Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSThe Pill Pounder.The Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival is known for audiences who talk back to the screen, but such rowdiness took a dark turn last weekend at a screening of Love Lies Bleeding (2024), during which homophobic and misogynistic taunts caused more than 60 attendees to walk out and then to stage a protest at the cinema door, which was broken up by the police.Italy’s right-wing government has left the country’s motion-picture industry stalled in uncertainty as they debate new regulations to tax incentives for film and television production, some of which may give preference to films “tied to Italy’s national identity.”Ten of thirteen IATSE locals now have tentative agreements with AMPTP. Talks...
- 4/17/2024
- MUBI
(Welcome to Did They Get It Right?, a series where we look at Oscars categories from yesteryear and examine whether the Academy's winners stand the test of time.)
If you were to guess who the most nominated director was in the history of the Academy Awards, who would you guess? Maybe you'd say Steven Spielberg, who has made films for a half-century that have been beloved by millions. Or maybe you're inclination was to guess Martin Scorsese, given his level of simultaneous mainstream acclaim and critical adoration. Or maybe you'd go back to the golden age of Hollywood and guess someone like Frank Capra or John Ford, filmmakers fundamental to establishing what popular American cinema was and directed many films still revered today. In reality, it's not any of these people.
It may come as a surprise to learn that the most nominated director of all time is William Wyler.
If you were to guess who the most nominated director was in the history of the Academy Awards, who would you guess? Maybe you'd say Steven Spielberg, who has made films for a half-century that have been beloved by millions. Or maybe you're inclination was to guess Martin Scorsese, given his level of simultaneous mainstream acclaim and critical adoration. Or maybe you'd go back to the golden age of Hollywood and guess someone like Frank Capra or John Ford, filmmakers fundamental to establishing what popular American cinema was and directed many films still revered today. In reality, it's not any of these people.
It may come as a surprise to learn that the most nominated director of all time is William Wyler.
- 10/15/2023
- by Mike Shutt
- Slash Film
The director and producer, who has died aged 75, brought his golden touch to family mega-hits from Ghostbusters to Kindergarten Cop
Hadley Freeman: my Hollywood heroIvan Reitman: a life in pictures
Ivan Reitman was a director and producer with a golden touch for Hollywood comedy and feelgood entertainment – the heir, perhaps, of Ernst Lubitsch or Gregory La Cava from the golden age, but with a multiplex talent for the 80s and 90s – able to detonate serious box-office explosions. His great heyday, importantly, coincided with the great heyday of video rental and home entertainment – an era of couples and families browsing the VHS racks at video rental stores on a Friday and Saturday night and deciding that comedies were the best bet: Reitman’s comedies.
And this, most famously, was for the glorious high-concept fantasy comedy Ghostbusters in 1984, which brilliantly absorbed SNL-type comedy into the movie mainstream and made stars...
Hadley Freeman: my Hollywood heroIvan Reitman: a life in pictures
Ivan Reitman was a director and producer with a golden touch for Hollywood comedy and feelgood entertainment – the heir, perhaps, of Ernst Lubitsch or Gregory La Cava from the golden age, but with a multiplex talent for the 80s and 90s – able to detonate serious box-office explosions. His great heyday, importantly, coincided with the great heyday of video rental and home entertainment – an era of couples and families browsing the VHS racks at video rental stores on a Friday and Saturday night and deciding that comedies were the best bet: Reitman’s comedies.
And this, most famously, was for the glorious high-concept fantasy comedy Ghostbusters in 1984, which brilliantly absorbed SNL-type comedy into the movie mainstream and made stars...
- 2/14/2022
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
In the two dozen years since Paul Thomas Anderson first became an Oscar nominee, he has received seven more bids across four categories, the two most recent of which came in 2018 for “Phantom Thread” (Best Picture; Best Director). He has also directed nine nominated performances that span three of the four acting categories; to date, no Anderson film has ever figured in a Best Actress lineup. But now, Alana Haim (“Licorice Pizza”) could make history as the first to do so.
Haim, whose performance in “Licorice Pizza” marks her film debut, ranks ninth in our Best Actress odds but that should change based on her surprise BAFTA bid. Those running ahead of her are four women snubbed by the BAFTAs — Olivia Colman (“The Lost Daughter”), Nicole Kidman (“Being the Ricardos”), Jessica Chastain (“The Eyes of Tammy Faye”) and Kristen Stewart (“Spencer”) — plus Lady Gaga (“House of Gucci”), Penélope Cruz (“Parallel Mothers...
Haim, whose performance in “Licorice Pizza” marks her film debut, ranks ninth in our Best Actress odds but that should change based on her surprise BAFTA bid. Those running ahead of her are four women snubbed by the BAFTAs — Olivia Colman (“The Lost Daughter”), Nicole Kidman (“Being the Ricardos”), Jessica Chastain (“The Eyes of Tammy Faye”) and Kristen Stewart (“Spencer”) — plus Lady Gaga (“House of Gucci”), Penélope Cruz (“Parallel Mothers...
- 2/3/2022
- by Matthew Stewart
- Gold Derby
Revisiting last year's introduction when putting together 2021's favorites, it is with a shock to realize how little has changed in the wildly disrupted world of cinema under the shroud of the pandemic. The urge to copy-and-paste the whole shebang is quite tempting indeed.What can we say about this year, 2021? We got a little more used to long-term instability. Cinemas and festivals re-opened, only for some to close again. We, like many, ventured carefully out into the world to finally see films again with audiences, all kinds: nervous ones, uproarious ones, spartan ones, and delighted ones. It was an experience both anxious and joyous. We also doubled down on the challenges, but also the pleasures, of home viewing: of virtual cinemas and virtual festivals, of straight to streaming premieres, of trying to capture a social joy in semi-isolation by connecting with others over experiences shared and disparate.The long...
- 12/27/2021
- MUBI
Continuing our series of writers recommending underseen films available to stream, a recommendation for a sly screwball comedy from 1936
Sometimes escapist films only need to take the audience a few steps, or city blocks, from reality. Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, a peerless comedy from Hollywood’s Golden Age, is a screwball with a social conscience. This 1936 classic is a glamorous 90 minutes of frivolity that doesn’t so much explore the divided society of the Great Depression, as take the imbalance between the haves and have-nots as the launchpad for a series of grimly bitter jokes. With slammers of punchlines.
Related: My streaming gem: why you should watch Results...
Sometimes escapist films only need to take the audience a few steps, or city blocks, from reality. Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, a peerless comedy from Hollywood’s Golden Age, is a screwball with a social conscience. This 1936 classic is a glamorous 90 minutes of frivolity that doesn’t so much explore the divided society of the Great Depression, as take the imbalance between the haves and have-nots as the launchpad for a series of grimly bitter jokes. With slammers of punchlines.
Related: My streaming gem: why you should watch Results...
- 4/24/2020
- by Pamela Hutchinson
- The Guardian - Film News
As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.And now they've quietly disappeared William Fox's name from the company: guilty by association with Rupert Murdoch, even though he never associated with him.***Twentieth Century Fox is now to be called Twentieth Century, the name of a company that ceased to be back in 1935 when it swallowed the beleaguered Fox Picture Company. Zanuck's pre-merger studio is actually rather well-represented on home video, considering it existed for less than four years: Zanuck's story instinct, which had served him so well at Warners/First National, may not have fired so consistently, but it gave us punchy entertainments like The Bowery, Blood Money, and The Call of the Wild.The studio's tastes were more eclectic than Warners,...
- 2/24/2020
- MUBI
CineSavant obsesses over yet another obscure bit of cinematic sociology: a glossy pre-Code MGM melodrama about mothers and war, which half-debates issues like pacifism, the losses of world war one, military vigilance, cowardice, chemical WMDs and foolish idealism! But don’t worry, the title statement is the ultimate answer to everything. Oh, it’s also political sci-fi: it takes place in the future year of 1940, when New York City comes under aerial attack, with skyscrapers bombed to bits and poison gas dropped in the streets. No, this is not new, it was released in 1933.
Men Must Fight
DVD
The Warner Archive Collection
1933 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 72 min. / Street Date January 15, 2019 / available through the WBshop / 191.99
Starring: Diana Wynyard, Lewis Stone, Phillips Holmes, May Robson, Ruth Selwyn, Robert Young, Robert Greig, Hedda Hopper, Donald Dilloway, Mary Carlisle, Luis Alberni.
Cinematography: George J. Folsey
Film Editor: William S. Gray
Written by C. Gardner Sullivan...
Men Must Fight
DVD
The Warner Archive Collection
1933 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 72 min. / Street Date January 15, 2019 / available through the WBshop / 191.99
Starring: Diana Wynyard, Lewis Stone, Phillips Holmes, May Robson, Ruth Selwyn, Robert Young, Robert Greig, Hedda Hopper, Donald Dilloway, Mary Carlisle, Luis Alberni.
Cinematography: George J. Folsey
Film Editor: William S. Gray
Written by C. Gardner Sullivan...
- 5/14/2019
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Thirty Years of Motion Pictures (The March of the Movies)The breadth of programming at the International Film Festival Rotterdam allows something glorious: room for others to build their own domains, unique pockets of how to view cinema and, through it, the world. Sound//vision is one such place, a corridor of exciting, variable programming happening each night in such a way that an attendee could only do that and have a rich, expanded festival experience. There are other pockets of curation in the 2019 program as well: a profile of African-American artist Cauleen Smith, profiles of directors Charlotte Pryce (which included two lovely live slideshow performances) and Edgar Pêra, and a tantalizing section devoted to spy cinema which adroitly ranges over the mainstream to the arthouse, from Hollywood to the Czech Republic to South Korea, from 1928 to 2018. And then there is the “Laboratory of Unseen Beauty,” a series whose code word,...
