Irving Rapper

Irving Rapper, the Hollywood director whose most famous film, "Now, Voyager," included the classic, often-screened romantic scene of Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes and handing one to Bette Davis, is dead at 101. Rapper, who directed Davis in four films, died Dec. 20 in Los Angeles, according to his niece, Rita Rothenberg of Long Island City, N.Y. Rapper had been a resident of the Motion Picture and Television Fund home in Woodland Hills since 1995.

Irving Rapper, the Hollywood director whose most famous film, "Now, Voyager," included the classic, often-screened romantic scene of Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes and handing one to Bette Davis, is dead at 101. Rapper, who directed Davis in four films, died Dec. 20 in Los Angeles, according to his niece, Rita Rothenberg of Long Island City, N.Y. Rapper had been a resident of the Motion Picture and Television Fund home in Woodland Hills since 1995.

Eighteen years after blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, using the name Robert Rich, won a best original story Oscar for "The Brave One," Trumbo was presented with his long overdue Academy Award just one year before his death in 1976. (Harry Franklin and Merrill G. White, credited with the screenplay, were not nominated.) As time has passed, this incident, so symbolic of the injustices of the McCarthy era, have overshadowed the film itself, a classic family picture of timeless emotional impact.

When girls are good they are very good, but when they are bad they are even better. And during the height of the film noir genre in the 1940s and '50s, some of the juiciest roles for women were as femmes fatales in snappy B-movies. Sony's terrific two-volume "Bad Girls of Film Noir" DVD collections, due out Tuesday, offer eight scrappy samples featuring several female icons of the genre. Volume I kicks off with the 1950 thriller "The Killer That Stalked New York." The killer in question is played by Evelyn Keyes, though she isn't a typical film noir villainess.

What are the 10 most romantic movies ever made? An informal poll of film intelligentsia--critics, historians and buffs--resulted in this list of movies that, on Valentine's Day, would be perfect to cuddle up in front of. Here are the Top 10 that are available on video: 1--"Wuthering Heights" (1939, Nelson). This was a surprise, nosing out the obvious choice, "Casablanca." Romantics love stories about long-running affairs that override mighty obstacles, such as class and culture conflicts.

"Don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars." IN "The History Boys," the adaptation of Alan Bennett's Tony Award-winning play that lands in movie theaters Tuesday, actor Richard Griffiths (the estimable Uncle Monty in "Withnail & I") incites his young charges, circa 1982, to extend their love of history beyond the traditional Western canon by performing the final scenes from popular films, a contest for money in which they try to stump him.

Egypt was at risk when Bette Davis went down the Nile to film "Death on the Nile." Had she chosen to fire the full bazooka of her personality at the Great Pyramid, Davis might have stripped some stones from that remarkable pile. By that point (1977), Davis was herself a great pyramid. But mummified she wasn't. As Barbara Leaming makes clear in a strong, poignant biography that has truth-telling power, Davis' rampaging ego was at work almost from the start.

Although one clause of conventional wisdom says that opposites attract, there is a strong case to be made for common interests as the ties that really bind. In their 30th year of marriage, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward are as enthusiastic a model of togetherness as can be found. Both act, both direct, both love the stage and eloquent writing. They greatly admire each other's work and they seem to bring out the best in each other.

He was dead, I was told. Or at least he wouldn't answer my letters (he didn't). When I finally trapped him on the telephone, he said he was far too busy to grant an interview. I said I was coming to see him anyway. Would he talk? He said, "We'll see." Philip Yordan is the great mystery man of the post-1930s generation of Hollywood screenwriters.