Director Carol Reed filmed his extremely well-cast adaptation of Grahame Greene’s spy novel on location in Havana only three months after Fidel Castro’s January 1959 revolution, and completed it just before Cuba aligned itself with the Soviet Union. Alberto Cavalcanti had explored the idea of directing this in the late ’40s (but set in Estonia)…
Jack Clayton’s 1967 film is a one-of-a-kind gothic-drama about a steely band of children who keep the news of their mother’s death a secret rather than be dispersed to an orphanage. Skirting the edge of horror, the movie is more melancholy and suspenseful than scary with superb performances from Pamela Franklin and Dirk Bogarde as…
A quintessential “coming of age” film, Jim McKay’s drama is a stirring example of empathetic moviemaking. Kerry Washington, Melissa Martinez, and Anna Simpson are three African-American teens navigating a rocky road to adulthood where marching bands and motherhood share equal weight. McKay wrote the unusually perceptive screenplay.
A movie that could just as easily qualify for TFH’s Movies You Never Heard Of, Peter Hyams’ little-seen teen soaper is a sensitive look at life in a girl’s school circa 1955. Featuring TV stars Pamela Sue Martin and Parker Stevenson, the movie is an uncharacteristically modest effort from action maven Hyams and it deserves…
Although it didn’t make much of a box office dent when new, TFH guru Jonathan Kaplan’s bleak portrait of rootless suburban kids in an ’80s “model community” still packs a punch. Benefits from naturalistic and starkly credible performances from a charismatic teenage cast, several of whom went on to stardom. Co-written by TFH guru Tim…
Daniel Kremer updated Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker for this moody mystery about a radio jock investigating a murder. Photographed in sumptuous black and white by Aaron Hollander, the two hour and fifty minute movie justifies its reputation as an “existential epic neo-noir.”
An odd-man-out on director Daniel Haller’s resume, Paddy is a Ireland-set romantic comedy starring the great Dublin-born actor Milo O’Shea. Haller, best known for his wizardly art direction on Roger Corman’s Poe films, had some financial assistance from his old boss to put the movie in motion. Co-starring a cast of the Emerald Isle’s best…
Movie musicals don’t come with a more problematic pedigree than director Josh Logan’s PAINT YOUR WAGON. Starring two notably tone-deaf non-singers, Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, and written by that exemplar of “Kitchen Sink” realism, Paddy Chayefsky, Logan’s film is a 2 1/2 hour musical made at a time when the genre was considered box-office…
Set in the world of Yakuzas and gambling dens, Masahiro Shinoda’s 1964 film features the kind of star-crossed lovers that populated great American noir movies of the forties. Ryō Ikebe plays a hitman who enters into a fraught relationship with a kindred soul played by Mariko Kaga. Things spiral from there. Merciless but poignant, Shinoda’s…
The original title of this influential screwball comedy was Is Marriage Necessary?, but even though writer-director Preston Sturges was on a roll, he couldn’t get that one past the Hays Office. This was Joel McCrea’s second Sturges lead after the fabulous Sullivan’s Travels and the seventh of ten Sturges-written movies in which William Demarest appeared….
Before Contagion, before Outbreak, there was this scarifying 50s germfest. Shot semi-documentary style on evocative New Orleans locations, Elia Kazan’s sixth feature outing incorporates film noir elements into its story of US Public Health officials trying to prevent a plague from spreading through the populace via some infected criminals. Film debuts of Jack Palance and…
Peter Bogdanovich followed the success of The Last Picture Show with this deliberately retro thirties-style portrait of a depression-era con man and the little girl he may be passing off as his daughter. Ryan O’Neal has the Adolphe Menjou part and his daughter Tatum plays the Shirley Temple role.
