By Patrick F. Cannon

“It’s a wonderful modern world we live in,” said Captain Jack Aubrey in director Peter Weir’s movie Master and Commander, based on Patrick O’Brian’s novels about the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars. He was commenting on a new American ship design. I could make the same comment about television streaming services that permit you to find at a whim just about any movie you might like to see, including that one, which I highly recommend.

            Just the other day, I watched 12 Angry Men, a 1957 movie about a jury wrestling with the verdict in a murder case. Written by Reginald Rose and directed by Sidney Lumet, it has an extraordinary cast, headed by Henry Fonda, but including Lee J. Cobb, Martin Balsam, E.G Marshall, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, and Ed Begley. I can think of few films with so many quality actors. If you haven’t seen it, you should.

            If you would like to focus on a single actor, who better than Spencer Tracy? Like the team of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Tracy is often linked with Katherine Hepburn, and the movies they made together are certainly worth seeing. But I would also recommend three of his later roles: Bad Day at Black Rock, in which he uncovers a murder while searching for the father of a soldier who had served under him in World War II (Robert Ryan is great too as the villain); Inherit the Wind, a thinly fictionalized story about the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, in which he plays the role based on Clarence Darrow (Fredric March is also superb as a fictionalized William Jennings Bryan); and The Last Hurrah, where his Irish-American  mayor of Boston makes one final run for office.

            Although he appeared more on stage than in films, the British actor Paul Scofield is best known here for his Academy Award-winning role in the film version of  Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. He also won a Tony Award for the stage version that tells the story of Sir Thomas More’s refusal to support Henry VIII in his difficulties in getting the Pope to agree to his divorce. As a result, he lost his head, but was later made a Saint.

In another role with religious overtones, he played the chilly Judge Thomas Danforth in the movie version of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. A special favorite of mine is John Frankenheimer’s The Train. Scofield plays an obsessed Nazi Colonel, who packs up a museums worth of French paintings and puts them on a train bound for Germany just before the Allies liberate Paris in 1944. His nemesis is a French railway worker played by an indominable Burt Lancaster. Burt doesn’t know a Monet from a Miro, but he’s determined to stop this demented Nazi from stealing French culture.

Finally, in the female actor category, no one was bigger from the 1930s through the 1950s than Bette Davis. Before Meryl Streep came along, Davis had the most Academy Award nominations, ten (she won twice). One of her wins was for 1938s Jezebel, whose title says it all. I would also recommend The Little Foxes, based on Lilian Hellman’s play; but especially All About Eve, which was 1950s Best Picture Academy Award winner. In it, she plays veteran actor Margot Channing, who is challenged by the devious Eve Harrington, played by Anne Baxter, who, coincidentally, was Frank Lloyd Wright’s granddaughter.

So, if you’re tired of streaming series that never seem to end, why not search into the past for the work of some very great actors?

Copyright 2023, Patrick F. Cannon