- 1/31/2019
- MUBI
Whaddaya know, this new disc of the Carole Lombard / Fredric March comedy hit looks great, besting by far all previous videos and prints I’ve seen of the early (1937) Technicolor production. Hazel Flagg’s Madcap Manhattan Weekend now pops with brilliant hues. And a little digging tells us that Ben Hecht’s morbid premise is based on a real-life scandalous workplace tragedy called ‘The Living Dead Women.’
Nothing Sacred
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1937 / Color / 1:37 flat Academy / 74 min. / Street Date November 13, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Carole Lombard, Fredric March, Charles Winninger, Walter Connolly, Sig Ruman, Troy Brown, Max ‘Slapsie Maxie’ Rosenbloom, Margaret Hamilton, Olin Howland.
Cinematography: W. Howard Greene
Original Music: Oscar Levant
Written by Ben Hecht suggested by a story by James H. Street
Produced by David O. Selznick
Directed by William A. Wellman
Here’s something we didn’t expect to see. When I reviewed an older Kino disc of this title,...
Nothing Sacred
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1937 / Color / 1:37 flat Academy / 74 min. / Street Date November 13, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Carole Lombard, Fredric March, Charles Winninger, Walter Connolly, Sig Ruman, Troy Brown, Max ‘Slapsie Maxie’ Rosenbloom, Margaret Hamilton, Olin Howland.
Cinematography: W. Howard Greene
Original Music: Oscar Levant
Written by Ben Hecht suggested by a story by James H. Street
Produced by David O. Selznick
Directed by William A. Wellman
Here’s something we didn’t expect to see. When I reviewed an older Kino disc of this title,...
- 11/17/2018
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Stars: Carole Lombard, William Powell, Gail Patrick, Eugene Pallette, Alice Brady | Written by Eric Hatch, Morrie Ryskind | Directed by Gregory La Cava
The fate of the stars of this socially-conscious screwball comedy, directed by former animator Gregory La Cava in 1936, couldn’t be more different. Carole Lombard was cruelly cut off in her prime, dying in a plane crash at the age of 33, while William Powell led a remarkably long life, marrying three times and beating cancer, before passing in 1984.
They show great chemistry in La Cava’s darkly comic fable. The rich WASPs of New York engage in a “Scavenger Hunt”, getting wasted and hunting down things no one else wants. This includes Godfrey (Powell), a homeless man living on a trash heap. He spurns the condescending Cornelia Bullock (Gail Patrick), but when her sister Irene (Lombard) takes an interest, he lets her take him back to the party,...
The fate of the stars of this socially-conscious screwball comedy, directed by former animator Gregory La Cava in 1936, couldn’t be more different. Carole Lombard was cruelly cut off in her prime, dying in a plane crash at the age of 33, while William Powell led a remarkably long life, marrying three times and beating cancer, before passing in 1984.
They show great chemistry in La Cava’s darkly comic fable. The rich WASPs of New York engage in a “Scavenger Hunt”, getting wasted and hunting down things no one else wants. This includes Godfrey (Powell), a homeless man living on a trash heap. He spurns the condescending Cornelia Bullock (Gail Patrick), but when her sister Irene (Lombard) takes an interest, he lets her take him back to the party,...
- 9/20/2018
- by Rupert Harvey
- Nerdly
For my money this is the brightest, most endearing and wittiest ’30s comedy to be given the name ‘screwball.’ Everyone on screen is flawlessly magnificent — Carole Lombard, William Powell, Alice Brady, Gail Patrick, Jean Dixon, Eugene Pallette and Mischa Auer — and Gregory La Cava’s direction is so good, it’s invisible. No kidding, I’ve never watched this with a group or individual that didn’t immediately rank it among the best entertainments they’ve seen.
My Man Godfrey
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 114
1936 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 93 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date September 18, 2018 / 39.95
Starring: William Powell, Carole Lombard, Alice Brady, Gail Patrick, Eugene Pallette, Alan Mowbray, Jean Dixon, Mischa Auer.
Cinematography: Ted Tetzlaff
Film Editors: Ted Kent, Russell Schoengarth
Original Music: Charles Previn
Written by Morrie Ryskind, Eric Hatch from his novel
Produced by Gregory La Cava, Charles R. Rogers
Directed by Gregory La Cava
Screwball...
My Man Godfrey
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 114
1936 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 93 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date September 18, 2018 / 39.95
Starring: William Powell, Carole Lombard, Alice Brady, Gail Patrick, Eugene Pallette, Alan Mowbray, Jean Dixon, Mischa Auer.
Cinematography: Ted Tetzlaff
Film Editors: Ted Kent, Russell Schoengarth
Original Music: Charles Previn
Written by Morrie Ryskind, Eric Hatch from his novel
Produced by Gregory La Cava, Charles R. Rogers
Directed by Gregory La Cava
Screwball...
- 9/18/2018
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Guilt, gloom, weird nightmares of death and persecution — and romance? The wondrous Gail Russell brings a spark of life into Frank Borzage’s weird expressionist masterpiece produced at the seldom-artistic Republic Studio. The bitter, despairing Dane Clark has just committed what a jury will likely call first degree murder, but the night can offer atonement and forgiveness, if he’ll just listen to Russell’s good advice.
Moonrise
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 921
1948 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 90 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date May 8, 2018 / 39.95
Starring: Dane Clark, Gail Russell, Ethel Barrymore, Allyn Joslyn, Rex Ingram, Henry Morgan, Lloyd Bridges, Selena Royle.
Cinematography: John L. Russell
Film Editor: Harry Keller
Original Music: William Lava
From the book by Theodore Strauss
Written and Produced by Charles Haas
Directed by Frank Borzage
Frank Borzage’s 1948 Moonrise is a critic’s delight, especially among aficionados that like to point out the artistic margins of traditional Hollywood filmmaking.
Moonrise
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 921
1948 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 90 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date May 8, 2018 / 39.95
Starring: Dane Clark, Gail Russell, Ethel Barrymore, Allyn Joslyn, Rex Ingram, Henry Morgan, Lloyd Bridges, Selena Royle.
Cinematography: John L. Russell
Film Editor: Harry Keller
Original Music: William Lava
From the book by Theodore Strauss
Written and Produced by Charles Haas
Directed by Frank Borzage
Frank Borzage’s 1948 Moonrise is a critic’s delight, especially among aficionados that like to point out the artistic margins of traditional Hollywood filmmaking.
- 5/5/2018
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Recently completing one of the longest shoots of his career with The Irishman, most other directors would consider that an accomplishment enough, but in between takes, Martin Scorsese somehow found time to construct a new curriculum as part of his “The Story of Movies” film course, produced with his company Film Foundation. This latest edition is “Portraits of America: Democracy on Film” and is free for students. However, if one would just like to follow along with their own personal screenings, the full list is available.
“We all need to make sense of what we’re seeing. For young people born into this world now, it’s absolutely crucial that they get guided,” Scorsese says (via IndieWire). “They have to learn how to sort the differences between art and pure commerce, between cinema and content, between the secrets of images that are individually crafted and the secrets of images that are mass-produced.
“We all need to make sense of what we’re seeing. For young people born into this world now, it’s absolutely crucial that they get guided,” Scorsese says (via IndieWire). “They have to learn how to sort the differences between art and pure commerce, between cinema and content, between the secrets of images that are individually crafted and the secrets of images that are mass-produced.
- 3/29/2018
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Martin Scorsese and his nonprofit organization The Film Foundation have announced their brand-new film curriculum, “Portraits of America: Democracy on Film.” The curriculum is the latest addition to the group’s ongoing film course “The Story of Movies,” which aims to teach students how to read the language of film and place motion pictures in the context of history, art, and society. Both “Democracy on Film” and the course are completely free for schools and universities.
“Portraits of America: Democracy on Film” is broken down into eight different sections, all of which include in-depth looks at some of the most important American films ever made, from Chaplin to Ford, Coppola, Spielberg, and ultimately Scorsese himself. The program is presented in partnership with Afscme. Scorsese announced the curriculum at a March 27 press conference in New York City.
“We all need to make sense of what we’re seeing,” Scorsese explained. “For...
“Portraits of America: Democracy on Film” is broken down into eight different sections, all of which include in-depth looks at some of the most important American films ever made, from Chaplin to Ford, Coppola, Spielberg, and ultimately Scorsese himself. The program is presented in partnership with Afscme. Scorsese announced the curriculum at a March 27 press conference in New York City.
“We all need to make sense of what we’re seeing,” Scorsese explained. “For...
- 3/27/2018
- by Zack Sharf
- Indiewire
After polling critics from around the world for the greatest American films of all-time, BBC has now forged ahead in the attempt to get a consensus on the best comedies of all-time. After polling 253 film critics, including 118 women and 135 men, from 52 countries and six continents a simple, the list of the 100 greatest is now here.
Featuring canonical classics such as Some Like It Hot, Dr. Strangelove, Annie Hall, Duck Soup, Playtime, and more in the top 10, there’s some interesting observations looking at the rest of the list. Toni Erdmann is the most recent inclusion, while the highest Wes Anderson pick is The Royal Tenenbaums. There’s also a healthy dose of Chaplin and Lubitsch with four films each, and the recently departed Jerry Lewis has a pair of inclusions.
Check out the list below (and my ballot) and see more on their official site.
100. (tie) The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese,...
Featuring canonical classics such as Some Like It Hot, Dr. Strangelove, Annie Hall, Duck Soup, Playtime, and more in the top 10, there’s some interesting observations looking at the rest of the list. Toni Erdmann is the most recent inclusion, while the highest Wes Anderson pick is The Royal Tenenbaums. There’s also a healthy dose of Chaplin and Lubitsch with four films each, and the recently departed Jerry Lewis has a pair of inclusions.
Check out the list below (and my ballot) and see more on their official site.
100. (tie) The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese,...
