In other later roles, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Olivia de Havilland represented powerful, liberated females on screen, and helped to create long-lasting examples of this genre. Crawford starred in the trashy, high-strung, musical melodrama Humoresque (1946) as an older, wealthy society patroness who sought revenge after being scorned by a struggling, talented violinist. She also played an emotionally unstable nurse in Possessed (1947), a playwright/heiress wise to a plot against her by her scheming husband in Sudden Fear (1952), and a middle-aged typist grasping for love with a younger man in the psychological soaper Autumn Leaves (1956). Melodramatic elements were found in the socially-conscious drama regarding mental illness and institutionalization The Snake Pit (1948) with Olivia de Havilland's showcase performance as a woman descending into madness in a brutal mental institution. De Havilland also played a courted, plain-jane spinster in the moody and somber melodrama The Heiress (1949).

Safety Last (1923) earned Harold Lloyd, the bookish, horn-rimmed glasses, straw-hat-wearing comedian and Everyman hero, his nickname "the King of Daredevil Comedy." Lloyd's films of this period often included timeless gags, pathos, and clever visual elements. The film was directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, and produced by Hal Roach. Other Lloyd films that featured the same character included Girl Shy (1924), The Freshman (1925) - his most successful film, For Heaven's Sake (1926), and The Kid Brother (1927) - often considered his best film.

This successful film is most remembered for its thrilling, hair-raising climax - a reckless, 'safety last,' humorous stunt on the side of a twelve-story skyscraper above busy city streets. The scary sequence was deliberately shot with most of the camera compositions including views of the perilous drop behind him.

Greatest War Films: War films acknowledge the horror and heartbreak of war, letting the actual combat fighting or conflict (against nations or humankind) provide the primary plot or background for the action of the film. There are a significant number of influential, important, and milestone war films throughout cinematic history, outlined here.

Typical elements in the action-oriented war plots include POW camp experiences and escapes, historical recreations of major battles or war-related events, submarine warfare, spy or espionage tales, personal heroism, biopics of important war figures, "war is hell" brutalities, air dogfights, tough trench/infantry experiences, resistance movements, pre-war intrigue, veterans returning to the homeland, male-bonding buddy adventures during wartime - even black comedies about warfare. Themes explored in these war films include combat, survivor and escape stories, tales of gallant sacrifice and struggle, studies of the futility and inhumanity of battle, the effects of war on society, and intelligent and profound explorations of the moral and human issues.

The Big Parade (1925) is director/producer King Vidor's most famous, precedent-setting war film from the silent era. It was the first realistic war drama and has served ever since as an archetypal model for all other war films. It was the first big box-office success of the newly-formed MGM Studios - and possibly the most profitable silent film of all time - it helped bring back the popularity of war films in the late 20s. Vidor, often compared to the end of the century's director Steven Spielberg, brought his own epic, sweeping style to his intimate yet massive work about love and war.

Screenwriter Harry Behn based his script on a story by author Laurence Stallings, who based his writing on his own gritty wartime experiences as a Marine serving in N. France. Made only seven years after the Great War's Armistice, the film captures the impact of the conflict on an ordinary GI. It was the first war film of its kind to tell its story from the viewpoint of the GI. Handsome matinee silent screen idol John Gilbert gave his greatest acting performance in a star-making role as one of three Americans who enlisted and was swept into the war in France.

Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) is producer/director Stanley Kubrick's brilliant, satirical, provocative black comedy/fantasy regarding doomsday and Cold War politics that features an accidental, inadvertent, pre-emptive nuclear attack. The undated, landmark film - the first commercially-successful political satire about nuclear war, has been inevitably compared to another similar suspense film released at the same time - the much-more-serious and melodramatic Fail-Safe (1964). However, this was a cynically objective, Monty Python-esque, humorous, biting response to the apocalyptic fears of the 1950s.

The witty screenplay, co-authored by the director (with Terry Southern), was based on Peter George's novel Red Alert (the U.S. title). [George's work, under his pseudonym Peter Bryant, was first published in England with the title Two Hours to Doom. Early drafts of the script were titled Edge of Doom and The Delicate Balance of Terror.] The novel's primary concern was the threat of an accidental nuclear war. Dr. Strangelove himself did not appear in the novel, however - he was added by Kubrick and co-screenwriter Southern.

