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Questions: What's the name of the movie theater in It's a Wonderful Life? — William

What's the name of the house where George Bailey throws a rock? — Sue

What book is Clarence reading when he falls into the river? — Ed

Is Bedford Falls a real place? — Barry

FlickChick: I'm a huge fan of It's a Wonderful Life (1946), which is not the sentimental piece of Capra-corn so many people imagine it to be. So before the holiday season is definitively over, I'm taking this opportunity to answer some queries about the classic holiday film that have trickled into my Ask FlickChick mailbox.

The movie theater is called The Bijou (and though you didn't ask, it's playing 1945's The Bells of St. Mary's). The deserted house, which George Bailey (James Stewart) and his wife, Mary (Donna Reed), eventually move into, is the Old Granville place. Clarence (Henry Travers) the apprentice angel is reading Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

And no, Bedford Falls is not real — I was actually surprised to find that there is in fact no Bedford Falls at all in the U.S., unless it's so small it's unmapped. The film was actually shot on an enormous set constructed on RKO's Encino Ranch property (in the middle of summer, no less), near the Sepulvida Dam basin. But there's compelling anecdotal evidence that director Frank Capra's image of what the fictional Bedford Falls should look like was based on a real place: Seneca Falls, in the middle of the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, about four hours north of New York City. Capra had an aunt who lived in nearby Auburn and so he had passed through Seneca Falls, and local barber Thomas Bellissima, who's now in his eighties, claims to have cut Capra's hair on several occasions in the early 1940s. Bellissima says the director spoke glowingly of Seneca Falls' beauty.

Several features of the town, including a truss bridge over the Seneca-Cayuga Canal and a couple of Granville-style Victorian mansions, distinctly resemble places in the film, and since the mid-1990s Seneca Falls has actively promoted the rumored connection to the film with an annual festival. There are references in the film to the neighboring cities of Buffalo, Rochester, Elmira and Binghamton, all of which are not far from Seneca Falls. And Seneca Falls has always had a significant Italian population — not always the case in small towns, but also true of Bedford Falls.

Granted, there's no hard evidence, and Professor Jeanine Bassinger of Wesleyan University, who is a film historian and scholar, as well as curator of the Frank Capra Archives and author of The "It's a Wonderful Life" Book, has combed Capra's extensive papers without finding a reference to Seneca Falls or, for that matter, mention of any real city that might have inspired Bedford Falls.

But the believers include actress Karolyn Grimes, who as a child played little Zuzu Bailey. She describes her first visit to Seneca Falls here, and her memories of the Bedford Falls set jibe with what she saw.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

My colleague Ken Fox and I added our two cents to TVGuide.com's year-end wrap up, and now it's your turn.

Agree, disagree, suggest things we missed -- anything goes. You can follow the links to read our full text, but here are the lists:

Best Movies:

Something New
United 93
Little Miss Sunshine
Volver
Children of Men
The Queen
Brick
13 Tzameti
Flags of Our Fathers
Half Nelson

Worst Movies:

My Super Ex-Girlfriend
Phat Girlz
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
The Benchwarmers
School for Scoundrels
The Pink Panther
Peaceful Warrior
Lady in the Water
Date Movie
Wassup Rockers

Guilty Pleasures:

(Angel "Surfer Girl" Cohn's TV picks come first -- but there's a movie buried in there too!)

Jackass Number Two
Beerfest
District B13
Shadowboxer
The Marine

Post here or to Ken's blog -- we want to know what you think.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: This is an obvious question, but I've neard a lot of contradictory answers. Who was the voice of Mrs. Bates in Psycho? – Dan

FlickChick: It appears that three people provided the voice of Norman's "mother" in Psycho (1960). Actresses Virginia Gregg, Jeanette Nolan (whose husband, actor John McIntire, played Sheriff Chambers) and an aspiring actor named Paul Jasmin, who did the voice-over dialogue at the end, after Norman is arrested — the "I woudn't hurt a fly" speech.

