Nothing like a Hollywood film to brush up my days as a Jesuit schoolboy. 

Clash of The Titans is a film that has been made twice. Once with Laurence Olivier as Zeus (1981) and the second (2010) with Liam Neeson as the God of Gods.

In all deference to Liam Neeson and his brilliant performance in Schindler’s List,  I have seen the Great Olivier on stage and … well … no single actor in the world has so terrified me in a live theater performance.

Zeus’ trump card was terror.

Olivier’s vocal lightening?!

You “had to be there,” of course, but trust me. On stage, in 1963? At the Old Vic Theater? The mere human beings standing next to Olivier as Othello?

The entire acting roster of England’s National Theater were Piper Cubs when seen beside this mighty F117 Stealth Fighter Jet of demonic size, Sir Laurence Olivier.

Olivier as Othello was a lethal weapon on stage, always ahead of his time and his fellow actors when it came to erupting in unpredictably atomic vocal power!

With sound men and editors of film as The Great Leveler, however?

Olivier’s loss, Hollywood’s gain.

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Yesterday I walked into my local supermarket to find they already had a massive Christmas tree up ornamented with gift cards. Yes, it’s quickly approaching “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” and that means gifts to buy, preferably before you find yourself scrambling from store to store in a panic on Christmas Eve.

With that in mind, here are five drool-worthy stocking stuffers for the cinemaphiles in your family, all of them due to be released in the next few weeks.

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1. Frank Sinatra: Concert Collection (November 2, 2010, $54.99 at Amazon)

Get hep to this, man: seven discs containing fourteen hours of TV specials and filmed concerts, with Ol’ Blue Eyes joined by Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Gene Kelly, Antonio Carlos Jobim, John Denver, Bing Crosby, and of course Dino. Four of the specials have never been released, and a host of isolated TV clips are thrown in for good measure. Top it all off with a 44-page booklet chock full of rare photos and scholarly commentary, and the Chairman of the Board is truly back in all his scotch-soaked glory.

The seventh “Bonus Disc” sounds like the perfect thing to have playing in the background while you are decorating your tree: a “Happy Holidays with Bing and Frank” color TV special. (more…)

It always impresses me when an aged actor manages a comeback that is authentic, one based on more than mere nostalgia, one appealing to an entirely new generation of moviegoers. Jackie Gleason spent most of the 1970s appearing in pale television retreads of his 1950s heyday, and for most of that time he was absent from the big screen entirely. A revered comedic master, yes — but nevertheless his career as an innovator and taste-maker seemed long over. Then came Smokey and the Bandit, a fitting capstone to a long career of memorable portrayals and endless belly-laughs.

Born in 1916 in Brooklyn, Gleason was no stranger to tragedy. His sickly brother died when he was three, and his mother died when he was nineteen. But it was his father vanishing that gouged the biggest hole in his soul. “I was about nine when one day my pop didn’t come home,” Gleason said in later years. “A few days before, my mom and he had a violent argument and he took every picture out of the house that had him in it. That should have been the tip-off, but I was too young to know.” (more…)

I have been watching a lot of 40s movies lately. Being radically anti-celebrity, I was taken aback by how easily mesmerized I was by the movie stars of that period. 

After all, why wouldn’t any man (straight or gay) imitate Cary Grant’s walk up the stairs to save Ingrid Bergman at the end of Hitchcock’s “Notorious?”

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And why wouldn’t any honest woman try to talk and look like Barbara Stanwyck? 

I was at a pool party in the Hollywood Hills once where agressive supermodels were trying to seduce fake producers. That entire pack of semi-nude nymphs had less seductive power than the play of the anklet on Barbara Stanwyck left leg in Wilders’ “Double Indemnity.”  (more…)