Arnold Schwarzenegger remained committed to jump-starting his acting career post-governor's office and his infidelity scandal and divorce with wife Maria Shriver via his commitment to the Lionsgate western The Last Stand. Schwarzenegger agreed to play what a Lionsgate exec described as a border town sheriff facing a drug cartel leader trying to escape across the Mexican border.

Maternal melodramas featured plots with sacrificial, selfless mother-loving figures who suffered hardships. They were a popular tearjerker (or 'soaper') sub-genre requiring multiple hankies to make it to the emotional finales. Maternal characters were cruelly neglected and scorned by their children, or separated from their children for any number of causes (social pressures to give up the child, financial destitution, scandal or a moral lapse, etc.). However victimized, they would often become heroines by sacrificing themselves for their children.

Ultimately, it's of minor import how much of Rob Roy is based upon historical fact and how much has been embellished by the pen of screenwriter Alan Sharp. As a hero of 18th century Scotland, Robert Roy MacGregor is known to have walked through the mists of the Highlands, living by the code that made his name a legend. This film takes the skeletal myth and builds a real person around those bones. As embodied by Liam Neeson, Rob Roy is a tremendous protagonist -- a naive man whose belief in honor and whose love for a woman, family, and clan make him a figure to cheer for.

Cast:

Michael Douglas, Demi Moore, Donald Sutherland, Caroline Goodall, Roma Maffia

The undisputed queen of the women's melodramas, playing a wide range of tarnished females (a Southern belle, a long-suffering secret mother, a terminally-ill socialite, a spoiled seductive rich girl, a tawdry Cockney waitress, a calculating murderous wife, a repressed ugly duckling spinster who is transformed, a trampy housewife, and more) was independent-minded star Bette Davis in such classic, four-hanky films as:

Sultry Jennifer Jones starred as a lustful, spiteful, white-trash hellcat in the passionate melodrama Ruby Gentry (1952), James Dean starred in his first film as a wronged, rebellious brother in Elia Kazan's emotionally brooding East of Eden (1955), and Elizabeth Taylor starred in two literate tales of dysfunctional Southern families: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). Both Taylor and Dean starred in George Stevens' Giant (1956), an epic melodramatic look at the aristocratic-estate life of a Texas cattle rancher over two generations. And at the close of the decade, Taylor won a Best Actress Oscar as a sophisticated, professional New York callgirl in the overripe drama Butterfield 8 (1960).

The Apartment (1960) is producer/director Billy Wilder's bittersweet, heart-rending tragi-comedy/drama of a compliant insurance clerk (Lemmon) who secretly lends out his apartment to other company executives for adulterous sexual affairs and liaisons. The plot thickens when the clerk realizes that his building's elevator operator (MacLaine) is being taken for trysts by his married boss (MacMurray) to his apartment. The sophisticated yet cynical film of the early 60s is a bleak assessment of corporate America, big business and capitalism, success, and the work ethic, when a lowly but ambitious accountant enables his climb up the corporate ladder by ingratiating himself to his superiors - he literally prostitutes his own standards and moral integrity and allows himself to be exploited.

It won five major Academy Awards out of ten nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay (co-written by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond), Best B/W Art Direction/Set Decoration, and Best Film Editing. [It was not until thirty-three years later that another black and white Film would win Best Picture - Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993)].Three acting awards were passed over: Jack Lemmon for Best Actor, Shirley MacLaine for Best Actress and Jack Kruschen for Best Supporting Actor. It was a triple win for Wilder as Director (Wilder's second directing Oscar), Producer, and Screenplay author. Wilder's previous The Lost Weekend (1945) had also won Best Picture and Best Director. Wilder would cast Jack Lemmon in five more films as a leading man, including Irma La Douce (1963), The Fortune Cookie (1966), Avanti! (1972), The Front Page (1974), and Buddy Buddy (1981).

The Awful Truth (1937) is one of the classic, definitive screwball comedies of the thirties from Columbia Pictures, joining company with other classics including Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey (1936), George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story (1940), and Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve (1941). Producer/director Leo McCarey's stylish light comedy is a witty battlefield of marital misadventures, mismatches and snappy dialogue, with physical scenes of slapstick, spontaneous and improvised acting, and hilarious romantic antagonism between its two stars - Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. They appear as a mistrusting couple who decide to separate and file for divorce, but then attempt to sabotage and ruin each other's new romances and affairs, and are ultimately reconciled to each other just before the divorce decree becomes final.

It was the first of the major stars' three films together - Grant and Dunne were reunited in the romantic screwball farce My Favorite Wife (1940) (also produced by Leo McCarey) and then in the classic tear-jerker Penny Serenade (1941). This film also starred an Airedale, Scottish fox terrier named Mr. Smith (known as Asta in The Thin Man (1934) series of films, and who was later to appear in Bringing Up Baby (1938)) to bank on the previous success of a husband-wife and dog combination.

It Happened One Night (1934) is one of the greatest romantic comedies in film history, and a film that has endured in popularity. It is considered one of the pioneering "screwball" romantic comedies of its time, setting the pattern for many years afterwards along with another contemporary film, The Thin Man (1934).

The escapist theme of the film, appropriate during the Depression Era, is the story of the unlikely romantic pairing of a mis-matched couple - a gruff and indifferent, recently-fired newspaper man (Gable) and a snobbish, superior-acting heiress (Colbert) - a runaway on the lam. It is a reversal of the Cinderella story (the heroine rejects her wealthy lifestyle), a modern tale with light-hearted sex appeal in which courtship and love triumph over class conflicts, socio-economic differences, and verbal battles of wit.

The madcap film from Columbia Studios (one of the lesser studios) was an unexpected runaway box office sleeper hit (especially after it began to play in small-town theaters), and it garnered the top five Academy Awards (unrivaled until 1975, forty-one years later by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) - and then again by The Silence of the Lambs (1991).) It won all five of its nominated categories: Best Picture, Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Claudette Colbert), Best Director (Frank Capra), and Best Adaptation (Robert Riskin).