The iconoclastic, not-politically-correct Blazing Saddles (1974) is one of Mel Brooks' funniest, most successful and most popular films. It is an unsubtle spoof or parody of all the cliches from the time-honored genre of westerns, similar to the comic attitude of numerous Marx Brothers films. Brooks' third feature film tagline blurb advertised: "Blazing Saddles...or never give a saga an even break!" Notice in the film's poster, the gold coin is inscribed: "HI, I'M MEL. TRUST ME."

The crude, racist and sexist film with toilet humor and foul language includes the main elements of any western - a dance-hall girl, a gunslinger, a sheriff, a town full of pure folk, and more, but it twists them around. So they become a black sheriff, a racist town, a sex-obsessed Governor, and so forth. In addition, there are other anachronistic elements - Hedley Lamarr (a misnaming of actress Hedy Lamarr), hints of the seductive character Frenchy (played by Marlene Dietrich) in Destry Rides Again (1939), a medieval executioner, a Cole Porter song, redneck bigotry of all flavors, and a 'film-within-a-film' concept, exemplified by Lamarr exclaiming: "Drive me off this picture."

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.

A controversial, explicitly racist, but landmark American film masterpiece - these all describe ground-breaking producer/director D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). The domestic melodrama/epic originally premiered with the title The Clansman in February, 1915 in Los Angeles, California, but three months later was retitled with the present title at its world premiere in New York, to emphasize the birthing process of the US. The film was based on former North Carolina Baptist minister Rev. Thomas Dixon Jr.'s anti-black, 1905 bigoted melodramatic staged play, The Clansman, the second volume in a trilogy:

* The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865-1900
* The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan
* The Traitor

The General (1927) is an imaginative masterpiece of dead-pan "Stone-Face" Buster Keaton comedy, generally regarded as one of the greatest of all silent comedies (and Keaton's own favorite) - and undoubtedly the best train film ever made. The Civil War adventure-epic classic was made toward the end of the silent era. Posters describing the slapstick film heralded: "Love, Locomotives and Laughs." However, Keaton's greatest picture (arguably) received both poor reviews by critics (it was considered tedious and disappointing) and weak box-office results (about a half million dollars domestically, and approximately one million worldwide) when initially released in the late 20s, and it led to Keaton's loss of independence as a film-maker and a restrictive deal with MGM. It would take many decades for the film to be hailed as one of the best ever made.

The General (1927) is an imaginative masterpiece of dead-pan "Stone-Face" Buster Keaton comedy, generally regarded as one of the greatest of all silent comedies (and Keaton's own favorite) - and undoubtedly the best train film ever made. The Civil War adventure-epic classic was made toward the end of the silent era. Posters describing the slapstick film heralded: "Love, Locomotives and Laughs." However, Keaton's greatest picture (arguably) received both poor reviews by critics (it was considered tedious and disappointing) and weak box-office results (about a half million dollars domestically, and approximately one million worldwide) when initially released in the late 20s, and it led to Keaton's loss of independence as a film-maker and a restrictive deal with MGM. It would take many decades for the film to be hailed as one of the best ever made.

Filled with hilarious sight gags and perfectly timed stunt work, the chase comedy was written and directed by Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, and filmed with a huge budget for its time ($750,000 supplied by Metro chief Joseph Schenck). It is memorable for its strong story-line of a single, brave, but foolish Southern Confederate train engineer doggedly in pursuit of his passionately-loved locomotive ("The General") AND the woman he loves. His stoic, unflappable reactions to fateful calamities, his ingenious and resourceful uses of machines and various objects (water tanks, a large piece of timber, a cowcatcher, a rolling artillery cannon on wheels, and unattached railroad cars), and the unpredictable forces of Nature, provide much of the plot.And now begins the bulk of the film, the sustained chase scenes - first with Johnnie chasing the spies, and then back again, with the spies chasing Johnnie. The film is consistently suspenseful and thrilling, with a series of complicated, dangerous stunts and sight gags all over the moving train in the sustained chase sequences (both in the pursuit and on the return journey.)