Jean Arthur on Criterion

by Cláudio Alves

Charming and witty, Jean Arthur was one of the great actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. While nowadays she's most famous for her comedic works, Arthur wasn't constricted to only humorous movies, being able to play everything from melodramas to crime pictures. Still, it's easy to see why her comedy talents are her calling card to this day. The actress was able to bring the manic, unstable energy of screwball comedy to all of her movies, imbuing them with an electrifying unpredictability. Like a black hole can bend light, so did Arthur bend the tone of every film she was in, making projects bow to the power of her screen presence and helping them become better, more complicated cinema in the process.

Her filmography is full of greatness. The Criterion Channel is celebrating her enviable resume with a new collection of 16 of her films available to stream. Here are some major highlights from that sterling selection…

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A Rita Hayworth lovefest

by Cláudio Alves

Born Margarita Carmen Cansino, Rita Hayworth was one of Old Hollywood's brightest and most glamourous stars. As it often happens with such legends of the silver screen, her life was an unhappy one, full of tales of abuse and five failed marriages, crippling insecurity, alcoholism and Alzheimers. Perhaps more hauntingly, her biographers agree that Hayworth despised her existence as a movie star and as a pin-up icon, longing to escape the movie business in her heyday. In Hayworth's later years, she would even come to express disdain towards some of her more famous movies like the iconic Gilda. Still, those same pictures, as well as other classics, made her an immortal legend.

To explore the filmography of Rita Hayworth is to confront the cruel incongruences of her biography, how the movies sculpted her into something bigger than life and made her suffer for it too…

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