One of the lesser lights in the Screen Gems Shock TV package that helped initiate the Monster Kid boom in the late 50s. These lurid, cheap but slickly produced double feature items, usually running between 60 and 75 minutes, were ideal for programming in 90 minute time slots with commercials. At least this one has…
Based on a novel by Sloan Wilson and directed by Nunnally Johnson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit follows the lead of The Best Years of Our Lives as it traces the trajectory of a troubled World War II vet while at the same time explicitly addressing the effects of PTSD (referred to in…
Based on Victor Hugo’s 19th century novel, Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs is one of the most influential achievements in film history, if for no other reason than as the inspiration for The Joker. A soulful Conrad Veidt stars as Gwynplaine, a circus clown whose permanent grimace is a mocking reminder of his miserable…
Originally titled The Man Who Changed His Mind, this nimble and witty British film about a scientist specializing in mind transferals deserves a much bigger audience. Robert Stevenson directs in an energetic style that belies the occasionally stage bound work found in his later studio blockbusters and a premium band of screenwriters, including John Balderston…
For better and for worse, John Ford understood tall tales helped shape America as much as the truth—The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is the director’s tribute to the lies we tell ourselves about our heroes. James Stewart is the country lawyer who gains fame and fortune thanks to John Wayne’s selfless act and Lee…
Notorious envelope-pusher Otto Preminger was the first to produce an adult movie about drug addiction, based on Nelson Algren’s novel about a heroin addict’s desperation to kick the habit. Released without an MPAA seal, it helped liberate subsequent films from the rigid strictures of the production code. Elmer Bernstein’s jazz score and Saul Bass’s title…
Perfectly cast down to the smallest roles, director John Frankenheimer’s stunning satirical thriller was part of his remarkable run of quality hits during the 1960s. Oddly, this one was not a box office success and its classic status only kicked in when it was reissued in 1988, after being pulled from distribution following the Kennedy…
Lawrence Turman’s film stands alongside Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, Blume in Love and other films of the late 60’s/early 70’s that found middle class Americans fed up and frustrated in their search for marital bliss. Carrying on in that tradition, Stockbroker zeroes in on one man’s attempt to patch up his empty union through the fine art of…
John Landis was the natural choice to talk about this middling post-Thalberg Marx Bros. movie. Can you guess why? Because it has Charlie Gemora in a Gorilla Suit! Groucho introduces the now iconic, W.S. Gilbert-inspired song “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”. This is the one where the boys save a circus from bankruptcy. Kinda topical, except…
Julian Roffman’s The Mask, Canada’s first horror film, alternates a routine 2-D horror story with trippy psychedelic fantasy sequences centering on a haunted Aztec artifact. Viewers were given Magic Mystic Masks to see the dreams in anaglyphic 3-D (no, they didn’t look anything like the clunky mask seen in this odd trailer). Reissued repeatedly over the years as Eyes…
The Wachowski Sisters’ genre bending thriller plays more levels of 3-D chess than perhaps Spock himself could have handled. The directors tapped into some mind-meld with moviegoers as well; The Matrix was a smash hit making way for two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. Stylistically innovative and much copied, the film starred Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and…
This theatrical mashup of TV’s The Virginian comes with a heavyweight pedigree—Sam Fuller is one of the directors and the stars include Charles Grodin, Lee Marvin, and Charles Bronson. Pity the poor movie editors, they were working with material from two separate episodes, 1962’s It Tolls For Thee and Reckoning from 1967.
