovelies they look at...

<p>Boston blueblood Aloysius Merriweather loves to play jokes on people and he's come up with a joy-buzzer of a doozy. He'll send barber Joe Jenkins in his place to a dinner party aimed at squeezing a few Merriweather millions. That Cinderella plan soon turns...

<p>Everyone who's anyone in Brookford can claim ancestors who were heroes of the Revolutionary War. Everyone that is, except ex-entertainers Sam and Susie Parker. But then the Parkers find a letter from George Washington that acknowledges the heroism of a long-ago Parker patriarch and...

<p>Dignity Always. That's the motto of the ritzy department store (haberdashery on the 3rd floor, stuffed shirts in the boardroom) owned by the Spear family -- and that's the comportment corporate scion John Spear (Reginald Denny) expects of his intended bride Josephine (Evelyn Venable),...

<p>When working girl Peggy Evans of humdrum Hotchkiss Falls gets a makeover, she does more than change from prim brunette to racy blonde. She gets a whole new life, leaving behind what everyone thinks is a suicide note and resurfacing in New York City,...

<p>Fortune-hunting playboys woo her. Newshounds clamor for the scoop on her romances. But society-page sensation Daisy Appleby, renowned as the heiress to a cosmetic company's millions, has a plan. Weary of facing a revolving door of flower-bearing fops, she arranges a marriage of convenience...

<p>A bundle of joy becomes a barrel of trouble for two nurses caring for a newborn when each of their boyfriends thinks he's dating a secret single mom! Wisecracking Patsy Kelly teams with a hot, funny blonde for a Hal Roach farce, but this...

<p>Her hair isn't yet platinum and her makeup is still more girlish than glamorous, but Lana Turner is nonetheless "a walking acetylene torch" in her first top billing, playing a dancer planted in a big Midwest college to win a rigged Hollywood contest. The...

<p>A remake of 1929's The Broadway Melody, Two Girls on Broadway follows the heart-tugging adventures of a dancer who loses both her shot at the big time and her stage-partner fiance to her talented kid sister. The story may have been a bit familiar,...

<p>Jane Thomas (Lana Turner) has everything: beauty, youth, brains. Everything except breeding or what passes for breeding among the snooty mean girls she meets at a college house party. Radiant 18-year-old Turner was on the cusp of fame when she made this smart, perceptive...

<p>Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort) lives deep within the cavernous underground of the Houston Astrodome, but his dreams rise much higher. He aims to fly. Not in a plane. But with strapped-on wings he's designing -- encouraged by a mysterious woman (Sally Kellerman) who may...

<p>Demoted to working in the "kindergarten" of the police department, tough cop Butch Saunders (Pat O'Brien) goes all soft at the center when a sweet blonde (Bette Davis) walks into the Bureau of Missing Persons looking for her missing husband. When it turns out...

<p>The sassy daughter of a local innkeeper, Peggy O'Neill (Joan Crawford) uses her smarts and good looks -- not to mention her close personal friendship with President Andrew Jackson (Lionel Barrymore) -- to make a scandalous impression on Washington's power elite in this lavish...

<p>Beautiful Austrian political refugee "Johnny" Jones is about to be deported, leaving the loving arms of a married Manhattan publisher for the waiting arms of the Nazis. The solution: instant citizenship via a marriage of convenience with flat-broke writer Bill Smith, in which the...

<p>With large confidence and an even larger hat, cattleman Calvin Jones (rubber-faced comic Joe E.Brown) rolls along the lighted cow path of Broadway. He has $20,000 to invest in a show, intending to skedaddle back to Texas with his profits. Faster than you can...

<p>Sailor beware! That sweet trick with the big eyes is looking for more than a good time. She wants a ring! As bad-boy tar Jack Kelly, silent-film leading man William Haines brings his trademark humor, charm and amazing good looks to his first Talkie...

<p>The "terrible trio" of Summer of '42 has graduated high school. Now the real learning begins. Gary Grimes, Jerry Houser and Oliver Conant return in writer Herman Raucher's continued tale of coming of age in World War II's shadow. For Benjy (Conant), 1944 is...

<p>Baseball rookie Frank X. Farrell is a phenom, a kid who can hurl the ol' horsehide and swing the lumber so well he may lead Chicago's beloved Cubbies to a pennant. He can sure spin excuses and blarney, too! Joe E. Brown brings a...

<p>A movie musical about wrestling? Turns out the public grew weary of musicals while Sit Tight was made, so most of the tunes were jettisoned prior to release. What remains is a wrestling comedy filled with plenty of pre-Code friskiness. Athletic funnyman Joe E....

<p>Everyone in a small resort town thinks Rollo Smith is famed aviator Robert Story. That's fine with Rollo, who's actually a penniless newspaperman bounced from his job. Doe-eyed cuties want to be near him. Stalwart men celebrate him. And all Rollo has to do...

