One of the most influential movies of the 1960s, Robert Aldrich’s celebrated Hollywood Gothic was the first movie to open widely in “Flagship Theaters” instead of playing initial dates in top urban houses and changed distributor release patterns forever more. It didn’t exactly hurt the late careers of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford either.

Writer Henry Farrell ushered in the horror-hag genre with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, but this later iteration went into production with the title The Best of Friends, only to be changed when judged too close to the Otto Preminger movie Such Good Friends. Cult director Curtis Harrington’s stylish period production suffered from the usual…

Woody Allen’s first stab at moviemaking is still one of his funniest. “Key of Keys”, a low budget Japanese spy movie, is recut and entirely redubbed into a free-form comedy in which the Macguffin is the world’s greatest egg salad recipe. A huge favorite on college campuses in the late sixties, this exists in several…

One of the biggest comedy hits of the early ’70s. Following up on his dramatic breakthrough with The Last Picture Show, movie scholar turned director Peter Bogdanovich evokes ’30s screwball comedies and classic Looney Tunes in this self-consciously wacky homage to Bringing Up Baby. As befits the brief post-Easy Rider era when directors were as…

Introducing Howard Hughes’ latest discovery, Faith Domergue, as a wacko femme fatale who hooks fall guy doctor Robert Mitchum in her web. The underrated John Farrow provides his usual smooth direction including an amazing seven minute take. Mitchum sure is mean to Claude Rains in this trailer.

World War II meets James Bond. Elliot Kastner’s action-packed, enduringly popular superproduction was filmed on various impressive Austrian locations and features a top cast including Clint Eastwood, who distributor MGM didn’t really want. The $21 million boxoffice take changed their minds.

Boasting a fever dream cast that brings together Dana Andrews, George Sanders, Vincent Price, and Ida Lupino, Fritz Lang’s film about a serial killer and the race to catch him is a companion piece to Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. Price plays the cynical CEO of a news service who uses the killings as a…

A milestone—the first TFH trailer for a movie that never had a trailer! Sam Fuller’s final Hollywood picture, whose non-release at the hands of gutless studio execs drove him to Europe for the rest of his career, didn’t merit a finished trailer or even a poster. This is the never-seen rough cut for the unfinished…

Raoul Walsh’s most muscular gangster pic with an all-time great James Cagney as Cody Jarrett, the psychotic killer that only a mother could love. She’s the under-appreciated Margaret Wycherly, brilliant as the most monstrous mom since Agrippina. But she doesn’t get much attention in the trailer.

Director Jonathan Kaplan followed up his knockout Truck Turner with this slam-bang 1975 trucksploitation hit. Vietnam vet Jan-Michael Vincent takes over his late father’s Arizona hauling business and has to battle violent smugglers and corrupt officials. It’s a rubber-meets-the road, Capra-esque little-guy-vs.-the-system populist thriller, Walking Tall-style. Lots of great character actors on hand.

Sure it’s creaky, but this early talkie from poverty row was the first zombie movie and visually it’s still pretty cool. Bela Lugosi is the indelibly named Murder Legendre, head zombie master on a Haitian plantation where the dead don’t charge for their labor. First takes seem to be the rule, as there are a…

One of the many post-Vietnam war films that began appearing in the late 70’s, Karel Reisz’ Who’ll Stop the Rain is one of the best. Nick Nolte stars as a veteran whose decision to lend his talents to a dangerous drug running scam leads to no good. The 1978 film, based on Robert Stone’s novel Dog Soldiers, boasts…

Writer-director Mike Nichols, then known for Broadway comedies and his satirical work with Elaine May, surprised everyone by choosing Edward Albee’s incendiary psychodrama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as his motion picture debut. Filmed on the campus of Smith College in Massachusetts, it’s a cinematic one-two punch thanks to the gloves-off performances of Richard Burton and Elizabeth…

The dulcet tones of veteran actor Les Tremayne‚ transport us to the US Mint where Jim Hutton and a motley crew of tv and movie comics are trying to replace a missing $50K lost in a garbage disposal. Another fun movie that got lost in the shuffle, it has yet to appear on DVD.