- 8/22/2017
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
'The Magnificent Ambersons': Directed by Orson Welles, and starring Tim Holt (pictured), Dolores Costello (in the background), Joseph Cotten, Anne Baxter, and Agnes Moorehead, this Academy Award-nominated adaptation of Booth Tarkington's novel earned Ricardo Cortez's brother Stanley Cortez an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White. He lost to Joseph Ruttenberg for William Wyler's blockbuster 'Mrs. Miniver.' Two years later, Cortez – along with Lee Garmes – would win Oscar statuettes for their evocative black-and-white work on John Cromwell's homefront drama 'Since You Went Away,' starring Ricardo Cortez's 'Torch Singer' leading lady, Claudette Colbert. In all, Stanley Cortez would receive cinematography credit in more than 80 films, ranging from B fare such as 'The Lady in the Morgue' and the 1940 'Margie' to Fritz Lang's 'Secret Beyond the Door,' Charles Laughton's 'The Night of the Hunter,' and Nunnally Johnson's 'The Three Faces...
- 7/8/2017
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Ricardo Cortez: Although never as big a star as fellow 1920s screen heartthrobs Rudolph Valentino, Ramon Novarro, and John Gilbert, Cortez had a long – and, to some extent, prestigious – film career, appearing in nearly 100 movies between 1923 and 1950. Among his directors: Allan Dwan, Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith, James Cruze, Alexander Korda, Herbert Brenon, Roy Del Ruth, Frank Lloyd, Gregory La Cava, William A. Wellman, Alexander Hall, Lloyd Bacon, Tay Garnett, Archie Mayo, Raoul Walsh, Frank Capra, Walter Lang, Michael Curtiz, and John Ford. See previous post: “Remembering Ricardo Cortez: Hollywood's Silent “Latin Lover” & Star of Original 'The Maltese Falcon'.” First of all, why Ricardo Cortez? Since I began writing about classic movies and vintage filmmakers roughly 30 years ago, people have always been curious why I choose particular subjects. It sounds kind of corny, but I have always wanted to do original work and perhaps make a minor contribution to film history at the...
- 7/7/2017
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Ricardo Cortez biography 'The Magnificent Heel: The Life and Films of Ricardo Cortez' – Paramount's 'Latin Lover' threat to a recalcitrant Rudolph Valentino, and a sly, seductive Sam Spade in the original film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon.' 'The Magnificent Heel: The Life and Films of Ricardo Cortez': Author Dan Van Neste remembers the silent era's 'Latin Lover' & the star of the original 'The Maltese Falcon' At odds with Famous Players-Lasky after the release of the 1922 critical and box office misfire The Young Rajah, Rudolph Valentino demands a fatter weekly paycheck and more control over his movie projects. The studio – a few years later to be reorganized under the name of its distribution arm, Paramount – balks. Valentino goes on a “one-man strike.” In 42nd Street-style, unknown 22-year-old Valentino look-alike contest winner Jacob Krantz of Manhattan steps in, shortly afterwards to become known worldwide as Latin Lover Ricardo Cortez of...
- 7/7/2017
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
On this day in history as it relates to showbiz...
1892 One of Old Hollywood's most undersung but talented 1930s directors Gregory La Cava is born. Classics include Stage Door and My Man Godfrey
1913 Famed abolitionist and American hero Harriet Tubman dies of pneumonia. So glad she's getting biopic treatment soon. And twice over!
1938 The 10th annual Oscars are held with The Life of Emile Zzzzzola winning Best Picture and Louise Rainer taking her consecutive Best Actress prize but the most enduring anecdote was of course the theft of Alice Brady's Oscar for In Old Chicago.
1958 Sharon Stone is born in Pennysylvania
The 1959 Golden Globes (and more) are after the jump...
1892 One of Old Hollywood's most undersung but talented 1930s directors Gregory La Cava is born. Classics include Stage Door and My Man Godfrey
1913 Famed abolitionist and American hero Harriet Tubman dies of pneumonia. So glad she's getting biopic treatment soon. And twice over!
1938 The 10th annual Oscars are held with The Life of Emile Zzzzzola winning Best Picture and Louise Rainer taking her consecutive Best Actress prize but the most enduring anecdote was of course the theft of Alice Brady's Oscar for In Old Chicago.
1958 Sharon Stone is born in Pennysylvania
The 1959 Golden Globes (and more) are after the jump...
- 3/10/2017
- by NATHANIEL R
- FilmExperience
Gabriel Over the White House
DVD-r
The Warner Archive Collection
1933 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame / 86, 102 min. / Street Date October 20, 2009 / available through the Warner Archive Collection / 17.99
Starring: Walter Huston, Karen Morley, Franchot Tone, Arthur Byron, Dickie Moore, C. Henry Gordon, David Landau, Samuel S. Hinds, Jean Parker, Mischa Auer.
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Film Editor: Basil Wrangell
Original Music: Dr. William Axt
Written by: Carey Wilson, from a book by T. F. Tweed
Produced by: William Randolph Hearst, Walter Wanger
Directed by Gregory La Cava
A Review Revisit.
The unique political fantasy Gabriel Over the White House has become painfully topical lately. This is an update of a 2009 review. To my knowledge nothing has changed with the product — I saw a re-promotion of Twilight Time’s 1984 disc and thought, Gabriel is twice as relevant and at least as scary.
Unstable times in America have produced some pretty strange political-religious message pictures.
DVD-r
The Warner Archive Collection
1933 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame / 86, 102 min. / Street Date October 20, 2009 / available through the Warner Archive Collection / 17.99
Starring: Walter Huston, Karen Morley, Franchot Tone, Arthur Byron, Dickie Moore, C. Henry Gordon, David Landau, Samuel S. Hinds, Jean Parker, Mischa Auer.
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Film Editor: Basil Wrangell
Original Music: Dr. William Axt
Written by: Carey Wilson, from a book by T. F. Tweed
Produced by: William Randolph Hearst, Walter Wanger
Directed by Gregory La Cava
A Review Revisit.
The unique political fantasy Gabriel Over the White House has become painfully topical lately. This is an update of a 2009 review. To my knowledge nothing has changed with the product — I saw a re-promotion of Twilight Time’s 1984 disc and thought, Gabriel is twice as relevant and at least as scary.
Unstable times in America have produced some pretty strange political-religious message pictures.
- 2/4/2017
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
All sing the praises of Frank Borzage, a gentle director fully committed to the idea of romance in an imperfect world. Sally Eilers and James Dunn make a go of marriage, despite their personal flaws and difficulties with communication. It’s hard to believe that films of this vintage portray behaviors as sensitive as this.
Bad Girl
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1931 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 90 min. / Street Date December 13, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring James Dunn, Sally Eilers, Minna Gombell, Sarah Padden, William Pawley, Billy Watson.
Cinematography Chester A. Lyons
Film Editor Margaret Clancey
Written by Viña Delmar, Brian Marlow, Edwin J. Burke
Directed by Frank Borzage
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Directors don’t come any more romantic than Frank Borzage. It is said that he was one of several Fox directors, including John Ford, who were heavily influenced by F.W. Murnau, whose Sunrise was a massive hit in...
Bad Girl
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1931 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 90 min. / Street Date December 13, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring James Dunn, Sally Eilers, Minna Gombell, Sarah Padden, William Pawley, Billy Watson.
Cinematography Chester A. Lyons
Film Editor Margaret Clancey
Written by Viña Delmar, Brian Marlow, Edwin J. Burke
Directed by Frank Borzage
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Directors don’t come any more romantic than Frank Borzage. It is said that he was one of several Fox directors, including John Ford, who were heavily influenced by F.W. Murnau, whose Sunrise was a massive hit in...
- 12/6/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
“We used to go to the movies. Now we want the movies to come to us, on our televisions, tablets and phones, as streams running into an increasingly unnavigable ocean of media. The dispersal of movie watching across technologies and contexts follows the multiplexing of movie theaters, itself a fragmenting of the single screen theater where movie love was first concentrated and consecrated. (But even in the “good old days,” movies were often only part of an evening’s entertainment that came complete with vaudeville acts and bank nights). For all this, moviegoing still means what it always meant, joining a community, forming an audience and participating in a collective dream.” –
From the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming notes for its current series, “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing”
Currently under way at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s far-reaching and fascinating series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” takes sharp aim at an overview of how the movies themselves have portrayed the act of going out to see movies during these years of seismic change in the way we see them. What’s best about the collection of films curated for the series is its scope, which sweeps along from the anything-goes exhibition of the silent era, on through an examination of the opulent era of grandiose movie palaces and post-war audience predilection for exploitation pictures, and straight into an era—ours—of a certain nostalgia for the ways we used to exclusively gather in dark places to watch visions jump out at us from the big screen. (That nostalgia, as it turns out, is often colored by a rear-view perspective on the times which contextualizes it and sometimes gives it a bitter tinge.) As the program notes for the Marquee Movies series puts it, whether you’re an American moviegoer or one from France, Italy, Argentina or Taiwan, “the current sense of loss at the passing of an exhibition era takes its place in the ongoing history of cultural and industrial transformation reflected in these films.”
The series took its inaugural bow last Friday night with a rare 35mm screening of Matinee (1993), director Joe Dante and screenwriter Charlie Haas’s vividly imagined tribute to movie love during a time in Us history which lazy writers frequently like to describe as “the point when America lost its innocence” or some other such silliness. For Americans, and for a whole lot of other people the world over, those days in 1962 during what would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis felt more like days when something a whole lot more tangible than “innocence” was about to be lost, what with the Us and Russia being on the brink of nuclear confrontation and all. The movie lays down this undercurrent of fear and uncertainty as the foundation which tints its main action, that of the arrival of exploitation movie impresario Laurence Woolsey (John Goodman, channeling producer and gimmick maestro William Castle) to Key West, Florida, to promote his latest shock show, Mant!, on the very weekend that American troops set to sea, ready to fire on Russian missile installments a mere 90 miles away in Cuba.
