Pamela's Nite
He has the look, attitude, and lifestyle of a rock star, but David would make the hardest rockers cower in fear.
As the leader of a ruthless vampire gang, Kiefer Sutherland became one of the most memorable villains of all time.
Now he gets the deluxe treatment as part of Series 6 of NECA's Cult Classics with the Cult Classics Lost Boys David Action Figure.
David includes interchangeable heads, hands, and feet, blood bottle, and detailed base. Link
Peter's niteEditor and Publisher Magazine, "The Best Movie About a Reporter Ever":
Large segments of America may distrust or despise them, but Hollywood still loves reporters. They have served as compelling heroes and villains since the dawn of cinema. You only have to go back to 1931 to enjoy "Five Star Final" (if you can find it), with Boris Karloff starring as the shifty journalist. Between the birth of the talkies and today, Hollywood has produced hundreds of films that revolve around newsrooms. But somehow, until last month, I had missed the best, Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole."Rarely seen in recent years, the movie finally came out on DVD this past summer. About 15 years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing the very friendly (and, yes, hysterically funny) Wilder for a book I was writing on a California political campaign in which he played a tiny role, and he recommended this cult classic during one of our talks. If you haven't seen it, rush out to get it, or do that Netflix thing.
Although something of a box office flop in 1951 — and later released under a new title, "The Big Carnival" — it was way ahead of its time in anticipating the feeding frenzy of media coverage today. But like Larry David and "The Simpsons," it is an equal-opportunity mocker, poking malicious fun at everything from gullible common folk to the police. Its most famous line comes from the no-nonsense wife of its chief victim, who says she doesn't go to church because "kneeling bags my nylons."
....
Yes, I'm aware that yellow journalism and media circuses existed long before this. In the film, Tatum even mentions a real-life precursor — the Kentucky cave-in in 1925 that made W.B. Miller of the Louisville Courier-Journal a household name (and landed him a Pulitzer). State troopers with bayonets had to hold tourists back at the Sand Cave, and that victim perished, also.
But "Ace in the Hole" still stands as a savage — and highly entertaining — reminder of one reason the media has lost so much standing. To be sure, Hollywood has fallen just as far: They truly don't make movies like this anymore.
Molly Haskell via Criterion:The 1951 movie, fascinating in the sweep and savagery of its indictment, and a flop when it opened (and again when it was released as The Big Carnival), points to the direction noir would take in the fifties, hiding in broad daylight in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk. But if Hitchcock diabolically upended our expectations of the leading man, Wilder went much, much further. This satire of the media circus that would envelop us all goes beyond noir into saeva indignatio, and beyond Swift into something more intensely and disturbingly personal. Rarely, if ever, have there been such brutally antipathetic leads in a mainstream film as Kirk Douglas’s scoop-or-die reporter and Jan Sterling’s breathtakingly callous victim’s wife. However prophetic Wilder’s vision of a press and a public drunk on sensation, this issue ends up seeming almost peripheral to two main characters so monstrous in their mutual, and mutually despising, selfishness that it’s astonishing the movie got released at all.
Fresh from his star-making turn as the self-promoting prizefighter in Champion (1949), a ferociously determined Douglas gives one of his great over-the-top, sadomasochistic performances as Chuck Tatum, bent reporter (a liar, a fabricator, an adulterer just begin to count the ways), desperate for a scoop, a ticket back to a big-city newspaper, who winds up in the hick town of Albuquerque. Before landing him in the newspaper office, an extended opening scene features one of cinema’s great entrances: Douglas’s convertible, having broken down in the desert, is being towed in to the local shop as he sits like a catbird in the driver’s seat, reading a newspaper, with the camera tracking alongside. The image is that of a man both crippled and defiant: to be carless—see Sunset Boulevard (1950)—is to be emasculated, but this born opportunist and exploiter has turned the truck driver into his charioteer. Having now acquainted himself with the local paper, Tatum strides into its storefront office and, with characteristic chutzpah, condescends to the locals—“How,” he says to a Native American, and sneers at the secretary’s handmade sampler “Tell the Truth”—before penetrating the office of the kindly editor-publisher, played by Porter Hall. In an outrageous Wilderian aria of simultaneous self-promotion and self-contempt, he makes his pitch: “I can handle big news,” he boasts; all he needs is “just one good beat,” as he comes down in price—“Fifty dollars . . . Forty-five dollars.” There is something already frightening, if funny, in the mixture of self-abasement and aggression. It’s the self-abasement that is the aggression, as if he’s getting the jump on you by saying the very worst, bragging about what a liar he is, even as he confesses each sordid detail of his firings from various newspapers. He talks himself into and out of a job several times over and is finally hired for sixty bucks.
