Wonder of wonders — restored to HD, Warners’ ode to high art generates big magic through Shakepeare’s giddy romantic comedy. Newcomer Olivia de Havilland romps with Dick Powell, Ross Alexander and Jean Muir, while James Cagney, Joe E. Brown, Frank McHugh and Co. clown it up like happy idiots. Backed by the music of Mendelssohn,…
Jack Nicholson’s second breakthrough film and the first to show his dramatic range is Bob Rafelson and Carole Eastman’s portrait of an unsettled drifter. Bobby Dupea is described by Criterion as an alienated & irresponsible cad — but one caught between a heritage in the arts and a trailer park working man’s life. It’s a…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week, a trio of Shakespeare movies. You didn’t know they had movies back then, did you? A wine pairing will be given for each. From 1996, we have Looking for Richard….
Severin Slays with disc virtuosity … by reaching into the BBC archives for a 4K remaster of Peter Watkins’ searing ‘documentary’ of nuclear war in England’s County Kent. With minimal resources and maximum creativity, Watkins’ atomic horrorshow was deemed excellent yet was banned from the airwaves, starting a censorship controversy that still hasn’t cooled down….
For his third feature film Fred Zinnemann scored big with a grim story of Nazi terror that finally took note of the Concentration Camps, if not the full immensity of their horror. Spencer Tracy’s everyman fugitive one of seven escapees, and the people he meets and things he sees would send any war industry worker…
Sony surprises us with another fine 4K upgrade for an unheralded classic in the Columbia library. It’s a shipwreck survival tale that challenges ship’s officer Tyrone Power with a series of impossible decisions. The most important is a heartbreaker: everyone will drown if the 9-person lifeboat continues to carry the 26 people presently clinging to…
This early starring feature for Jean-Paul Belmondo co-stars him with Christine Kaufmann in an episodic crime tale. One friend tries to spring another from prison, while contending with gangsters on his home turf. It’s uneven but has many excellent scenes, especially a midsection filmed in le taule. Also starring Michel Constantine and Béatrice Altariba, and…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week we get vengeful, as we pair wines with movies about getting even. Denmark produced Riders of Justice in 2020. In case you didn’t think the Danes had a good sense…
Pacifism goes Panavision and color in Richard Attenborough’s first directorial effort, a musical epic of the tragedy of World War One. The mirth and magic — and despair — comes from songs sung in the trenches, that were given alternate, irreverent lyrics by the soldiers themselves. An endless cast of English stars appear, in good…