Woolsey’s hardly worried that his potential audience will be distracted the specter of annihilation; in fact, he’s energized by it, convinced that the free-floating anxiety will translate into box office dollars contributed by nervous kids and adults looking for a safe and scary good time, a disposal cinematic depository for all their worst fears. And it certainly doesn’t matter that Woolsey’s movie is a corny sci-fi absurdity-- all the better for his particular brand of enhancements. Mant!, a lovingly sculpted mash-up of 1950s hits like The Fly and Them!, benefits from “Atomo-vision,” which incorporates variants of Castle innovations like Emergo and Percepto, as well as “Rumble-rama,” a very crude precursor to Universal’s Oscar-winning Sensurround system. The movie’s Saturday afternoon screening is where Dante and Haas really let loose their tickled and twisted imaginations, with the help of Woolsey’s theatrical enhancements.
Leading up to the fearful and farcical unleashing of Mant!, Dante stages a beautifully understated sequence that moved me to tears when I saw it with my daughters last Friday night at the Billy Wilder Theater. Matinee is seen primarily through the eyes of young Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military kid whose dad is among those waiting it out on nuclear-armed boats pointed in the direction of Cuba. Gene is a monster-movie nerd (and a clear stand-in for Dante, Haas and just about anybody—like me—whose primary biblical text was provided not by that fella in the burning bush but instead by Forrest J. Ackerman within the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland), and he manages to worm his way into Woolsey’s good graces as the producer prepares the local theater to show his picture. At one point he walks down the street in the company of the larger-than-life producer, who starts talking about his inspirations and why he makes the sort of movies he does:
“A zillion years ago, a guy’s living in a cave,” Woolsey expounds. “He goes out one day—Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now, he’s scared to death, but he gets away. And when it’s all over with, he feels great.”
Gene, eager to believe but also to understand, responds quizzically-- “Well, yeah, ‘cause he’s still living.”
“Yeah, but he knows he is, and he feels it,” Woolsey counters. “So he goes home, back to the cave. First thing he does, he does a drawing of a mammoth.” (At this point the brick wall which the two of them are passing becomes a blank screen onto which Woolsey conjures an animated behemoth that entrances Gene and us.) Woolsey continues:
“He thinks, ‘People are coming to see this. Let’s make it good. Let’s make the teeth real long and the eyes real mean.’ Boom! The first monster movie. That’s probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything’s okay, the lights come up,” Woolsey concludes, ending his illustrative fantasy with a sigh.
But that’s not all, folks. At this point, Dante cuts to a Steadicam shot as it moves into the lobby hall of that Key West theater, past posters of Hatari!, Lonely are the Brave, Six Black Horses and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The tracking shot continues up the stairs, letting us get a really close look at the worn, perhaps pungent carpet, most likely the same rug that was laid down when the theater opened 30 or so years earlier, into the snack bar area, then glides over to the closed swinging doors leading into the auditorium, while Woolsey continues:
“You see, the people come into your cave with the 200-year-old carpet, the guy tears your ticket in half—it’s too late to turn back now. The water fountain’s all booby-trapped and ready, the stuff laid out on the candy counter. Then you come over here to where it’s dark-- there could be anything in there—and you say, ‘Here I am. What have you got for me?’”
Forget nostalgia for a style of moviegoing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compact, evocative and heartfelt tribute to the space in which we used to see movies than those couple of minutes in Matinee. The shot and the narration work so vividly together that I swear I could whiff the must underlying that carpet, papered over lovingly with the smell of popcorn wafting through the confined space of that tiny snack bar, just as if I was a kid again myself, wandering into the friendly confines of the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon (More on that place next week.)
Dante’s movie is a romp, no doubt, but its nostalgia is a heartier variety than what we usually get, and it leaves us with an undercurrent of uneasiness that is unusual for a genre most enough content to look back through amber. Woolsey’s words resonate for every youngster who has searched for reasons to explain their attraction to the scary side of cinema and memories of the places where those images were first encountered, but in Matinee there’s another terror with which to contend, one not so easily held at bay.
Of course the real world monster of the movie— the bomb— was also, during that weekend in 1962 and in Matinee’s representation of the missile crisis, “killed off,” making “everything okay.” But Dante makes us understand that while calm has been momentarily restored, something deeper has been forever disturbed. The movie acknowledges the societal disarray which was already under way in Vietnam, and the American South, and only months away from spilling out from Dallas and onto the greater American landscape in a way so much less containable than even the radiative effects of a single cataclysmic event. That awareness leaves Matinee with a sorrowful aftertaste that is hard to shake. The movie’s last image, of our two main characters gathered on the beach, greeting helicopters that are flying home from having hovered at the precipice of nuclear destruction, is one of relief for familial unity restored—Gene is, after all, getting his dad back. But it’s also one of foreboding. Dante leaves us with an extreme close-up of a copter looming into frame, absent even the context of the sky, bearing down on us like a real-life mutant creature, an eerie bellwether of political and societal chaos yet to come as a stout companion to the movie’s general air of celebratory remembrance.
***************************************
The “Marquee Movies” series has already seen Matinee (last Friday night), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) paired with Polish director Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 Escape from Liberty Island (last Saturday night), and Ettore Scola’s masterful Splendor (1989), which screened last Sunday night.
But there’s plenty more to come. Sunday, June 12, the archive series unveils a double bill of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) with the less well-known This Way, Please (1937), a terrific tale of a star-struck movie theater usherette with dreams of singing and dancing just like the stars she idolizes, starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Betty Grable, Jim Jordan, Marian Jordan and the brilliantly grizzled Ned Sparks.
Wednesday, June 15, you can see Uruguay’s A Useful Life (2010), in which a movie theater manager in Montevideo faces up the fact that the days of his beloved movie theater are numbered, paired up with Luc Moullet’s droll account of the feud between the French film journals Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, entitled The Seats of the Alcazar (1989).
One of my favorites, Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) gets a rare projection at the Wilder on Sunday, June 19, along with Lisandsro Alonzo’s Fantasma (2006), described by the archive as “a hypnotic commentary on cinematic rituals and presence.”
Friday, June 24, you can see, if you dare, Lamberto Bava’s gory meta-horror film Demons (1985) and then stay for Bigas Luna’s similarly twisted treatise on the movies and voyeurism, 1987’s Anguish.
Saturday afternoon, June 25, “Marquee Movies” presents a rare screening of Gregory La Cava’s hilarious slapstick spoof of rural moviegoing, His Nibs (1921), paired up with what I consider, alongside Matinee and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the real jewels of the series, Basil Dearden’s marvelously funny The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), all about what happens when a newlywed couple inherits a rundown cinema populated by a staff of eccentrics that include Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers. (More on that one next week.)
And the series concludes on Sunday, June 26, with a screening of the original 174-minute director’s cut of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).
(Each program also features a variety of moviegoing-oriented shorts, trailers and other surprises. Click the individual links for details and show times.)
******************************************
(Next week: My review of The Smallest Show on Earth and a remembrance of my own hometown movie theater, which closed in 2015.)
*******************************************
Later this year Matinee will be released by Universal in the U.S. (details to come) and by Arrow Films in the UK (with a nifty assortment of extras).
From the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming notes for its current series, “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing”
Currently under way at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s far-reaching and fascinating series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” takes sharp aim at an overview of how the movies themselves have portrayed the act of going out to see movies during these years of seismic change in the way we see them. What’s best about the collection of films curated for the series is its scope, which sweeps along from the anything-goes exhibition of the silent era, on through an examination of the opulent era of grandiose movie palaces and post-war audience predilection for exploitation pictures, and straight into an era—ours—of a certain nostalgia for the ways we used to exclusively gather in dark places to watch visions jump out at us from the big screen. (That nostalgia, as it turns out, is often colored by a rear-view perspective on the times which contextualizes it and sometimes gives it a bitter tinge.) As the program notes for the Marquee Movies series puts it, whether you’re an American moviegoer or one from France, Italy, Argentina or Taiwan, “the current sense of loss at the passing of an exhibition era takes its place in the ongoing history of cultural and industrial transformation reflected in these films.”
The series took its inaugural bow last Friday night with a rare 35mm screening of Matinee (1993), director Joe Dante and screenwriter Charlie Haas’s vividly imagined tribute to movie love during a time in Us history which lazy writers frequently like to describe as “the point when America lost its innocence” or some other such silliness. For Americans, and for a whole lot of other people the world over, those days in 1962 during what would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis felt more like days when something a whole lot more tangible than “innocence” was about to be lost, what with the Us and Russia being on the brink of nuclear confrontation and all. The movie lays down this undercurrent of fear and uncertainty as the foundation which tints its main action, that of the arrival of exploitation movie impresario Laurence Woolsey (John Goodman, channeling producer and gimmick maestro William Castle) to Key West, Florida, to promote his latest shock show, Mant!, on the very weekend that American troops set to sea, ready to fire on Russian missile installments a mere 90 miles away in Cuba.
Woolsey’s hardly worried that his potential audience will be distracted the specter of annihilation; in fact, he’s energized by it, convinced that the free-floating anxiety will translate into box office dollars contributed by nervous kids and adults looking for a safe and scary good time, a disposal cinematic depository for all their worst fears. And it certainly doesn’t matter that Woolsey’s movie is a corny sci-fi absurdity-- all the better for his particular brand of enhancements. Mant!, a lovingly sculpted mash-up of 1950s hits like The Fly and Them!, benefits from “Atomo-vision,” which incorporates variants of Castle innovations like Emergo and Percepto, as well as “Rumble-rama,” a very crude precursor to Universal’s Oscar-winning Sensurround system. The movie’s Saturday afternoon screening is where Dante and Haas really let loose their tickled and twisted imaginations, with the help of Woolsey’s theatrical enhancements.
