Cary, Audrey, a clever Peter Stone script, sparkling direction by Stanley Donen on fabulous Paris locations, a memorable Mancini score and a breakout supporting cast–what more do you want? Often called the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made. Remade to no particular effect as The Truth About Charlie in 2002.
This taut, underrated Don Siegel thriller stars Walter Matthau in one his greatest roles as a small time crook in trouble with the mob, although Matthau inexplicably bad-mouthed the movie after making it. So good it takes two Grindhouse Gurus to do it justice!
Michael Winner’s cynical, violent Vietnam-era western pits stoic lone Apache Charles Bronson against a colorful posse of rapists and murderers led by Jack Palance and a really good cast. “The scream of his victims is the only sound he makes!” was the ad line. TFH Guru John Landis was actually there on the set to…
Although this low budget musical fantasy is, amazingly, not the only talking vagina movie (Pussy Talk, anyone?), it’s certainly the only one fronted by the literally bouncy Candice Rialson, who squeezes as much charm out of the silly proceedings as possible.
Underrated sequel-cum-remake of Village of the Damned didn’t get much attention in 1963, but it’s a gripping and well-made movie with plenty to say politically and allegorically. One of the better British films of a fertile period.
Positioned in this American trailer as the French answer to Gone With the Wind, Marcel Carne’s two-part,three hour meditation on the 19th century theater world (paradis is the name for the gallery, the second balcony) was voted Best Film Ever in a poll of Gallic critics and celebrities in 1995. Nonetheless it is not widely known today,…
Though the title sounds like an SCTV parody of a Bergman film, Joan Micklin Silver’s dramedy was first released in 1979 as Head Over Heels and was very obviously a romantic comedy. Since the box office was underwhelming, distributors lopped off the original’s happy ending and changed the name. Voila, a more successful film. Go…
One of the greatest of all film noirs came at the very end of the cycle. A troubled production whose cinematographer and composer were replaced at the last minute (Jerry Goldsmith had only ten days to write and record his classic score). Writer Robert Towne (who won an Oscar) initially envisioned this as the first…
(AKA: Fist of Fury) The amazing Bruce Lee’s second Hong Kong starring vehicle is a bigger-budget step up from his first, The Big Boss. There’s a lot of title confusion over the various global releases of this Raymond Chow production, but not enough to keep it from being widely considered a martial arts classic. This…
JeeJa Yanin plays Zen, an autistic teen who uses her extraordinary Taekwondo skills to settle a score in Prachya Pinkaew’s wild Thai thriller from 2008. Though critical reaction was mixed, the movie lit up the box office and a 3D sequel was quickly announced. Director Pinkaew built the film around the young Yanin’s very real…
A cozy bit of holiday fluff directed by Peter Godfrey and starring the usually uncompromising Barbara Stanwyck as Elizabeth Lane, a Manhattan food critic who masquerades as a Connecticut farm wife complete with fictitious family. The charade ends in ruins but happy-go-lucky Dennis Morgan is there to soften the blow. Sydney Greenstreet plays her unsuspecting…
Like Saps at Sea, this Hal Roach Laurel & Hardy vehicle was originally conceived as a four-reeler, but was bumped up to 63 minutes to compete in the feature market. These were arguably their last substantial feature releases before a contract with 20th Century Fox reduced them to formula B-pictures. It’s a cultural crime that…
Living up to its title, Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express moves like a bullet train, deftly switching tracks between two stories about lonely cops—one infatuated with a beautiful drug smuggler and the other whose world is turned upside-down by a fast food waitress. Released through Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder company, the 1994 movie was a sizable…
“Terrific as all Creation!” Wesley Ruggles’s film adaptation of Edna Ferber’s epic novel won the Oscar for Best Picture, helping to establish the RKO studio. Noble Richard Dix and beautiful Irene Dunne’s complex characters span 40 years of Oklahoma history — the oil wells arrive, the wild west fades, and Dix’s heroic Yancey Cravat never…
Back in the days when moviegoing was an event, the Roadshow Attraction was a special audience-pleaser designed to run for months in the same theater with reserved seating and, naturally, increased ticket prices. Of all the big-screen processes designed to lure audiences out of their living rooms and away from the dreaded picture tube, Cinerama…
German actor Anton Diffring, who specialized in playing Nazis and sinister aristocrats, is the psychotic plastic surgeon who takes over a French circus and populates it with disfigured criminals whose faces he reconstructs. Director Sidney Hayers topped this a year later with “Burn Witch Burn”. The theme song “Look for a Star” became an unexpected…
One of numerous entertaining coproductions based on the voluminous writings of British mystery writer Edgar Wallace, this was released in Germany and the US only in black-and-white, the latter in a heavily cut version and the former because the German coproducers wanted to promote another film, Phantom of Soho, as the first color Edgar Wallace…
The last of the extravagantly mounted epics produced by Samuel Bronston in the sixties, Circus World stars John Wayne as a two-fisted sharpshooter named Matt Masters taxed with rescuing both a struggling circus and his dysfunctional family, each of them acrobats with their own soap operatic problems. Working from a story by Nicholas Ray, the…
For years Orson Welles had to deal with the perception of failure when none of his subsequent works had equivalent cultural impact, but let’s face it, the legacy of Kane is the legacy of movies. Despite brilliant later work, Welles remained indelibly defined by his monumental debut– perhaps ultimately not a bad thing considering it’s…
Also known as The Gates of Hell (among other titles), this gruesome entry is the first of a loose Lucio Fulci trilogy including The Beyond and The House By the Cemetery. When the Gates of Hell are opened, hordes of ravenous levitating zombies are unleashed and reporter Christopher George has to travel to Lovecraft’s Dunwich…
A gentle comedy about a not-so-gentle subject, the hardscrabble life of an unmarried black woman and her lively brood circa 1974, Claudine stars Diahann Carroll as the set-upon title character and James Earl Jones as the big-hearted garbage man come courting. Carroll earned an Oscar nomination and the script received a Writer’s Guild nomination for…
It’s not part of our Movies You Never Heard Of series but Tom Stern and Lane Slate’s Clay Pigeon certainly qualifies. This low budget indie about a Vietnam vet-turned undercover informer has more than enough quirky qualities to recommend it. Stern also stars as the shaggy-haired decoy and Telly Savalas is the manipulative agent who…
There’s never been anything quite like it, before or since. Years in the making and more notable for its long term show biz fallout than its actual merits, this spectacularly mounted historical effusion is the very definition of the Troubled Production. There are many published treatises on the unmaking of this movie, none more insightful than harried producer Walter…
Folks not familiar with the wild and wacky ways of contemporary Chinese horror films, particularly those that add humor to the mix, will probably be asking for the license plate of the truck that just ran them over after experiencing Sammo Hung’s 1980 freak show. Hung’s film is emblematic of the bizarre, anything-goes aspect of…
Steven Spielberg was playing with house money after the enormous success of Jaws and he struck pay dirt again with this epic sci-fi fantasy chock-full of brilliantly composed panoramas and cracker-jack suspense scenes. Filming largely on the biggest indoor set ever constructed (inside a gigantic World War II dirigible hangar in Mobile, Alabama), CT3K races through its 137 minutes without breaking a sweat,…
Lana and Lilly Wachowski and Tom Tykwer’s 2012 epic fantasy features a formidable cast who inhabit different characters as they wander through six different eras with each timeframe sporting a different plot. Luckily for the audience those tangled storylines seem to cohere by movie’s end. Jumping back and forth from the 18th century to the…