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My grandmother believed in ghosts. More specifically she believed in the ghost of my uncle Alec, her only son, who died when he was still a boy of – depending on who you talked to – either membranous croup or an infected needle administered by a drunk doctor. His ghost, or so my mother told me years after my grandmother passed, appeared to her and told her not to grieve. Since I would hear about Alec's ghost over a half century after his sad death, it's safe to say that my grandmother, my mother and her sisters continued to grieve....

In the commentary track he recorded for the 2007 DVD reissue of Executive Suite, director Oliver Stone tells us that there are so few movies about the world of business that he ended up going back to this 1954 Robert Wise picture when he was looking for inspiration for his 1987 film Wall Street. Wise's film was a hit when it was released and netted four Oscar nominations, but it is as obscure now as when Stone studied it for his own picture. As crucial as finance and management are to the working of capitalism, the business picture remains a...

The years immediately after World War Two did not turn on a dime into the long decade of postwar prosperity in America and the West. There were labour problems, political battles, the problem of turning soldiers back into civilians and a war economy back into a peacetime one. And there was the vast social unease and trauma after a war that confirmed that we were capable of anything, including the worst things imaginable. My previous Christmas movie columns have been romances alternating with comedy or drama – pictures like Holiday Affair (1949) and Remember the Night (1940), where the holidays...

There's a cherished myth that the films made before the enforcement of Will Hays' Motion Picture Production Code in 1934 are a lost paradise of moviemaking: a frank, honest, adult cinematic universe that we were only able to return to with the abandonment of the Code in the '60s and the emergence of a school of movie radicals – the "raging bulls" of Peter Biskind's famous book – who blew away the fusty moral cobwebs from Hollywood. Part of this is a reaction to Joseph Breen, the man who Hays put in charge, and who ruled over the production offices...

In the first couple of pages of her 1987 memoir Being and Becoming, Myrna Loy gets down to business. Talking about the sex lives of Hollywood stars such as herself, she tells us that "any business involving so many beautiful and high-strung people working together on such intense and intimate terms is bound to breed an easy promiscuity. God knows I've fended off my share of amorous men – attractive, desirable men." She goes on to provide a short list: John Barrymore ("just because he felt like a little redhead now and then didn't incline me to join the club..."),...