Leading up to the fearful and farcical unleashing of Mant!, Dante stages a beautifully understated sequence that moved me to tears when I saw it with my daughters last Friday night at the Billy Wilder Theater. Matinee is seen primarily through the eyes of young Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military kid whose dad is among those waiting it out on nuclear-armed boats pointed in the direction of Cuba. Gene is a monster-movie nerd (and a clear stand-in for Dante, Haas and just about anybody—like me—whose primary biblical text was provided not by that fella in the burning bush but instead by Forrest J. Ackerman within the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland), and he manages to worm his way into Woolsey’s good graces as the producer prepares the local theater to show his picture. At one point he walks down the street in the company of the larger-than-life producer, who starts talking about his inspirations and why he makes the sort of movies he does:
“A zillion years ago, a guy’s living in a cave,” Woolsey expounds. “He goes out one day—Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now, he’s scared to death, but he gets away. And when it’s all over with, he feels great.”
Gene, eager to believe but also to understand, responds quizzically-- “Well, yeah, ‘cause he’s still living.”
“Yeah, but he knows he is, and he feels it,” Woolsey counters. “So he goes home, back to the cave. First thing he does, he does a drawing of a mammoth.” (At this point the brick wall which the two of them are passing becomes a blank screen onto which Woolsey conjures an animated behemoth that entrances Gene and us.) Woolsey continues:
“He thinks, ‘People are coming to see this. Let’s make it good. Let’s make the teeth real long and the eyes real mean.’ Boom! The first monster movie. That’s probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything’s okay, the lights come up,” Woolsey concludes, ending his illustrative fantasy with a sigh.
But that’s not all, folks. At this point, Dante cuts to a Steadicam shot as it moves into the lobby hall of that Key West theater, past posters of Hatari!, Lonely are the Brave, Six Black Horses and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The tracking shot continues up the stairs, letting us get a really close look at the worn, perhaps pungent carpet, most likely the same rug that was laid down when the theater opened 30 or so years earlier, into the snack bar area, then glides over to the closed swinging doors leading into the auditorium, while Woolsey continues:
“You see, the people come into your cave with the 200-year-old carpet, the guy tears your ticket in half—it’s too late to turn back now. The water fountain’s all booby-trapped and ready, the stuff laid out on the candy counter. Then you come over here to where it’s dark-- there could be anything in there—and you say, ‘Here I am. What have you got for me?’”
Forget nostalgia for a style of moviegoing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compact, evocative and heartfelt tribute to the space in which we used to see movies than those couple of minutes in Matinee. The shot and the narration work so vividly together that I swear I could whiff the must underlying that carpet, papered over lovingly with the smell of popcorn wafting through the confined space of that tiny snack bar, just as if I was a kid again myself, wandering into the friendly confines of the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon (More on that place next week.)
Dante’s movie is a romp, no doubt, but its nostalgia is a heartier variety than what we usually get, and it leaves us with an undercurrent of uneasiness that is unusual for a genre most enough content to look back through amber. Woolsey’s words resonate for every youngster who has searched for reasons to explain their attraction to the scary side of cinema and memories of the places where those images were first encountered, but in Matinee there’s another terror with which to contend, one not so easily held at bay.
Of course the real world monster of the movie— the bomb— was also, during that weekend in 1962 and in Matinee’s representation of the missile crisis, “killed off,” making “everything okay.” But Dante makes us understand that while calm has been momentarily restored, something deeper has been forever disturbed. The movie acknowledges the societal disarray which was already under way in Vietnam, and the American South, and only months away from spilling out from Dallas and onto the greater American landscape in a way so much less containable than even the radiative effects of a single cataclysmic event. That awareness leaves Matinee with a sorrowful aftertaste that is hard to shake. The movie’s last image, of our two main characters gathered on the beach, greeting helicopters that are flying home from having hovered at the precipice of nuclear destruction, is one of relief for familial unity restored—Gene is, after all, getting his dad back. But it’s also one of foreboding. Dante leaves us with an extreme close-up of a copter looming into frame, absent even the context of the sky, bearing down on us like a real-life mutant creature, an eerie bellwether of political and societal chaos yet to come as a stout companion to the movie’s general air of celebratory remembrance.
***************************************
The “Marquee Movies” series has already seen Matinee (last Friday night), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) paired with Polish director Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 Escape from Liberty Island (last Saturday night), and Ettore Scola’s masterful Splendor (1989), which screened last Sunday night.
But there’s plenty more to come. Sunday, June 12, the archive series unveils a double bill of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) with the less well-known This Way, Please (1937), a terrific tale of a star-struck movie theater usherette with dreams of singing and dancing just like the stars she idolizes, starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Betty Grable, Jim Jordan, Marian Jordan and the brilliantly grizzled Ned Sparks.
Wednesday, June 15, you can see Uruguay’s A Useful Life (2010), in which a movie theater manager in Montevideo faces up the fact that the days of his beloved movie theater are numbered, paired up with Luc Moullet’s droll account of the feud between the French film journals Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, entitled The Seats of the Alcazar (1989).
One of my favorites, Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) gets a rare projection at the Wilder on Sunday, June 19, along with Lisandsro Alonzo’s Fantasma (2006), described by the archive as “a hypnotic commentary on cinematic rituals and presence.”
Friday, June 24, you can see, if you dare, Lamberto Bava’s gory meta-horror film Demons (1985) and then stay for Bigas Luna’s similarly twisted treatise on the movies and voyeurism, 1987’s Anguish.
Saturday afternoon, June 25, “Marquee Movies” presents a rare screening of Gregory La Cava’s hilarious slapstick spoof of rural moviegoing, His Nibs (1921), paired up with what I consider, alongside Matinee and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the real jewels of the series, Basil Dearden’s marvelously funny The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), all about what happens when a newlywed couple inherits a rundown cinema populated by a staff of eccentrics that include Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers. (More on that one next week.)
And the series concludes on Sunday, June 26, with a screening of the original 174-minute director’s cut of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).
(Each program also features a variety of moviegoing-oriented shorts, trailers and other surprises. Click the individual links for details and show times.)
******************************************
(Next week: My review of The Smallest Show on Earth and a remembrance of my own hometown movie theater, which closed in 2015.)
*******************************************
Later this year Matinee will be released by Universal in the U.S. (details to come) and by Arrow Films in the UK (with a nifty assortment of extras).
- 6/11/2016
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
Top Ten Scream Queens: Barbara Steele, who both emitted screams and made others do same, is in a category of her own. Top Ten Scream Queens Halloween is over until next year, but the equally bewitching Day of the Dead is just around the corner. So, dead or alive, here's my revised and expanded list of cinema's Top Ten Scream Queens. This highly personal compilation is based on how memorable – as opposed to how loud or how frequent – were the screams. That's the key reason you won't find listed below actresses featured in gory slasher films. After all, the screams – and just about everything else in such movies – are as meaningless as their plots. You also won't find any screaming guys (i.e., Scream Kings) on the list below even though I've got absolutely nothing against guys who scream in horror, whether in movies or in life. There are...
- 11/2/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Here are a bunch of little bites to satisfy your hunger for movie culture: Fan Build of the Day: Have a ghost that needs busting? The Diy Prop Shop tells us how to make a Ghostbusters ghost trap: Fan Made Posters of the Day: BossLogic designed two posters for Captain America: Civil War, including the one with Iron Man being punched by Captain America below. See the other, depicting Iron Man smashing through Captain America's shield at Live for Films. Abridged Movie of the Day: Finally catch up with the entire Back to the Future trilogy in only 1.21 minutes (via Devour): Vintage Image of the Day: Lucille Ball and Katharine Hepburn with their Stage Door director, Gregory La Cava, in 1937. Cate Blanchett has already...
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- 9/3/2015
- by Christopher Campbell
- Movies.com
Lucille Ball: The glamour look. Cate Blanchett to play Lucille Ball: Actress won Oscar for incarnating Ball's fellow Rko contract player Katharine Hepburn Two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett is reportedly slated to star in a biopic of former Rko and MGM actress and big-time television comedienne Lucille Ball. Aaron Sorkin, Oscar winner for David Fincher's The Social Network, will be responsible for the screenplay. According to Entertainment Weekly, the Lucille Ball film biopic will focus on Ball's two-decade marriage to her I Love Lucy costar Desi Arnaz. In 1960, the couple had an acrimonious divorce that supposedly “shocked” clueless fans unable to tell the difference between TV reality and real-life reality. Their children, Desi Arnaz Jr. and Lucie Arnaz, had modest acting careers in film and on TV in the '70s and '80s. As per the EW.com report, they're both producing the planned Lucille Ball biopic.
- 9/3/2015
- by Zac Gille
- Alt Film Guide
Adolphe Menjou movies today (This article is currently being revised.) Despite countless stories to the contrary, numerous silent film performers managed to survive the coming of sound. Adolphe Menjou, however, is a special case in that he not only remained a leading man in the early sound era, but smoothly made the transition to top supporting player in mid-decade, a position he would continue to hold for the quarter of a century. Menjou is Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Day today, Aug. 3, as part of TCM's "Summer Under the Stars" 2015 series. Right now, TCM is showing William A. Wellman's A Star Is Born, the "original" version of the story about a small-town girl (Janet Gaynor) who becomes a Hollywood star, while her husband (Fredric March) boozes his way into oblivion. In typical Hollywood originality (not that things are any different elsewhere), this 1937 version of the story – produced by...