As he settles in, we can’t help but respond in some degree to his abject down-and-outness, his hunger and desperation, not to mention the New York hustler vibe he brings to this white-bread environment, where there are no pickles, no chopped liver (a sly reference to Douglas’s—and Wilder’s—Jewishness?), no Yogi Berra, where never is heard a discouraging word and the homemade “Tell the Truth” sampler reeks of small-town naïveté.
Guy Maddin via Criterion
Wilder’s effects and Douglas’s priapic performance are in the service of a story that was lambasted as hopelessly cynical by the critics of the day. Since most critics considered themselves newspapermen and therefore within the target range of the movie’s furious contempt, this makes a certain sense. But the picture isn’t cynical at all, it’s spot-on!There’s no denying it travels darker territories: the secret wish of a bored housewife, for example, to have a hundred tons of rock dumped on her Baby Duck–and–Minute Maid husband, or the parents happy to offer their children ringside seats to death because it could be “very instructive.” Of course, the main theme is the rapacious hunger of tabloid news gatherers for their scoops, and of a public for blood (an appetite in this case as sexy and naked as it was in Caesarean times). But these things are nothing more than accurately represented in the movie. The earnest young shutterbug who starts the picture as Tatum’s nemesis is utterly corrupted by him within seconds; the lad’s whiplash transformation from annoying goody-goody to sycophantic ponyboy puts the Oscar-winning mutative wizardry of Rick Baker to shame. Others within Tatum’s orbit—the sheriff and the contractor, particularly—undergo Fredric March–like personality shifts as well, though the cave rat’s wife, the perfectly cast Jan Sterling, appears to have come pre-Hoovered of all scruples. By the time the Great S&M Amusement Corp. rolls in, poor, mad Minosa is clearly doomed to die like a dog in his cave.
Wikipedia:Jan Sterling (April 3, 1921 – March 26, 2004) was an Academy Award-nominated American actress. She was born Jane Sterling Adriance in New York City, into a prosperous family. Sterling was educated in private schools before heading to Europe with her family. She was schooled by private tutors in London and Paris, and was enrolled in Fay Compton's dramatic school in London.
As a teenager she returned to Manhattan, and billed with such aliases as Jane Adriance and Jane Sterling, began her career by making a Broadway appearance in Bachelor Born, and went on to appear in such major stage offerings as Panama Hattie, Over 21 and Present Laughter. In 1947, she made her movies debut in Tycoon, now billed as Jane Darian. Seldom cast in passive roles, Sterling was at her best in parts calling for hard-bitten, sometimes hard-boiled determination. Actress Ruth Gordon insisted she change her stage name and the two hit upon Jan Sterling.
In 1948 she broke into films as the scheming floozy who tries to take the baby of Academy Award winner Jane Wyman's character in Johnny Belinda, but ultimately ends up helping "Belinda" (Wyman) by clearing her of murder. Shuttling between films and television, she showed up in nearly all the major live anthologies of the 1950s, playing in "bad girl" film roles in Caged (1950), Mystery Street (1950), The Big Carnival (1951), Flesh and Fury (1952), The Human Jungle (1954), and Female on the Beach (1955), while making a more sympathetic impression in Sky Full of Moon (1952).
In 1954 Sterling was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in The High and the Mighty. Also the same year, she travelled to England to play the role of Julia in the first film version of George Orwell's 1984, despite being several months pregnant at the time. During the following years, she appeared regularly in movies like Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, Kathy O, and The Female Animal. She retired from films in favor of the stage in 1969 and returned before the cameras in 1979 to portray Lou Henry Hoover in the TV miniseries Backstairs at the White House.
Married and divorced to actor John Merivale in the 1940s, Sterling's career slipped down after the death of her second husband, actor Paul Douglas, in 1959. In the 1970s, she entered into a long lasting personal relationship with the late actor and American expatriate in the UK, Sam Wanamaker, but they never married.