<p>Millionaire Brendan Byers may be 4-F but feels it's "every man's right to be killed fighting for his country." So he puts his money where his mouth is. Unable to be in Uncle Sam's army, he does the next best thing: buy one. Once...

<p>Want a good stock tip, bud? Just follow Don's advice. Some say he has insider information. Others say he has horse sense and they're right. The source of Hot to Trot's moneymaking, laugh making data is Don, the talking horse who mouths wisecracks that...

<p>The Dr. will see you now. Basketball's Dr. J -- Julius Erving -- operates on the competition in this hoop-it-up disco-era fantasy about a team on a winning streak when it signs up motley players born under the zodiac's fish sign of Pisces. Will...

<p>Time's running out for the world's supreme criminal mastermind: Fu Manchu has run out of the elixir that keeps his 168-year-old body Fit for Fiendishness. So he and his malevolent minions set out to purloin the ingredients, including a canary-yellow diamond that's one of...

<p>Cracking Up is a crazy quilt of sight gags, one-liners, caricatures, slapstick and quirky vocal mannerisms. In short, it's marvelous mayhem of the kind which has gained Jerry Lewis admirers the world over. Lewis plays a hapless misfit who seeks psychiatric help after bumbling...

<p>Suzanne Somers rocks the blues away in this sunny seaside adventure co-produced by future Academy Award winner* Brian Grazer. With career worries getting her down, fading rock star Bonnie Katt (Somers) heads to the beach, hoping to leave her troubles behind. Falling in with...

<p>The House Party pals make sure the party isn't over in a fresh comedy that asks: "What happens when the school records of a brainiac dweeb (Kid, the guy with the high-rise 'do) and a got-attitude street tough (hip-hop style master Play) get accidentally...

<p>For the minstrel matador Juan Bautista, only one thing holds him back from becoming Spain's most famous singing bullfighter. That "obstacle" is Olimpia, the most beautiful and manipulative woman in all Barcelona. Juan must "conquer" her before the local impresario will put his name...

<p>Funnyman filmmaker Carl Reiner, who put Steve Martin, George Burns and John Candy through their comedic paces in one hit movie after another, strikes again with this warmly outrageous musical comedy. The title role gives dazzling Robert Lindsay (Hornblower, Jericho) a screen-debuting showcase that...

<p>It's 1944 and Americans are in the mood for something to take their minds off the challenges of World War II -- something like a juicy sex scandal. At the same time, naive, 15-year-old Sonny Wisecarver (Patrick Dempsey) is in the mood for love...

<p>Geronimo. Sitting Bull. Crazy Horse. Flapping Eagle. Haven't heard of him? It's time you do: he's a boozed-up lay about on a Southwest reservation who stirs up quite a flap leading the Last Great Indian Uprising. Director Carol Reed (The Third Man) and a...

<p>Here's the recipe. Start with a Grade-A cast (Peter Falk, Dianne Wiest, Emily Lloyd leading a smart ensemble). Add crisp one-liners by writers Nora Ephron (Julie and Julia) and Alice Arlen (Silkwood). Combine with the stylish zest of director Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan)...

<p>Four-time Emmy Award-winner John Larroquette ("The John Larroquette Show," "Richie Rich") and Bronson Pinchot ("Perfect Strangers," "The First Wives Club") star as a private investigator and a super-psychic who operate a paranormal detective agency in this wild comedy. When the pair is enlisted to...

<p>Ex-Marine Ellie and shy bookworm Janis are fledgling female Feds who'd make Eliot Ness proud. More importantly, they'll make you laugh. Starring as these plucky FBI recruits are gangbuster comediennes Rebecca de Mornay (Risky Business, Wedding Crashers) and Mary Gross (Saturday Night Live, A...

<p>Jennifer Love Hewitt ("The Tuxedo," "I Know What You Did Last Summer") and Will Friedle (TV's "Batman Beyond," TV's "Boy Meets World") headline this comedy about a high school student's desperate quest for a condom so he can consummate a long hoped for encounter....

<p>Natalie, Jeff and Polly share a big problem: being 15 years old. But they also share a lot of laughs because they have each other. This wry, lump-in-the-throat comedy is immediately recognizable by anyone who's survived, or is surviving, growing up. Runaway Jeff (Byron...

<p>Take three of the funniest, cleverest actors in the movies plop them on a gorgeous, real-life Greek isle and add a feverish plot that involves an ingenious scam, big money, lighthearted romance and a lisping gangster and you have Island of Love. On the...

<p>What's better than one Robin Williams? How about five of him? Williams, whose on-screen transformations include the redoubtable Mrs. Doubtfire and the always-young Peter Pan of Hook, turns chameleon again in this fanciful look at human history and longing from writer/director Bill Forsyth (Local...

<p>Wealthy, impulsive Susan Trexel undergoes a religious conversion, one undoubtedly destined to last as long as this season's hemline length. But in the meantime, Susan insists everyone around her -- including her neglected husband and child -- alter their lives (and loves) to conform...