It Started with Eve (1941)

Boy, Hollywood in the '40s and '50s sure had a thing for "Eve." There's All About Eve, The Three Faces of Eve, The Lady Eve...and you might count Adam's Rib. ISwE has the least justification, as no one in it is named Eve (or Adam) and the main woman is neither especially wicked nor most responsible for setting things in motion. The studio just settled on a generic battle-of-the-sexes evocation that, true to the era, favored men. No wonder I had trouble recalling the title afterward. But you shouldn't judge the film itself on that basis.

Johnny Reynolds (Robert Cummings) expects aristocratic dad Jonathan (Charles Laughton) to die in bed any minute. Sensing too little time to introduce his dad to new fiancée Gloria (Margaret Tallichet), he hires random stranger Anne (Deanna Durbin) to pose as her briefly. The plot thickens when Jonathan makes a gradual unforeseen recovery and wishes to see more of "Gloria." Since the truth might shock him to death, Anne is persuaded to sustain the act a bit longer, while Johnny must juggle two "fiancées."

The Private Life of Henry VIII. (1933)

Evidently, I have a weakness for movies that include English royals among the characters. Becket, The King's Speech, The Lion in Winter, The Madness of King George, The Queen.... It hardly matters whether the royals appear respectable or despicable; I enjoy them either way. The one slight exception that comes to mind is Elizabeth, which I might like better if I saw it again today.

As you've probably guessed, this one focuses on the many marital/romantic connections of the king (Charles Laughton, who won an Oscar for it). Not all of them, tho: It begins on the day of the execution of second wife Anne Boleyn (Merle Oberon), almost as if Anne of the Thousand Days were a prequel, and ends somewhere in his sixth marriage, to Catherine Parr (Evelyn Gregg), covering a period of 7 to 11 years. His only explicitly depicted extramarital love interest is lady-in-waiting Catherine Howard (Binnie Barnes), who becomes his fifth wife.

The Old Dark House (1932)

This early talkie is best remembered for two things. First, it was the first post-Frankenstein James Whale movie featuring Boris Karloff, though the latter is made up so differently that an opening written paragraph tells us who he plays. Second, legal complications on distribution rights caused it to be lost for decades until Curtis Harrington, a director and friend of Whale, campaigned to find and restore it.

Karloff gets top billing but not the most screen time, let alone the most lines (he plays a mute again). Other notable actors include Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart, and Charles Laughton, all of whom play relatively good and normal characters. The gist: Two parties with a total of five people get caught in a terrible storm on a mountain road and beg shelter at the titular house. Unlike in many such setups, there's nothing supernatural about the mansion; it just has unhinged residents. Some of whom have tendencies to unprovoked violence....

Advise & Consent (1962)

Sometimes, all it takes to get me to put off viewing a popular movie is an off-putting title. Such dry, stilted language, adapted to awkward verb form from the Constitution. I can enjoy legal dramas -- 12 Angry Men, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Otto Preminger's other great Anatomy of a Murder are among my favorite dramas in any subgenre -- but not so much when they focus on the more seemingly esoteric aspects of law. Was that the case here?

Not really, but it is a little tricky to follow. Initially, the most focal character is Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda), whom the curiously unnamed U.S. president (Franchot Tone) nominates for Secretary of State. It's not clear when the story takes place -- the novel was written three years earlier -- but apparently the Red Scare still has some steam, because opponents present evidence that Leffingwell has been moving in the wrong circles, if you will. By the second half, focus shifts to the hearing committee chair, Sen. Brigham Anderson (Don Murray), faced with a scandal of his own....

The Big Clock (1948)

Rarely has a Netflix jacket description been so misleading. It says that this story concerns a man, George Stroud (Ray Milland), framed for murder by his boss, Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton). In truth, Janoth wishes to frame the one witness to his whereabouts at the time of the murder, believing said witness not to be Stroud. He even orders Stroud, in charge of investigative journalism, to dig up as much as he can about the mysterious fugitive. With self-protective deceptions on both sides, no character fully comprehends the situation until near the end of the 95 minutes.

Unsurprisingly, such intrigue and complexity, which can be confusing and amusing in turn, come from a novel that debuted a couple years earlier. Kenneth Fearing (appropriate name for a thriller novelist) wrote it partly to express his anger at his own overbearing boss at TIME, hence the otherwise curious obsession with clocks at a news magazine corporation. Funnily enough, contemporary reviews in TIME praised both the book and the movie.