George Stevens News

Today is Friday, Dec. 18, the 352nd day of 2009 with 13 to go. The moon is waxing.

Robert Hinkle's career started in earnest in the spring of 1955, when the self-described "two-bit" actor from Brownfield, Texas, got a phone call from the Famous Artists Agency asking him to sit down with George Stevens, the director of Shane , A Place in the Sun , and Gunga Din .

In the nineteen-fifties, Fred Zinnemann and George Stevens tried to freeze the Western genre into a single archetypal film, while directors like Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann were taking it in bitter new directions.

Director George Stevens has sometimes been unfairly dismissed as a maker of "prestige" mainstream movies .

TOP PICKS "The Diary of Anne Frank" : The grade-school literary fave got a '50s movie adaptation courtesy of director George Stevens, who was then fresh from "Shane" and "Giant." "The Seventh Seal," "Bergman Island" : Criterion reissues one of the first titles they put on DVD, with both a two-disc standard DVD and a very welcome Blu-ray; "Island," ...