Jasmin went on to become a photographer and did a lot of on-set work. I've heard that Gregg, who had an uncredited bit part in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) and died in 1986, voiced Mrs. Bates' less strident dialogue and that Nolan, who died in 1998, did the harsher lines.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: When I was a kid in the mid-1960s, I saw a horror story where an old woman was readying a corpse (closing the eyes, arranging the face, cleaning up the room where the body was) and then steals a ring off the body. A fly that can only be described as malicious then frightens the woman (and the audience) by constantly landing on the body. The corpse changes each time the fly lands — the eyes open, the face smiles, etc. I thought it was an episode of Night Gallery or some TV show like that, but my mother says it was part of a larger movie. Do you know this story? J. Ted

FlickChick: I do: It's a segment of the Italian horror movie Tre Volti della Paura (Three Faces of Fear), which was directed by Mario Bava and released in the U.S. as Black Sabbath (1963). The segment you're describing was called "A Drop of Water" and was supposedly based on a story by Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov, but I've never run across anyone who could figure out what story that might have been. Black Sabbath is available on DVD.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

My husband and I saw the new James Bond movie on opening night. Loved it, by the way — Daniel Craig rocked! Anyway, we got into a debate about whether Casino Royale is a prequel to all the other Bonds. I know it is the first James Bond book by Ian Fleming, but does that make the movie a prequel? I say yes to the prequel, my husband says no. Help me out here. Brandi

I'd say this is a gray area of the first order, complicated by the fact that the other Bond movies based on Ian Fleming novels weren't made according to the chronology of the books. The word I wound up using when I reviewed it was "reboot," because Casino Royale is clearly meant to be a new start for the Bond franchise, and the things that happen in it, at least to my mind, are not meant to have happened before the events depicted in the Sean Connery/Roger Moore/George Lazenby/Timothy Dalton/Pierce Brosnan films. But they will be the foundation on which future Bond films are built.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.

This one is for the die-hard horror fan in me. Having misspent a significant portion of my youth prowling Times Square grindhouses in pursuit of the cream of the exploitation crop — heavy on the scary movies — I'm officially a tough audience. Sure, Hostel is way nasty, but it's nothing I haven't seen before. And while I'm always looking for something new, novelty for its own sake doesn't cut it: Hold the black vampire movies, gay slasher pictures and Indian knockoffs of The Exorcist, please.

All of which leads us to U.K. writer-director Neil Marshall's The Descent. Forget any "femme fright flick" spin you may have read. It's one of the best horror films I've seen in ages: Spare, harrowing and uncompromising — even the slightly softened U.S. version, which shaved a crucial few moments from the end, is really good. The original version is flat-out great.

The setup is straightforward: Six women, all extreme-sports lovers, gather for a weekend of caving in Appalachia. Their reunion, one year after a white-water rafting weekend in Scotland, is tainted by unspoken rivalries and unfinished business: One lost her husband and small daughter in a freak car crash on the way back to their hotel, and another was disappointingly unsupportive immediately after the accident; some are old friends and others are newcomers jockeying for position within the group. Marshall spends enough time establishing the interpersonal dynamics that once the expedition goes wrong and the women realize they're not only trapped in an uncharted cave, but they're not alone in the dark, the unraveling of their apparently solid comraderie makes grim, inevitable sense. And Marshall does everything right: He establishes a thoroughly convincing sense of the cave as a physical space; he cast actresses who look like athletes rather than gym bunnies and who put in the time it took to get comfortable with climbing equipment; he favored physical effects over CGI and kept glimpses of the scary cave-dwellers to a minimum; and he really knows how to stage a suspense scene. That last one may sound like the least you should expect from a horror filmmaker, but if you see enough of them, you learn otherwise.

The Descent is top-of-the-line genre filmmaking, smart as well as scary. It's neither a torture show nor a tedious string of running-and-screaming scenes, and it tips its hat to high watermarks of earlier generations without pulling you out of the story with smirking hommages. I recommend it highly.

