Mr. & Mrs. Smith was Alfred Hitchcock’s only attempt at a romantic comedy, and you can see why he didn’t try again. It doesn’t help that Norman Krasna’s script — about a loving wife who, discovering she’s not legally married to her husband, decides to leave him — makes no sense. As the husband, Robert Montgomery is quite deft, but Lombard seems strained and uncomfortable. And though it has a big rep and many people are fond of it, I don’t think much of To Be or Not To Be either; the combination of farce and anti-Nazi melodrama is bizarre when it isn’t downright creepy, and the casting of Lombard and Jack Benny as famous Polish Shakespeareans is unfathomable. If you love Lombard, you don’t want to hear her read damp platitudes about how terrible war is, and you don’t want to wonder what she’s doing married to Benny. But all three of the ’30s comedies in the series are champions, and they showcase virtuoso Lombard turns.
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Awake! Awake!, Making magic, Kino pravda, More 
- Awake! Awake!
Sleep No More , the second entry in the American Repertory Theater’s mini-season of revisionist Shakespeare, is the least orthodox production of Macbeth you’re likely to see. In fact, it’s linked to Macbeth as much by poetic allusion as by narrative — which is to say that it’s a little of both.
- Making magic
Ever since the Greeks learned to keep their masks on straight and not bump into the statuary, theaters and theatergoers have been learning more and more about how the magic works.
- Kino pravda
Because Mosfilm, the subject of the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Envisioning Russia” retrospective, was the Soviet state production studio, any cross-section of its history lays out the entirety of Soviet film history.
- The witching hour
WICKED is a very different witch hunt from the 1995 Gregory Maguire novel on which it is based.
- They always beat Gypsies
From the beginning of his career in movies, Joseph Losey was persecuted — chased out of town.
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