Category Archives: Commentaries

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Who better to front one of our most extensive playlists than Roger Corman? Here’s a selection of Roger’s other commentaries along with some of our gurus paying homage to Roger’s own films.

The Roger Corman Playlist

All-star cold war thrills from the writer of North By Northwest set against the colorful background of the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm. The basic plot gimmick involving dual roles for Edward G. Robinson was later lifted for a Man from U.N.C.L.E. movie, The Spy with My Face. The huge cast is tops. Britt Ekland can be spotted in her first Hollywood movie in a bit part (as a nudist, no less).

George Sidney’s terrific film adaptation of the popular Broadway musical (derived from Taming of the Shrew) underwent a lot of cleaning up from the Hays Office, which removed numerous suggestive lyrics and risque jokes. Even so, it’s considered one of the most entertaining of the vaunted MGM musicals and still enchants today. Although the cleverly shot 3-D version initially racked up stronger grosses, the film played the majority of its major dates, including Radio City Music Hall, in 2D.

Original trailer right here!

Set on the French Riviera during the roaring 20′s, Sandy Wilson’s smash 1954 London musical production ran for 2,078 performances to great acclaim. Julie Andrews made her Broadway debut in the starring role the same year, but when Ken Russell mounted his 1971 film version he chose current pop culture icon Twiggy for the lead, and she gave an unexpectedly charming and delightful performance. However, notorious MGM honcho James Aubrey reduced the US running time from 136 to 109 minutes. In 1987 MGM/UA’s Mike Schlesinger engineered a reissue of the uncut version, which is now available on DVD from Warner Archive.

Here’s the original trailer.

Oscar-nominated Gary Busey lost 32 pounds to play doomed rocker Holly, who weighed 146 at the time of his death. Busey had previously been slated to play Crickets drummer Jerry Allison in an aborted earlier attempt to dramatize Holly’s life called Three Sided Coin, which was cancelled by 20th Century Fox over rights issues. Director Steve Rash made a splash with this, his first feature, that was never to be repeated.

Click here for the original trailer.

Socially committed filmmaker Cornel Wilde (who often specialized in directing showcases for his wife, Jean Wallace) depicts a future societal breakdown brought on by global famine and pollution. In today’s genetically engineered Frankenfood society it’s only a matter of time before someone pounces on this one for a remake, as it features all the sensational elements that make for commercial prospects today.

Francis Coppola’s idealistic attempt to transform the way movies were made upended his career when it crashed and burned, taking his Zoetrope studio with it. Set in Las Vegas but filmed entirely on sound stages to heighten the artificiality, it featured a number of audacious stylistic touches, but despite them (or perhaps because of them), audiences found the end result pretentious and uninvolving. Even so, its adherents see it as a brave, innovative film with a great soundtrack.

This was Matt Dillon’s third featured role in a film based on an S.E. Hinton novel, shot back-to-back by Francis Coppola immediately after finishing The Outsiders, which shares much the same cast and crew. What was viewed as its self-indulgent art-house aura turned off audiences and critics, but modern viewers have begun to warm up to this expressionistic and bracingly experimental effort, which was characterized at the time by Time critic Richard Corliss as “Coppola’s professional suicide note to the industry”.