Elliot Freed's Movie of the Week:

It Happened One Night (1934)

Elliot Says: "The last time an actual flat-out comedy won the big Academy Awards: Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay. And it was 1934! This is a film that neither Clark Gable nor Claudette Colbert wanted to make, one that wasn't director Frank Capra's most comfortable (he preferred something more, let's say, sentimental), and one that was shot on an abbreviated schedule to accommodate Colbert. It shouldn't have worked, but it did, and it's still funny. The tribute shows always show the same scene--the hitchhiking sequence where Colbert raises her skirt--but the rest of the movie holds up beautifully. And the time we showed it at Comedy Tonight... well, therein lies a tale."

It Happened One Knife: A Double Feature Mystery Elliot Freed couldn't be happier: His all-comedy movie theatre, Comedy Tonight, is newly refurbished; things with his ex-wife are looking up; he's even willing to screen his projectionist's film debut. But what really has Elliot walking on air is hosting the legendary duo, Lillis & Townes, at a special showing of their classic comedy Cracked Ice. Nothing can bring Elliot down—not a missing film, a bomb scare, or even a surly teenage girl. But when insinuations arise that one of his boyhood heroes may have been involved in a Hollywood murder decades earlier, Elliot crashes to earth. He sets out to discover the truth—but finds that he may be on the killer's hit list... Read the first chapter of It Happened One Knife

Some Like It Hot-Buttered: A Double Feature Mystery All Elliot Freed wanted to do was to make people die laughing. But he didn't mean it literally. The dead guy in Row S, Seat 18, is no joke. Elliot Freed, recovering writer, socked all his savings-and the alimony from his ex-wife-into the Comedy Tonight movie theater, never suspecting it would become a murder scene. And murder can't be good for ticket sales... Death by popcorn was the cause. Poisoned popcorn. To the chagrin of the police, Elliot takes to his bike to start his own investigation. A growing attraction to a beautiful detective, the discovery of a DVD pirating operation, and one missing employee later, Elliot's still waiting for the punch line. But this one might knock his theater—and Elliot—out for good... Read the first chapter of Some Like It Hot-Buttered Read reviews of Some Like It Hot-Buttered

© 2002-08 by Jeffrey Cohen.