Most film noirs are notable for their low budgets and scrappy attitude but producer Mark Hellinger’s hard-boiled detective drama is Tiffany-level moviemaking all the way. Jules Dassin, director of art house favorites like Rififi and Phaedra, is at the helm, Barry Fitzgerald stars and the Oscar-winning cinematography is by Hollywood veteran William Daniels (Camille, The…
Roger’s 1956 trip to Hawaii resulted in two movies (naturally) and this one was so well plotted by Chuck Griffith and Mark Hanna that he remade it several times under different titles and in different locations. Look for later leads Dick Miller and Jonathan Haze in supporting henchmen roles. Then- girlfriend Beverly Garland stars in…
Cornel Wilde directs and stars in this landmark survivalist thriller based on a historical incident originally involving a trapper being chased across country by Blackfoot Indians. Transposed to South African locations, it became one of the most popular films of its era, and was hilariously referenced in Carl Reiner’s Where’s Poppa?.
Art Gilmore’s breathless narration propels us through this classic trailer for the third collaboration between James Stewart and Anthony Mann, a rugged five-character psychological western with a great cast and gorgeous Rocky Mountain locations.
Sci-fi specialist Jack Arnold’s best Western casts Audie Murphy against type -or is he?- as a cold-blooded hit man who just might be Death personified and brings fear to a town full of guilty people. An underrated gem.
Middle-aged leading ladies from prior decades found new starring opportunities during the sixties in lurid horror followups to the successful Davis/Crawford vehicle Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. One of the best of these was this well-received Hammer suspense thriller starring Bette Davis in one of her most sinister yet touching late career roles.
Shot mostly in sequence with entirely on-set sound recording, this free-form metaphor for American society circa 1975 is one of Robert Altman’s most acclaimed and yet controversial projects. Susan Anspach was originally cast in the Ronee Blakeley role and Robert Duvall turned down the country star role that Henry Gibson played–the jury is out on…
Shot mostly in sequence with entirely on-set sound recording, this free-form metaphor for American society circa 1975 is one of Robert Altman’s most acclaimed and yet controversial projects. Susan Anspach was originally cast in the Ronee Blakeley role and Robert Duvall turned down the country star role that Henry Gibson played – the jury is…
It’s a rough road to country music stardom for a briefly virginal Loretta Lynn wannabe in this fast-paced rags-to-riches “hicksploitation” saga, New World style.
Bud and Lou’s second WW II service comedy was another huge hit, but ran afoul of wartime censors because of a scene where Lou takes command of a destroyer and crashes it. The sequence was finally allowed but only after a reshoot transformed it into a dream sequence.
For her second film, director Kathryn Bigelow’s original intention had been to make a revisionist western, but when it became apparent nobody was funding horse operas in 1987 she and co-writer Eric Red decided to turn their project into a genre hybrid–a vampire western. Aside from Curse of the Undead (1959), Billy the Kid Meets…
Lynne Ramsey’s chilling 2012 US-British horror film, about a young sociopath whose sadistic disposition turns murderous, skirts the line between exploitation and art. Tilda Swinson plays Kevin’s tragically ineffectual mother and John C. Reilly co-stars as his oblivious father. Both the long-gestating film and Swinson nabbed several awards including the Palme d’Or at Cannes and…
One of the most prescient and corrosive satires ever filmed, Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning screenplay is brilliantly realized by director Sidney Lumet, with an exceptional cast at its collective best. Stunningly transgressive in 1976, today it plays like a documentary and the bizarre programming on the fictional UBS Network looks positively classical compared to what we’re…
W.C. Fields’ last starring vehicle was shot under the title The Great Man, and despite a host of studio-mandated cuts, stands as a triumphantly nonsensical, semi-autobiographical farrago of unreconstructed Fieldsiana. Sadly, few original Fields trailers exist so this one is a fan-made attempt to duplicate the style of Universal promotion circa 1941.
Controversial and little seen in its day, this well done social problem drama made for an uncharacteristic and correspondingly uncommercial project for Hammer Films, which tried to sell it as a maniac-on-the- loose movie. British critics labeled it sordid and tasteless, but in fact it was ahead of its time in its consideration of child…
Hobbled by studio cuts and ignored at the box office, Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York was conceived as a tribute to “event” movies like Cukor’s A Star is Born—musical epics that leaned on complex characterizations as much as a good showstopper. Robert De Niro flexes his acting chops as a volatile jazz musician and…
Released soon after Pearl Harbor, audiences in 1941 didn’t find this Runyonesque comic melodrama in which familiar Warner gangsters unite to fight Nazis all that funny. But years of tv exposure has built up the following it deserves. It’s no To Be Or Not To Be, but Vincent Sherman’s second time directing Bogart (and a…
Jonathan Kaplan relives his frenetic directorial debut on the third of New World’s five low-budget nubile-nurses-in-trouble movies. More overtly comic than previous entries, this was also Julie Corman’s first outing as producer. NSFW.
Set in a supernatural museum decorated by foreboding artworks, Rod Serling’s Night Gallery premiered in 1969 on NBC. The pilot episode featured three stories, The Cemetery, with Roddy McDowall, Escape Route with Richard Kiley, and, its most celebrated effort, Eyes, starring Joan Crawford, and directed by Steven Spielberg. The show went on to a three…
No, not the 1982 Barbra Streisand movie (which come to think of it might be equally unfamiliar), but Basil Dearden’s sadly obscure 1962 British drama which received a barely noticeable US release a year later from the tiny Colorama Features. A mouth-wateringly rare assembly of jazz greats is on display jamming it up behind the…
One-time industrial filmmaker George Romero’s seminal Pittsburgh indie (an unauthorized re-imagining of “I Am Legend”) changed the face of horror films and redefined the word “zombie” for a generation. It spawned a flood of imitations, but a copyright snafu sent Romero’s signature work into the public domain and he had to remake it in color…
Although some bemoan Irving Thalberg’s civilizing influence on the Marx Brothers when they moved to MGM, this is probably their most popular picture. And seen with an audience, one of their all-time funniest.
Tormented heroine Barbara Stanwyck is haunted by an expressionistic dreamworld in 1964’s The Night Walker, William Castle’s speedy follow-up to that same year’s Strait-Jacket. The Night Walker also recycles that thriller’s template, switching out Joan Crawford for Stanwyck in the faded Hollywood star department and bringing back Robert Bloch to fashion yet another macabre storyline. This was Stanwyck’s…
One of the darkest major studio movies of the post-war period, this bleakly cynical melodrama anticipates the most nihilistic upcoming noirs despite its classy auspices. A movie Tom Cruise needs to remake.
Masters of Horror directors Mick Garris and Joe Dante team up with cultish mischief makers Ryûhei Kitamura, David Slade, and Alejandro Brugués to breathe life into the venerable horror anthology genre a la Dr. Terror’s House of Horror. Mickey Rourke stars as a sinister projectionist who screens horror films with all-too-real consequences for his audience.
A topsy-turvy take on The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ursula Andress, John Derek and Aldo Ray engage in some murderous fun and games in this 1965 potboiler directed by Hollywood stalwart Marc Lawrence. Shot in a little over two weeks in Calabasas, California, Lawrence co-wrote the steamy screenplay with his wife Fanya.