Things to consider:

Are horror movies inherently sadistic and, if so, why do people willingly submit themselves to being terrorized?

The best horror movies are character-driven, yet many of the most popular are the thrill-ride films in which the "characters" tend to be "fat practical joker" and "slutty girl No. 1." Is the popularity of this kind of movie tied to the fact that the death of such two-dimensional figures doesn't hurt and can be enjoyed as spectacle?

Women are traditionally victims in horror movies. Is that just because they're easier targets — smaller, hampered by impractical clothes — or is their victimization a sign of something deeper?

Do horror movies work better in a theater, where you're drawn into a group experience with other people, or in isolation?

Would you rather see more or less of the monsters and mayhem?

Remember: Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Previous DVD blogs:

The Devil Wears Prada

Pandora's Box

The Thief and the Cobbler

Nashville

Panic in the Streets and our Jack Palance interview

The Pusher Trilogy

Scarface

Slither

Sunset Blvd.

In Cold Blood

Brick

Also: this week's new DVD releases

Question: With Dreamgirls about to open, I keep thinking I saw a poster a long time ago for a movie about the same thing: Three African American young ladies who want to be singers. I know Dreamgirls was a play, but I didn't see it — was there an earlier movie version? Rex

FlickChick: There's never been another adaptation of Dreamgirls — in fact, the saga of its convoluted journey from stage to screen is almost as dramatic as its Supremes-inspired narrative.

But I think you're thinking of Sparkle. Released in 1976 but set in 1958, it starred Irene Cara, still four years away from her breakthrough performance in Fame, as 15-year-old Sparkle Williams, the youngest of three Harlem-raised sisters. The eldest, Sister (Lonette McKee) is the beauty of the family, and middle sister Dolores (Dwan Smith) is a budding black-power activist; all sing their hearts out in church every week with their mother ( whose character name, coincidentally, is Effie), who supports them by working as a maid. Ambitious neighborhood pianist (a pre-Miami Vice Philip Michael Thomas) encourages them to form a group, and success at an amateur night contest starts them on the road to fame, drug addiction, abusive relationships and bitter disillusionment. Like Dreamgirls, Sparkle was clearly inspired by '60s girl groups like The Supremes, but it's a drama with music rather than a flashy musical.

The songs were composed by Curtis Mayfield, and while Cara, McKee and Smith performed their own numbers in the film, on the soundtrack album all the songs were sung by Aretha Franklin. In 1990, En Vogue had a hit with Sparkle's "Giving Him Something He Can Feel."

There are persistent rumors of a remake with Whitney Houston producing; they quieted down for a while after the 2001 death of Aaliyah, who was attached to play Irene Cara's part. But the buzz has started up again, apparently both because of Dreamgirls and because Raven Symone has shown interest in the project.

Question: My friend and I just saw Volver, and I hope you can settle an argument: I say Penelope Cruz was wearing some kind of butt booster under her clothes and he says she wasn't. Who's right? — Greg

FlickChick: You are. In interviews about Volver, director Pedro Almodóvar has spoken at some length about the way he wanted Penelope Cruz to look for her role as a sexy, put-upon, working-class housewife: He envisioned her character as voluptuous and earthy, like Sophia Loren in her prime. Though Cruz's bosom made the grade — if Almodóvar weren't openly gay, his appreciative remarks about her cleavage would probably be grounds for a sexual harassment suit — her backside did not. So Cruz was padded. The look is exaggerated by the cut of her costumes — they're really, really tight.

Question: I recently rented Brick and realized I've seen Lukas Haas in a music video. But I can't remember what it was. Do you have any idea? — Angela

FlickChick: Former child actor Lukas Haas, an adorable moppet who matured into a gangly, decidedly offbeat-looking adult, plays the hollow-eyed patient in My Chemical Romance's video for the song "Welcome to the Black Parade." Despite his unusual appearance, the very talented Haas has made an excellent transition to adult roles in movies and television, and Brick is an excellent example. I think his performance as teenage Dr. Mabuse "The Pin" is one of the film's highlights.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.

