Take 1: The '50s

Best evening wear (informal): Grace Kelly's nightgown in Rear Window

Best hair: Yul Brynner in The King and I

Best accessory: Audrey Hepburn's wimple in The Nun's Story

Best star vehicle: The chariot in Ben-Hur

Best drag queens (male): Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot

Best drag queens (female): Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard; Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame

Reunions: Charles Heston & Janet Leigh, August 14, 1999

"It feels funny being back here, doesn't it, kid?" Janet Leigh asks Charlton Heston. The legendary actors have returned to the sunbaked streets of Venice Beach, Calif., where more than 40 years ago, they stood before Orson Welles' handheld camera for the shadowy 1958 masterpiece Touch of Evil. Heston looks around, not recognizing the area now with its incense shops, hemp boutiques, and henna-body-art galleries.

"It couldn't have been this part of Venice," he insists, even though it was exactly this strip of old balustrades that was the backdrop for Welles' story of a Mexican narcotics investigator (played without accent by Heston) and his wife (Leigh) caught up in a murder investigation. From the famous long traveling shot that opens the film, through the noirish shadows, to Marlene Dietrich's "adios" at the end, it is, as Heston says now, under the echo of the surf, "not a great movie, but rather the best B movie ever made."

The going rate: 1955

Avg. Ticket Price: 50[cents]

Avg. Movie Budget: $900,000

Sophia Loren's Five Favorite Italian Movies

Two Women 1961 "Because it shows the tragedies and miseries of war and the courage of common people."

Gold of Naples 1957 "An open, zestful, and unprejudged look to the many facets of Naples and its colorful people. It was the beginning of my long association with my beloved maestro, Vittorio De Sica."

Open Center 1946 "The masterpiece of the Italian neorealism. It is the most shaking and true story of Rome under the Nazis' occupation."

La Dolce Vita 1960 "Fantasy, poetry, absolute mastery of cinematographic language to describe the Roman life of the '50s."

Life is Beautiful 1998 "Roberto's masterpiece, winner of the Academy Award. [He had] the courage and the fantastic idea of making a sweet and desperate comedy out of the darkest tragedy: the Holocaust."