An ailing schoolgirl’s sketches become disturbingly real in her dreams. THF Guru Bernard Rose’s debut film is an unnerving fantasy nightmare, based on Catherine Storr’s juvenile novel “Marianne Dreams”, that deserves to be better known. Its Lewtonesque dream psychology recalls The Curse of the Cat People as well as Night of the Hunter, Invaders from…
One of the most charming movies ever made, Lewis Gilbert’s bittersweet comedy is escapist entertainment at its best. Kenneth More plays the by-the-book butler to a household of insufferable snobs—the tables are turned, and how, when the whole crew is shipwrecked on a paradisiacal island. Sally Ann Howes is the prim aristocrat turned swinging Jane…
A corporation devoted to political assassinations?! What seemed pretty far out to some critics in 1974 doesn’t look quite so crazy 40 years later. The second entry in what has been called Alan Pakula’s political paranoia trilogy (following Klute and preceding All the President’s Men) benefits from striking Gordon Willis camerawork and a sharp script…
Kermit Schafer was a man who got rich off other people’s mistakes—”bloopers” he called them—and he broke the bank with a series of best-selling comedy records featuring the most celebrated gaffes. In 1974 he rolled the dice and put together a theatrical version, Pardon My Blooper. Dick Clark came on board for the TV edition…
Martin Ritt’s film about struggling jazz musicians in Paris circa 1961 comes with quite a pedigree, including Duke Ellington’s soundtrack, Louis Armstrong in a prominent role, and evocative black and white cinematography by the great Christian Matras (Jean Renoir’s La Grand Illusion and Max Ophüls’s The Earrings of Madame De…). Not to mention two superb…
Wim Wenders’ 1984 French-German coproduction features a typically (for Wenders) unconventional cast, including the great Harry Dean Stanton as an amnesiac who enlists his brother (Dean Stockwell) in a search for Stanton’s runaway wife played by Nastassja Kinski. Wenders brings a poker-faced European sensibility to the backwaters of America with compelling results. The stellar crew…
Wim Wenders’ fatalistic road movie stars Harry Dean Stanton as an amnesiac who wanders Texas in search of his lost wife. Dean Stockwell co-stars as Stanton’s estranged brother and Nastassja Kinski is Stanton’s runaway bride. Graced with a keenly literate script by L.M. Kit Carson and Sam Shepard, the film is made complete by Ry…
After adapting The Manchurian Candidate, legendary screenwriter George Axelrod turned his attention to this “marshmallow-weight hokum” directed by Richard Quine. William Holden and Audrey Hepburn play a capricious screenwriter and his eager to please secretary in a comedy rife with in-jokes and cameos including Tony Curtis and Marlene Dietrich. The passage of time has given…
A gritty newspaper saga about two battling tabloids shot like one of Fuller’s war movies, Park Row was one from the heart. Fuller began his career as a crime reporter at the ripe old age of 17 and claimed this period drama as his favorite of his films. Ignoring his pal Darryl Zanuck’s suggestion that he make it…
Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers approach silent-movie purity in this non-stop, quintessentially ’60s gag fest set at the kind of Hollywood party that Fatty Arbuckle wishes he’d lived to see.
Sam Peckinpah’s elegiac farewell to the western genre evokes the death of the old west by relentlessly killing off its character actors. Another troubled production released in a truncated version which has been supplanted by two re-edited variants. But in any condition it’s a melancholy, beautiful movie. An exhaustive accounting of the brouhaha is chronicled in Paul Seydor’s The…
Based on an actual incident, Kubrick’s powerful anti-war classic is his first masterpiece, featuring an unforgettable ensemble of Hollywood actors at the top of their game. Bavaria stands in for WWI France and the trench warfare scenes are the most harrowing ever. With one of the great endings of all time. If you don’t tear…
Based on an actual incident, Stanley Kubrick’s scathing anti-war classic set in the mud-packed trenches of WWI is his first masterpiece, featuring an unforgettable ensemble of Hollywood actors at the top of their game. Bavaria stands in for France as Kubrick’s effortlessly mobile camera prowls the trenches as with the elan of a Max Ophuls. With…
Jerry Lewis writes, directs, produces, stars, and probably does the craft service on this showbiz comedy made toward the end of his Paramount contract. It plays today somewhat like an early version of Entourage and may well be revealing of Jerry’s view of his own place in the Hollywood firmament.