John Badham explores the difficulties in adapting a hit play to the screen whose protagonist, paralyzed from the neck down, is bedridden for the entire story, fighting his doctors for the right to die. Richard Dreyfuss stars, in a role Ian McShane played in‚ a 1972‚ telefilm and which both Tom Conti and Mary Tyler…

“MGM introduces a New Film Experience: DUO-VISION ! No glasses–All you need is your eyes!” Despite the breathless promise of “Twice the tension! Twice the terror!”, this proved the only outing for this split-screen gimmick, which bears the signs of a conventional project tricked up in the editing.

The memories of movie fans are papered with the work of the remarkably prolific producer Edward Small, ranging from such sophisticated fare as Witness for the Prosecution to boomer favorites like Jack The Giant Killer and It! The Terror From Beyond Space. In 1953 Small produced Wicked Woman, a memorably sleazy but amusingly self-aware noir…

Clark Gable plays a man caught in the middle of a love triangle he wants no part of until he does. Myrna Loy plays his beautiful but suspicious wife and Jean Harlow is his beautiful but smitten secretary. The sixth-billed James Stewart plays Harlow’s boyfriend who only complicates matters. It’s frothy fun elevated by that…

The counterculture goes mainstream in this emblematic Vietnam-era classic. There would have been no Easy Rider without Roger Corman’s controversial but popular Hell’s Angels movie, which set the trend for a plethora of drive-in biker pictures over the following decade. Peter Bogdanovich contributed some second unit direction as well as tinkering with Chuck Griffith’s screenplay. Peter…

William Wellman’s grueling depression-era film takes full advantage of its pre-code status. Starring Frankie Darrow as a high school dropout who hops a rail car to make ends meet, the 1933 movie fairly embraces dicey subjects like prostitution, rape and grisly death scenes. Based on a story by Daniel Ahearn with the far more appropriate title, “Desperate…

Sam Peckinpah’s blood-flecked classic was a box office disaster in its Vietnam-era day, but has come to be recognized as one of the all-time greats, a brilliant portrait of the end of an era of tough S.O.Bs made by…well, a tough S.O.B.

Designed for the bottom of drive-in double-bills, this rags-to-rocker saga stars Arch Hall Jr. as a pompadoured rube who becomes an instant sensation on a low-rent American Bandstand knockoff and heartbreak, naturally, ensues. Grunge auteur Ray Dennis Steckler directs and costars (as “Cash Flagg”).

Two great Swedish directors, Ingmar Bergman and Victor Sjöström, collaborate on the story of an embittered old professor who makes his peace with the present by concentrating on the past. Sjöström plays the crusty physician and a few of Bergman’s stock company are on hand including Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin and Max Von Sydow. Now…

AIP toppers were floored by the unexpectedly positive reviews this lightning-in-a-bottle satire garnered in the volatile political world of 1968. The right movie at the right moment, it captured the mood of a country in crisis and propelled star Christopher Jones into a short-lived mainstream career that included a starring role in David Lean’s “Ryan’s…

Six outrageous revenge fantasies suggesting a grotesquely funny fusion of Luis Buñuel and Monty Python make up this anthology from Argentine director Damián Szifrón. The 2014 release, co-produced by Pedro Almodóvar (whose wicked sense of humor looms over the production), features a stellar ensemble cast and startlingly vivid cinematography from Javier Julia. Szifrón’s film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign…

The Fourth Wall is broken early and often in Frank Tashlin’s wacked-out follow-up to The Girl Can’t Help It, which bears little resemblance to the Broadway play it’s based on but is still a heck of a lot of fun. 1950s “culture” is skewered mercilessly, especially television–at times it looks like this was produced directly…