- 8/4/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Continuing the tradition of brisk pre-Code films, Joel McCrea’s occasional appearances in Gregory La Cava’s 1933 Bed of Roses serve as strange moral medium between the wanton hedonism of the lead Constance Bennett and the upcoming censorship of the era. Screenwriter Wanda Tuchock’s story of jail-hopping prostitutes-on-the-side seems like a victory lap for vice-ridden cinematic world of the early 30s, including flippant talk of suicide, heavily implied sex, liberal boozing, and poking fun at previous attempts of government sponsored moral judgment (“The Eighteenth Amendment is a law, and as a law should be enforced until it stops being a law”). The film begins in a prison as Bennett’s Lorry Evans and partner-in-crime Minnie (Pert Kelton) walk out of their cells, trash-talking life outside in radio-ready cadence and street-ready slang. They have short hair, hats tipped on the side of their head (I assume gravity worked differently in...
- 6/5/2015
- by Zach Lewis
- MUBI
For our roundup of current goings on, we begin in New York, where you can see Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Eve Arden and Lucille Ball in Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door (1937), surveys of the careers of John Carpenter, Lynn Hershman Leeson and John Boorman, a car company promo by Nagisa Oshima, Jim Jarmusch riffing on Man Ray and documentaries by Wang Bing and Lav Diaz at MoMA. Plus: Billy Wilder in Berkeley, Lewis Klahr in San Francisco, James Benning in Hamburg, Noël Burch in Brussels and more. » - David Hudson...
- 2/16/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
For our roundup of current goings on, we begin in New York, where you can see Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Eve Arden and Lucille Ball in Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door (1937), surveys of the careers of John Carpenter, Lynn Hershman Leeson and John Boorman, a car company promo by Nagisa Oshima, Jim Jarmusch riffing on Man Ray and documentaries by Wang Bing and Lav Diaz at MoMA. Plus: Billy Wilder in Berkeley, Lewis Klahr in San Francisco, James Benning in Hamburg, Noël Burch in Brussels and more. » - David Hudson...
- 2/16/2015
- Keyframe
Episode 13 of 52 wherein Anne Marie screens all of Katharine Hepburn's films in chronological order.
In which we've finally made it to the good stuff, so let's celebrate with Katharine Hepburn vs Ginger Rogers in a battle of the stars.
Hallelujah! Katharine Hepburn has arrived! From the ashes of Quality Street she rises, patrician and perfect. After 12 weeks of inconsistent performances, to suddenly be confronted with Kate in all her Mid-Atlantic, New England-born, iron spined, pants-wearing glory is a downright religious experience. And lo, Katharine Hepburn did star in a Kaufman and Ferber adaptation, and it was good.
Stage Door is the limelight dramedy of a gaggle of Broadway hopefuls living at the fictional Footlights Club in New York. The original play was an ensemble piece, but director Gregory La Cava and writer Morrie Ryskind remade the the movie in the image of its stars. Ginger Rogers, then between musical blockbusters,...
In which we've finally made it to the good stuff, so let's celebrate with Katharine Hepburn vs Ginger Rogers in a battle of the stars.
Hallelujah! Katharine Hepburn has arrived! From the ashes of Quality Street she rises, patrician and perfect. After 12 weeks of inconsistent performances, to suddenly be confronted with Kate in all her Mid-Atlantic, New England-born, iron spined, pants-wearing glory is a downright religious experience. And lo, Katharine Hepburn did star in a Kaufman and Ferber adaptation, and it was good.
Stage Door is the limelight dramedy of a gaggle of Broadway hopefuls living at the fictional Footlights Club in New York. The original play was an ensemble piece, but director Gregory La Cava and writer Morrie Ryskind remade the the movie in the image of its stars. Ginger Rogers, then between musical blockbusters,...
- 3/26/2014
- by Anne Marie
- FilmExperience
The following is an essay featured in the anthology George Cukor - On/Off Hollywood (Capricci, Paris, 2013), for sale at www.capricci.fr.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center will be running a complete retrospective on the director, "The Discreet Charm of George Cukor," in New York December 13, 2013 - January 7, 2014. Many thanks to David Phelps, Fernando Ganzo, and Camille Pollas for their generous permission.
The Second-hand Illusion:
Notes on Cukor
Above: The Chapman Report (1962), A Life of Her Own (1950)
“There’s always something about them that you don’t know that you’d like to know. Spencer Tracy had that. In fact, they do all have that – all the big ones have it. You feel very close to them but there is the ultimate thing withheld from you – and you want to find out.” —George Cukor1
“Can you tell what a woman’s like by just looking at her?” —The Chapman Report...
The Film Society of Lincoln Center will be running a complete retrospective on the director, "The Discreet Charm of George Cukor," in New York December 13, 2013 - January 7, 2014. Many thanks to David Phelps, Fernando Ganzo, and Camille Pollas for their generous permission.
The Second-hand Illusion:
Notes on Cukor
Above: The Chapman Report (1962), A Life of Her Own (1950)
“There’s always something about them that you don’t know that you’d like to know. Spencer Tracy had that. In fact, they do all have that – all the big ones have it. You feel very close to them but there is the ultimate thing withheld from you – and you want to find out.” —George Cukor1
“Can you tell what a woman’s like by just looking at her?” —The Chapman Report...
- 12/10/2013
- by David Phelps
- MUBI
Vintage film fans should tackle the daunting delights of the Internet Archive; and Saw director James Wan turns out a copybook horror chiller in The Conjuring
The expanding network of online streaming services means there are more ways than ever before for busy/idle/agoraphobic film lovers to see recent releases, but fans of vintage cinema are still rather poorly served. Most outlets offer a small, often arbitrary selection of older standards that are useful for beginners; those in search of more niche classics, however, are still reliant on DVD. Here's where the warren-like world of online archiving comes into play. You'd be amazed how many gems are lurking, albeit in grainy and segmented form, on YouTube, but if that seems too great an affront to cinema, the long-serving, simply named Internet Archive (archive.org/movies) is a better bet.
A non-profit-making Us site run much like an online library,...
The expanding network of online streaming services means there are more ways than ever before for busy/idle/agoraphobic film lovers to see recent releases, but fans of vintage cinema are still rather poorly served. Most outlets offer a small, often arbitrary selection of older standards that are useful for beginners; those in search of more niche classics, however, are still reliant on DVD. Here's where the warren-like world of online archiving comes into play. You'd be amazed how many gems are lurking, albeit in grainy and segmented form, on YouTube, but if that seems too great an affront to cinema, the long-serving, simply named Internet Archive (archive.org/movies) is a better bet.
A non-profit-making Us site run much like an online library,...
- 12/8/2013
- by Guy Lodge
- The Guardian - Film News
News.
Starting this week, filmmaker, editor, critic and Notebook contributor Gina Telaroli will be seeing the premiere of her exquisite short feature Traveling Light, "a small-scale silent (aesthetically “silent”, but with a dense sound mix) charting a trip among friends from New York to Pittsburgh carefully constructed as a string of tiny moments" (Christopher Small), around the world in a variety of venues. The most ambitious on the ground presentation will be at New York's Anthology Film Archives, in whose series "Closely Watched Trains" Traveling Light is showing alongside such other brilliant train cinema as Shanghai Express, Emperor of the North, and The Narrow Margin. For those not in New York, stay tuned for news of the film's online premiere.
As Dave Kehr prepares to take on his new position as Adjunct Curator at MoMA, it has been announced that J. Hoberman will be taking over his video column in...
Starting this week, filmmaker, editor, critic and Notebook contributor Gina Telaroli will be seeing the premiere of her exquisite short feature Traveling Light, "a small-scale silent (aesthetically “silent”, but with a dense sound mix) charting a trip among friends from New York to Pittsburgh carefully constructed as a string of tiny moments" (Christopher Small), around the world in a variety of venues. The most ambitious on the ground presentation will be at New York's Anthology Film Archives, in whose series "Closely Watched Trains" Traveling Light is showing alongside such other brilliant train cinema as Shanghai Express, Emperor of the North, and The Narrow Margin. For those not in New York, stay tuned for news of the film's online premiere.
As Dave Kehr prepares to take on his new position as Adjunct Curator at MoMA, it has been announced that J. Hoberman will be taking over his video column in...
- 11/13/2013
- by Adam Cook
- MUBI
Character actor who played the psychiatrist Major Sidney Freedman in the TV comedy M*A*S*H
The long-running Us television comedy M*A*S*H, set during the Korean war, was often perceived as an allegorical look at the Vietnam war, which was still being fought when it began in 1972. But the television show focused less on the specific mindsets of Vietnam which had driven the nihilistic Robert Altman film on which it was based, and in tone was much closer to Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22, with its comedic take on the intrinsic absurdity of war.
No character brought that home more clearly than Major Sidney Freedman, the psychiatrist who appeared in 12 episodes over the show's 11-year run. Freedman was played by Allan Arbus, who has died aged 95. His approach to the mental health of the soldiers, and medics, at the 4077th mobile army surgical hospital unit relied...
The long-running Us television comedy M*A*S*H, set during the Korean war, was often perceived as an allegorical look at the Vietnam war, which was still being fought when it began in 1972. But the television show focused less on the specific mindsets of Vietnam which had driven the nihilistic Robert Altman film on which it was based, and in tone was much closer to Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22, with its comedic take on the intrinsic absurdity of war.
No character brought that home more clearly than Major Sidney Freedman, the psychiatrist who appeared in 12 episodes over the show's 11-year run. Freedman was played by Allan Arbus, who has died aged 95. His approach to the mental health of the soldiers, and medics, at the 4077th mobile army surgical hospital unit relied...
- 4/25/2013
- by Michael Carlson
- The Guardian - Film News
My Best Girl
Directed by Sam Taylor
Written by Allen McNeil & Tim Whelan
USA, 1927
Tsff made its merry way up to Casa Loma on Monday night for a special screening of Mary Pickford’s final silent film on the occasion of the star’s 121st birthday (the organizers even served birthday cake during the intermission). Despite an interminable, bone chilling rain (which looked rather cozy sliding down the other side of the hundred-year old Gothic Revival castle’s windows), there was a packed house on hand to experience an authentic presentation of the film as it would have been shown at a cinema palace of the era, complete with accompaniment by the irrepressible Clark Wilson on the Toronto Theatre Organ Society‘s justly celebrated Wurlitzer organ. This magnificent instrument, which once enlivened screenings at Shea’s Hippodrome on Bay Street, was designed to put the power of an entire orchestra...