The Devil Wears Prada was one of the biggest surprises of the year for me (Apocalypto was another, but that's a conversation for some other time). It was a big, sleek, mainstream Hollywood movie that I enjoyed from beginning to end, despite its conflicted message. I don't mean to imply that I automatically dread Hollywood movies, but I picked up the book on which this one was based and found it so shallow and irritating that I couldn't finish the first chapter. And I can read just about anything.

It probably doesn't hurt that I work down the street from Condé Nast and have see the needle-toed ranks of the Condé Nasties striding down the street with their "I'm too fine to talk to anyone carrying last season's bag" affectations. I also worked for years in nonprofit (the New York City Ballet), which earned me a front-row seat to the fashionistias-in-action show at galas and fund-raising cocktail parties.

But the real pleasure of The Devil Wears Prada for me was what a throwback it is to the glory days of Mildred Pierce and other Hollywood melodramas about women who unsex themselves to advance their careers. Which sounds very un-PC, I know. But the fact is, that story hasn't changed as much as you might think.

And Devil is buoyed by amazing performances, led by Meryl Streep 's Miranda Priestly, a steely virago in haute couture. Yes, she's a thinly fictionalized variation on real-life Vogue editor Anna Wintour, but she's also an astonishing creation by an actress who's often underrated because she's made the mistake of doing too many things too well for too long. Anne Hathaway can't match her sheer virtuosity and years of experience, but she's talented, and acting opposite someone of such high caliber serves to boost her performance. Emily Blunt (of the fantastic and under-seen My Summer of Love) and Stanley Tucci lead the supporting cast, and they're both right on the money.

For me, the great thing about The Devil Wears Prada is that you can watch it with a diverse crowd: There's something for die-hard movie buffs, something for people who just want a fun story, something for closet celebrity-gossip addicts. And for a glossy mainstream comedy, it packs a nasty little sting.

Things to consider:

The cream of classic Hollywood melodramas were sharp, bracing examinations of social mores and the way women negotiated the rules of the game. Now "melodrama" has become an insult, a synonym for sloppy and sentimental. How did the genre become so despised?

In the end, smart aspiring journalist Andrea Sachs (Hathaway) realizes that she has to get out of the fashion-mag business before it entirely devours her soul. Is it really impossible to work in a viciously competitive commercial environment and maintain your ideals and dignity?

Why do so many people delight in mocking Meryl Streep for her flawless command of the tools of her trade, particularly accents?

Why, a full 35 years after the feminist movement became a mainstream phenomenon and at a time when women hold increasingly powerful and high-profile positions in business, government and the press, is the dragon lady who gave up her family life for a career still such a powerful archetype?

Remember: Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Previous DVD blogs:

Pandora's Box

The Thief and the Cobbler

Nashville

Panic in the Streets and our Jack Palance interview

The Pusher Trilogy

Scarface

Slither

Sunset Blvd.

In Cold Blood

Brick

Also: This week's new DVD releases

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: I saw a preview of the Steven Soderbergh movie The Good German and noticed that the black-and-white photography was by his regular cinematographer, Peter Andrews. What I'm wondering is why Andrews never works with anyone else? — Joanie

FlickChick: Peter Andrews never works with anyone other than Steven Soderbergh because Peter Andrews is Steven Soderbergh. Although there are a number of cinematographers who later became directors — including Jan de Bont, Barry Sonnenfeld, Mario Bava, Ernest Dickerson, Dean Semler, Nicolas Roeg, Andrew Davis and Ronald Neame — very few mainstream directors shoot their own films, in large part because directing a big, complicated and expensive feature is more than enough work without adding in another full-time job. The only other one I can think of who is working in Hollywood today is Peter Hyams, and given how awful his recent films have been, you could make a very persuasive argument that he should stop dividing his attentions.