A wild night on the town with departing soldiers leaves small town girl Trudy Kockenlocker with child–but she can’t remember who the father is, so the lovestruck schnook Norval Jones is recruited to protect her honor. Although it was Paramount’s biggest hit of 1944 (after being held on the shelf for a year), Preston Sturges’…
Blithely thumbing his nose at the Hays office, Preston Sturges’s wartime farce concerns a virginal young woman who goes a little too far in her support for the troops – the fact that her name, Trudy Kockenlocker, is not the movie’s most outrageous element should tell you all you need to know. Starring Eddie Bracken and…
Low rent but affectionately made by professional monster movie fans, this modest Creature imitation didn’t garner many theatrical playdates but had a long afterlife on tv Double Chiller programs. The well constructed Monster is considerably less sympathetic than his Black Lagoon compatriot. The producers missed a bet by not hiring their lead actor, radio star Les…
Reuniting the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, the Wolfman and the Mummy for the first time since Paul Naschy’s Assignment Terror, director Fred Dekker’s affectionate horror comedy simultaneously salutes the classic Universal Monsters and the nostalgia for our own childhoods. Though the box office was initially meager, the film engendered the good will of critics and has endured as…
Too close for comfort, Frank Borzage’s 1940 drama reunites the stars of The Shop Around the Corner, James Stewart, Margret Sullavan and Frank Morgan, in far more ominous circumstances – the overthrow of Germany by fascist rule. One of the first Hollywood “resistance” films, the movie features Father Knows Best star Robert Young as an up and…
The pitfalls and pleasures of a love triangle are at the heart of Jean Eustache’s 1971 film. Produced during the heyday of Jean-Luc Godard and Bernardo Bertolucci, Eustache dines off the cinematic freedoms those directors helped to win. Bernadette Lafont, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and Françoise Lebrun play the star-crossed lovers. Cahiers du cinéma called it the…
The second of Universal’s cookie-cutter sequels to 1933’s The Mummy and the first to star Lon Chaney Jr. This is a direct follow-up to the somewhat more lavish The Mummy’s Hand (thanks in large part to its appropriation of sets from Green Hell). Dick Foran and Wallace Ford, the stars of Hand, reappear, this time older but not much wiser as…
The onscreen title reads Ken Russell’s Film on Tchaikovsky and The Music Lovers, to differentiate it from a Russian film released the previous year. One of Russell’s most gloriously lurid fantasias, with Richard Chamberlain and Glenda Jackson brilliant as the haunted composer and his mad nymphomaniacal wife. Despite its many memorable and even shocking sequences…
Stuck in a steamy South American jungle and a decidedly unsteamy marriage, newlyweds Charlton Heston and Eleanor Parker don’t find real love until they’re visited by a swarm of voracious army ants; the “marabunta.” Produced by George Pal and directed by Byron Haskin, this preposterously enjoyable film was based on Carl Stephenson’s pulp thriller, Leiningen…
Richard Fleischer’s thriller achieves classic noir status thanks to Earl Felton’s Oscar nominated script—the dialog is so hard boiled it sizzles. The terrific Charles McGraw plays a cop protecting a gangster’s girlfriend train-bound for the grand jury—assorted assassins and gangsters have other ideas. As the unmanageable mobster’s moll, the great Marie Windsor is one of…
Based on Michael Ende’s epic fable, Wolfgang Peterson’s adaptation is a story within a story: a bullied child takes refuge in a mysterious book of fantasy and finds himself the hero of the tale. Released in 1985, Peterson’s film was the most expensive to be produced outside of the United States but more than made…
An uncooperative Marlon Brando put director Hubert Cornfield through the ringer during this offbeat French-made kidnap thriller, but the resultant film still has its perverse merits. Look for the Rita Moreno bathtub scene where Brando showed up drunk and Cornfield had to cut around him.
The only movie directed by Charles Laughton but he made it count. A brilliant mix of heavenly poetry and harrowing horror film, James Agee’s script, seemingly influenced by the New Testament and Jim Thompson, tells the story of a psychotic preacher (played by a terrifying Robert Mitchum) and his unstoppable hunt for some stolen loot….
Produced by Dan Curtis and directed by John Llewellyn Moxey, The Night Stalker was one of the most popular TV movies in history, a bracing mix of retro horror and 70s exploitation with an inspired setting: Las Vegas, where everyone keeps vampire hours. Darren McGavin is none other than Carl Kolchak who is perhaps the…