Directed by Sam Taylor
Written by Allen McNeil & Tim Whelan
USA, 1927
Tsff made its merry way up to Casa Loma on Monday night for a special screening of Mary Pickford’s final silent film on the occasion of the star’s 121st birthday (the organizers even served birthday cake during the intermission). Despite an interminable, bone chilling rain (which looked rather cozy sliding down the other side of the hundred-year old Gothic Revival castle’s windows), there was a packed house on hand to experience an authentic presentation of the film as it would have been shown at a cinema palace of the era, complete with accompaniment by the irrepressible Clark Wilson on the Toronto Theatre Organ Society‘s justly celebrated Wurlitzer organ. This magnificent instrument, which once enlivened screenings at Shea’s Hippodrome on Bay Street, was designed to put the power of an entire orchestra...
- 4/9/2013
- by David Fiore
- SoundOnSight
Our daily January countdown of the 300 Greatest Films Ever Made continues, with part eight out of 30. These are numbers 230-221.
230) The Avengers (2012) Joss Whedon USA
229) Brief Encounter (1945) David Lean British
228) Oliver (1968) Carol Reed British
227) The Shawshank Redemption (1994) Frank Darabont USA
226) Marty (1955) Delbert Mann USA
225) My Man Godfrey (1936) Gregory La Cava USA
224) Beau Geste (1939) William Wellman USA
223) Goodbye Mr. Chips (1937) Sam Woods British
222) The Last Picture Show (1971) Peter Bogdonovitch USA
221) La Strada (1954) Federico Fellini Italy
Numbers 220-211 coming next.
film cultureClassicslist300...
230) The Avengers (2012) Joss Whedon USA
229) Brief Encounter (1945) David Lean British
228) Oliver (1968) Carol Reed British
227) The Shawshank Redemption (1994) Frank Darabont USA
226) Marty (1955) Delbert Mann USA
225) My Man Godfrey (1936) Gregory La Cava USA
224) Beau Geste (1939) William Wellman USA
223) Goodbye Mr. Chips (1937) Sam Woods British
222) The Last Picture Show (1971) Peter Bogdonovitch USA
221) La Strada (1954) Federico Fellini Italy
Numbers 220-211 coming next.
film cultureClassicslist300...
- 1/9/2013
- by feeds@cinelinx.com (Rob Young)
- Cinelinx
Above: Gregory La Cava (seated, right) directs Joel McCrea, Claudette Colbert and a blonde Joan Bennett.
New artistic director Chris Fujiwara's Gregory La Cava retrospective at Edinburgh International Film Festival (six films, followed by six films at Edinburgh Filmhouse after the Festival) has brought to light several obscure titles from the great Hollywood director. For instance, I heard several of the lucky few crammed into the sweaty confines of Filmhouse 3 declare the silent comedy Feel My Pulse (1928) to be their favorite experience of the fest. But Private Worlds (1935), the penultimate film shown, is pretty fascinating too.
For one thing, it demonstrates La Cava's ability to work outside the screwball comedy genre for which he was most celebrated (although the film is far from humorless). The cast, which includes Claudette Colbert, Charles Boyer, Joel McCrea and Joan Bennett, could certainly have filled out a romantic comedy to perfection (Colbert and...
New artistic director Chris Fujiwara's Gregory La Cava retrospective at Edinburgh International Film Festival (six films, followed by six films at Edinburgh Filmhouse after the Festival) has brought to light several obscure titles from the great Hollywood director. For instance, I heard several of the lucky few crammed into the sweaty confines of Filmhouse 3 declare the silent comedy Feel My Pulse (1928) to be their favorite experience of the fest. But Private Worlds (1935), the penultimate film shown, is pretty fascinating too.
For one thing, it demonstrates La Cava's ability to work outside the screwball comedy genre for which he was most celebrated (although the film is far from humorless). The cast, which includes Claudette Colbert, Charles Boyer, Joel McCrea and Joan Bennett, could certainly have filled out a romantic comedy to perfection (Colbert and...
- 7/5/2012
- MUBI
This year's Edinburgh International Film Festival bounces back with a varied and dynamic program courtesy of artistic director Chris Fujiwara, more than making up for last year's lack of a retrospective with two extensive appreciations of neglected filmmakers, Gregory La Cava from the Us and Shinji Sômai from Japan. Sômai, who died young after a career span of just twenty years, is much-appreciated in his native land but little know outside it; thanks to this show, a progressively growing band of followers are discovering his amazing oeuvre. One nice moment came when Tilda Swinton, sitting in the seat in front of me to watch The Catch (Gyoei no mure, 1983), watched Ken Ogata piloting his fishing boat out of the harbor, with his blazing red sweater and jutting cigarette, and she reached up with both hands as if to seize the image and carry it home with her to Nairn.
- 6/28/2012
- MUBI
Walking around Edinburgh today it almost felt like there was a Film Festival taking place – an improvement over last year, when even the city’s residents seemed oblivious to the whole thing. Between films today I spotted a group of journalists snapping Festival patrons Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousins (whose film What Is This Film Called Love? I am seeing tomorrow). Elliott Gould could be seen hanging around the Cineworld in Fountainbridge. I was genuinely moved to look up from the DVDs in the Filmhouse foyer today and find that the sweet little lady smiling back at me was Thelma Schoonmaker, long-time collaborator of Martin Scorsese, widow of British film legend Michael Powell, and one of the finest editors in cinema history.
I kicked off today with a documentary about which I knew zip: One Mile Away. It explores gang culture in Birmingham, and the long-standing feud between the Burger...
I kicked off today with a documentary about which I knew zip: One Mile Away. It explores gang culture in Birmingham, and the long-standing feud between the Burger...
- 6/23/2012
- by Adam Whyte
- Obsessed with Film
The 2012 installment of the Edinburgh International Film Festival runs from June 20th to July 1st, and marks the return of major awards of incarnations prior to 2011′s edition. This year’s line-up is distinctive in its feeling of being a heavily curated affair courtesy of artistic director Chris Fujiwara, rather than just a selection of films out in a few months time (though there’s still a few of those, obviously). I will be providing Sound on Sight’s first ever coverage of Eiff over the coming weeks, and this year’s line-up is an especially enticing blend of buzz films, intriguing retrospectives, global or international premieres, and an array of eclectic content.
The Michael Powell Award honours the best British film selected from the British Gala section, and the competition will include documentaries for the first time. Documentary The Imposter, a hit at Sundance, receives its UK premiere, as...
The Michael Powell Award honours the best British film selected from the British Gala section, and the competition will include documentaries for the first time. Documentary The Imposter, a hit at Sundance, receives its UK premiere, as...
- 6/10/2012
- by Josh Slater-Williams
- SoundOnSight
Ahead of the festival’s June 20th launch, Chief Executive Ken Hay and Artistic Director Chris Fujiwara today announced the 2012 Eiff’s full selection of shorts, feature films and documentaries from Screen 1 of Edinburgh’s Filmhouse.
Eager to comment on the state of contemporary cinema, while both acknowledging its colourful past and attempting to forecast its possible future, the organisers’ full line-up features one hundred and twenty-one works from fifty-two countries.
Boasting a total of seventy-six UK premières (eleven of which will also make their European début), the festival will also pay homage to a number of prolific directors from around the world, including the first complete retrospective of Japanese filmmaker Shinji Somai (Kazahana, Typhoon Club) outside of his native country; a spotlight on and masterclass workshop from Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing (The Ditch, Fengming: A Chinese Memoir); both films in steampunk legend Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo franchise; and a...
Eager to comment on the state of contemporary cinema, while both acknowledging its colourful past and attempting to forecast its possible future, the organisers’ full line-up features one hundred and twenty-one works from fifty-two countries.
Boasting a total of seventy-six UK premières (eleven of which will also make their European début), the festival will also pay homage to a number of prolific directors from around the world, including the first complete retrospective of Japanese filmmaker Shinji Somai (Kazahana, Typhoon Club) outside of his native country; a spotlight on and masterclass workshop from Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing (The Ditch, Fengming: A Chinese Memoir); both films in steampunk legend Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo franchise; and a...
- 5/30/2012
- by Steven Neish
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
Cannes is now over which means it’s time to move to Britain as the Edinburgh Film Festival kicks off!
We’ve just been sent the full line-up for the 2012 Edinburgh Film Festival which is now in it’s 66th year. We have our people (Jamie, Steven and Emma) on the ground at the event right now ready to catch as many films as they possible can throughout the next wee or two as we get to see 121 new features and 19 world premieres.
I’ll let the full press release below do the talking but let us know what you’re looking forward to in the comments section below.
World Premieres:
Berberian Sound Studio Borrowed Time Day Of The Flowers Exit Elena Flying Blind Fred Future My Love Guinea Pigs Here, Then Leave It On The Track The Life And Times Of Paul The Psychic Octopus Life Just Is Mnl...
We’ve just been sent the full line-up for the 2012 Edinburgh Film Festival which is now in it’s 66th year. We have our people (Jamie, Steven and Emma) on the ground at the event right now ready to catch as many films as they possible can throughout the next wee or two as we get to see 121 new features and 19 world premieres.
I’ll let the full press release below do the talking but let us know what you’re looking forward to in the comments section below.
World Premieres:
Berberian Sound Studio Borrowed Time Day Of The Flowers Exit Elena Flying Blind Fred Future My Love Guinea Pigs Here, Then Leave It On The Track The Life And Times Of Paul The Psychic Octopus Life Just Is Mnl...