Question: I read your posting about the house used for the Father of the Bride movies, and that got me to thinking about something I've always wondered. Were the inside scenes in A Christmas Story shot in the house you see from the outside, and, if so, where is it? — Ken

FlickChick: The interiors of A Christmas Story (1983) were not done in the house used for the exteriors; they were shot in Toronto on a soundstage. But stick around, because the story gets interesting: The house, which is located at 3159 W 11th Street in Cleveland, Ohio, was bought by an entrepreneurial fan named Brian Jones, who completely redid the interior to match the movie and then opened it to the public — for a fee, of course. The house has its own website, and Jones also manufactures copies of the film's notorious leg lamp, which is for sale at the museum and gift shop Jones opened in the house across the street.

By a weird coincidence, on my way into work this morning I was reading the real-estate section of the paper and came across an item about yet another movie house: The one that nearly bankrupted Tom Hanks in The Money Pit (1986). It's in Lattingtown, Long Island, and interior scenes were shot on location. The current owners, however, completely renovated the interior, and it's now on the market for $7.9 million. The real-estate agent who's been showing it says that prospective buyers often observe that it doesn't look the way it does in the movie, though they recognize the site of the bathtub-through-the-ceiling scene.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.

Silent movies can be a hard sell, especially if you're talking to someone who's been burned by one of the clunkier survivors of the era. But I promise you: Louise Brooks is so mesmerizing that five minutes into Pandora's Box (1929), you won't even notice the absence of sound. Not for nothing did Cinémathèque Francaise founder Henri Langlois declare in 1955, years after Brooks' criminally short career was over and her films forgotten by everyone but a handful of intrepid cineastes: "There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!" She's so modern, so subtle, so ferally sexy that it's hard to believe she's a product of the same period as It girl Clara Bow and Latin lover Rudolph Valentino. Not to disparage them, but Bow, Valentino, Gloria Swanson and the rest of the superstars of that era look like products of their time. Louise Brooks looks like the unbelievably cool girl you saw in SoHo last week.

G.W. Pabst's adaptation of German Expressionist playwright Frank Wedekind's then-scandalous Lulu dramas, Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1902) follows the fortunes of a blithely amoral beauty sailing through Weimar-era Berlin and leaving a trail of broken hearts and lives in her wake. The genius of Brooks' Lulu is that she's not an old-fashioned vamp, a film noir femme fatale or a Machiavellian whore. She's just a ruthlessly practical girl playing the hand fate dealt her: She's not rich or socially connected or educated, but men — and women — can't resist her. And if she lets them make fools of themselves for her, well, that's her nature — you can't blame her any more than you can blame the scorpion for stinging. Chicago's merry murderesses have nothing on Lulu, and Cabaret's divinely decadent Sally Bowles was a babe in the demimonde by comparison.

The restored print Criterion used for its new DVD, an archival reconstruction, is the best version of Pandora's Box I've ever seen: It toured art-house theaters earlier this year, thereby reducing normally restrained critics to immoderate flights of hyperbole. And they're right on every count.

Some points for discussion:

Is watching a silent film with intertitles a significantly different experience from watching a subtitled foreign film? Some early film commentators argued that sound would ruin the art of filmmaking, because dialogue could be used as a shortcut to deliver information that would otherwise have to be conveyed in images. And they may have been right: It's easier to follow the average mainstream movie with the sound on and the picture off than the other way around.

What qualities make some stars from the early years of movies seem quaint and old-fashioned, while others — despite their dated clothes and conventions of dialogue and character — seem absolutely modern?

Remember: Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Previous DVD blogs:

The Thief and the Cobbler

Nashville

Panic in the Streets and our Jack Palance interview

The Pusher Trilogy

Scarface

Slither

Sunset Blvd.

In Cold Blood

Brick

Also: this week's new DVD releases