- 5/30/2012
- by David Sztypuljak
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
The full programme for the 66th edition of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (Eiff), which runs from 20 June to 1 July, has been officially announced and will feature nineteen World premieres and thirteen International premieres.
The Festival will showcase one hundred and twenty-one new features from fifty-two countries, including eleven European premieres and seventy-six UK premieres in addition to the World and International premieres. Highlights include the World premieres of Richard Ledes’ Fred; Nathan Silver’s Exit Elena and Benjamin Pascoe’s Leave It On The Track and European premieres of Lu Sheng’s Here, There and Yang Jung-ho’s Mirage in the maiden New Perspectives section; and the International premiere of Benicio Del Toro, Pablo Trapero, Julio Medem, Elia Suleiman, Gaspar Noé, Juan Carlos Tabio and Laurent Cantet’s 7 Days In Havana and the European premiere of Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America in the Directors’ Showcase. In addition to the new features presented,...
The Festival will showcase one hundred and twenty-one new features from fifty-two countries, including eleven European premieres and seventy-six UK premieres in addition to the World and International premieres. Highlights include the World premieres of Richard Ledes’ Fred; Nathan Silver’s Exit Elena and Benjamin Pascoe’s Leave It On The Track and European premieres of Lu Sheng’s Here, There and Yang Jung-ho’s Mirage in the maiden New Perspectives section; and the International premiere of Benicio Del Toro, Pablo Trapero, Julio Medem, Elia Suleiman, Gaspar Noé, Juan Carlos Tabio and Laurent Cantet’s 7 Days In Havana and the European premiere of Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America in the Directors’ Showcase. In addition to the new features presented,...
- 5/30/2012
- by Phil
- Nerdly
Genuinely fascist films made in democratic countries are agreeably scarce, although Gregory La Cava's Gabriel Over the White House (1933)—or President Jesus Hitler as a friend dubbed it—could certainly qualify, even if it does veer around a lot, almost as if a Hollywood film were trying to avoid committing itself politically. Nominations for other fascist films will be gratefully considered.
Bulldog Drummond was featured in ten novels by a pseudonymous character called "Sapper," (to sap: to slug over the head, British slang). Drummond, an ex-soldier bored by civilian life, advertises for adventure and finds it, as detailed in 1929 Bulldog Drummond with Ronald Colman. This movie largely avoids the racism and jingoistic fervor of the source novels, and seems to play the more brutal moments for laughs, as when Colman exchanges sweet nothings with Joan Bennett while cheerfully throttling Lionel Atwill.
The books' biggest influence in an indirect one:...
Bulldog Drummond was featured in ten novels by a pseudonymous character called "Sapper," (to sap: to slug over the head, British slang). Drummond, an ex-soldier bored by civilian life, advertises for adventure and finds it, as detailed in 1929 Bulldog Drummond with Ronald Colman. This movie largely avoids the racism and jingoistic fervor of the source novels, and seems to play the more brutal moments for laughs, as when Colman exchanges sweet nothings with Joan Bennett while cheerfully throttling Lionel Atwill.
The books' biggest influence in an indirect one:...
- 4/25/2012
- MUBI
There are two stories I want to tell with this glorious 1922 poster: one is about the film itself—a forgotten silent melodrama—and the sad fates of its main protagonists, and the other is about the artist Henry Clive.
The Green Temptation, a film which I’m not even sure is extant (the silent film database silentera.com says “survival status: unknown”), starred Betty Compson as Genelle, a member of the Parisian underworld who, along with her partner Gaspard, runs a travelling theatre as a ruse to pickpocket their patrons and burgle their homes while they’re watching the show. When the First World War starts, Genelle joins the Red Cross as a nurse to evade the police and after the War emigrates to America to start a new life. But her attempt to turn over a new leaf is foiled by the reappearance of Gaspard who forces her to...
The Green Temptation, a film which I’m not even sure is extant (the silent film database silentera.com says “survival status: unknown”), starred Betty Compson as Genelle, a member of the Parisian underworld who, along with her partner Gaspard, runs a travelling theatre as a ruse to pickpocket their patrons and burgle their homes while they’re watching the show. When the First World War starts, Genelle joins the Red Cross as a nurse to evade the police and after the War emigrates to America to start a new life. But her attempt to turn over a new leaf is foiled by the reappearance of Gaspard who forces her to...
- 3/30/2012
- MUBI
Jean Dujardin kissing Oscar statuette Best Actor Oscar winner Jean Dujardin kisses his Oscar statuette at the Governors Ball 2012. For his performance as a fading silent-film star in Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist, Dujardin became the first Frenchman to win an Oscar in the acting categories: Charles Boyer, Maurice Chevalier, and Gérard Depardieu had all been nominated before, but none of them had ever won. (Photo: © A.M.P.A.S.) The list of Frenchwomen who either won or were nominated for Oscars in the acting categories is much more extensive. The French-born, American-raised Claudette Colbert was the Best Actress of 1934 for Frank Capra's comedy It Happened One Night. The other French Best Actress Oscar winners are Simone Signoret for Jack Clayton's 1959 British drama Room at the Top and Marion Cotillard for Olivier Dahan's French-language Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose. Additionally, Juliette Binoche was a...
- 3/6/2012
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Gregory La Cava and Irene Dunne
"An extraordinary movie is being screened at Anthology Film Archives [today] through Sunday," writes the New Yorker's Richard Brody: "Unfinished Business, a bitterly passionate romantic drama with a relentless comic tone, from 1941, starring Irene Dunne and Robert Montgomery and directed by Gregory La Cava. It's part of the ongoing series Stuck on the Second Tier: Underknown Auteurs, programmed by Miriam Bale, and you can't get it on home video." And it's "a minor masterwork of performance, direction, and screenwriting."
Unknown Auteurs is actually a set of series running at various locations in New York, with Anthology focusing on La Cava; the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of the Moving Image, for example, will have other editions soon, but for now, Michael Rawls has an overview of the La Cava selections in Cinespect and David Cairns wrote about Unfinished Business here in the Notebook yesterday.
"An extraordinary movie is being screened at Anthology Film Archives [today] through Sunday," writes the New Yorker's Richard Brody: "Unfinished Business, a bitterly passionate romantic drama with a relentless comic tone, from 1941, starring Irene Dunne and Robert Montgomery and directed by Gregory La Cava. It's part of the ongoing series Stuck on the Second Tier: Underknown Auteurs, programmed by Miriam Bale, and you can't get it on home video." And it's "a minor masterwork of performance, direction, and screenwriting."
Unknown Auteurs is actually a set of series running at various locations in New York, with Anthology focusing on La Cava; the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of the Moving Image, for example, will have other editions soon, but for now, Michael Rawls has an overview of the La Cava selections in Cinespect and David Cairns wrote about Unfinished Business here in the Notebook yesterday.
- 1/27/2012
- MUBI
Gregory Le Cava's Unfinished Business (1941) screens at Anthology Film Archives in New York on 27th - 29th January, along with the director's 1935 film She Married Her Boss in part of the on-going series, Stuck on the Second Tier: Underknown Auteurs.
The first distinguishing feature I noticed about Gregory La Cava's films, apart from his great ability with comedy, was the tension between humor and pain, which often seemed quite off-kilter, unpredictable, and liable to Whang you in the face. The happy ending of Stage Door (1937) is marred by our consciousness of the death of the most sympathetic and passionate character (some prints apparently include a quick shot of her grave at the end, not smoothing over the problem so much as highlighting it). When Lee Tracy prepares to beat up Lupe Velez at the end of The Half-Naked Truth (1932), and the soundtrack jauntily plays Mendelssohn's Wedding March, the modern sensibility rather shudders.
The first distinguishing feature I noticed about Gregory La Cava's films, apart from his great ability with comedy, was the tension between humor and pain, which often seemed quite off-kilter, unpredictable, and liable to Whang you in the face. The happy ending of Stage Door (1937) is marred by our consciousness of the death of the most sympathetic and passionate character (some prints apparently include a quick shot of her grave at the end, not smoothing over the problem so much as highlighting it). When Lee Tracy prepares to beat up Lupe Velez at the end of The Half-Naked Truth (1932), and the soundtrack jauntily plays Mendelssohn's Wedding March, the modern sensibility rather shudders.
- 1/26/2012
- MUBI
Part of a series by David Cairns on forgotten pre-Code films.
Trawling through Hollywood musicals before Gold Diggers of 1933 is a fascinating job. Asides from Lubitsch and the operetta-film, the most salient feature of films like Sunnyside Up (1929) and Follow Thru (1930) is the slenderness of their plots, which are willowy and attenuated in the extreme. Of course one expects musicals to have rather lightweight, simplistic storylines, but these movies extend rudimentary narrative conceits farther than one would think possible, coasting on pure charm.
In today's cinematic world, the art of the musical looks hopelessly difficult: how do you maintain enough story tension to keep the audience hooked, while suspending plot for minutes at a time to indulge in musical numbers which tend to capture the mood of a moment, extending it well past any narrative requirement? In the 30s, they not only did it regularly and effortlessly, they didn't...
Trawling through Hollywood musicals before Gold Diggers of 1933 is a fascinating job. Asides from Lubitsch and the operetta-film, the most salient feature of films like Sunnyside Up (1929) and Follow Thru (1930) is the slenderness of their plots, which are willowy and attenuated in the extreme. Of course one expects musicals to have rather lightweight, simplistic storylines, but these movies extend rudimentary narrative conceits farther than one would think possible, coasting on pure charm.
In today's cinematic world, the art of the musical looks hopelessly difficult: how do you maintain enough story tension to keep the audience hooked, while suspending plot for minutes at a time to indulge in musical numbers which tend to capture the mood of a moment, extending it well past any narrative requirement? In the 30s, they not only did it regularly and effortlessly, they didn't...
- 12/22/2011
- MUBI
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