Stuart's NiteJocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece via Popmatters:
Fluid and erratic, viscous and elusive, Wong Kar-Wai's films are feats of dream logic. Scattered across genres and generations, they reveal that, despite their strangeness, they concern familiar human experiences: loyalty, sadness, obsession, and, of course, love. Wong Kar-Wai's genre reference and twisting brings to mind other cinematic masters, from Jean-Luc Godard in Chungking Express (Chong Qing Sen Lin, 1994) to Martin Scorcese in As Tears Go By (Wong Gok Ka Moon, 1988). But Wong also creates a filmic space entirely his own, with his signature use of bright colors, strobe effects, handheld camerawork, pop music, and broad themes.In nearly all of Wong's work, vibrant color hints at bottled up emotions or unexpressed desire. At the end of As Tears Go By, just before Wah (Andy Lau) is shot, the camera peers at the foreboding parking lot where he is to meet his fate through orange plastic curtain flaps. In this sudden glimpse of color, we see the location of Wah's death before he even arrives. It is both distancing and shocking distancing because we are forced to take a step back, to examine the establishing shot through a filter, and shocking because the color is unlike any other we have seen yet in the film. Up to this point, it's been all neon blue and muddy browns, and now with a simple switch in foreground color, Wong Kar-Wai eerily sets the stage for an equally shocking ending.
Such sentiment drives all of Wong Kar-Wai's films, the desire to live in a dream, to make the external world as beautiful as the internal one. His dreams evoke the splendor of the everyday. At the end of Chungking Express, when Faye (Faye Wong) takes a job as a flight attendant in order to see California, she bringing her dreams into real life. And that is Wong Kar-Wai's gift to his audiences, bringing his dreams into our real lives.
Nora's NiteNeil Young's Film Lounge:
Shand is a gang-boss of the old school, perhaps even a direct successor to the Kray twins - he refuses to have anything to do with drugs, and retains some smatterings of a social conscience. Harold sees himself as the bridge between the old (London's seedy criminal past) and the future: he has his eye on docklands development and has pieced together an ambitious deal reliant on funding from the American mafia - represented, in a nice casting coup, by veteran film noir star Eddie Constantine.
The film begins with Shand, a pugnacious, strutting little bantam of a man, at the crest of a wave - he has his glamorous, classy girlfriend Victoria (Mirren) on one arm, and the world, so it seems, on a string. But, over the course of one Easter weekend (the film, despite the title, spills over from Friday into Saturday) Harold's world falls apart. Close associates are killed, the showcase pub he owns is blown up, another bomb is found in his casino. As the mafia grow increasingly jittery about these high-profile attacks, Harold is spurred into increasingly desperate courses of action...Largely due to Hoskins, Harold's problems take on increasingly epic dimensions as the film unfolds. London is his city, and he sees himself as the king of his turf, a theme subtly emphasised by the names of both his girlfriend (who, we are told, once knew Princess Anne) and his pub, the 'Lion and Unicorn.' But Barrie Keefe's script keeps on adding layers - though he's basically an East End boy made good, Harold's vivid, heightened vocabulary has distinct echoes of Shakespeare ("I'll have his carcase dripping blood by midnight"), and this enriches the tale of his downfall with tragic elements of self-defeat and inevitability. The film also hints at an ever grander aspect of Harold's self-image - his references to blood, Judas and crucifixion suggests he sees his persecutions and troubles, if only at some subconscious level, as an echo of Christ's - why else set the film on this particular weekend?
Hoskins' intensely physical performance brings out every nuance of the script, and goes beyond it to engage directly with the camera - there's tension in the way the flat planes of his face slope backwards from the camera, even when his body seems to be leaning into it. Like Harold, Hoskins bridges the old and the new - he's a direct descendant of Jimmy Cagney and Edward G Robinson, while foreshadowing Robert De Niro's strutting Al Capone from The Untouchables. It's a fantastic role for any actor, but Hoskins makes it his own - he carries out a shocking attack with a broken bottle that's as hardcore as the hammer scene in The Honeymoon Killers, while the film's final close-up of Hoskins' face (marred only by a couple of cutaways) surpasses its closest predecessor, Garbo in Queen Christina.
Michael Sragow via Criterion:
Harold Shand, the London crime boss at the center of The Long Good Friday, is more than an antihero. He’s the Antichrist, uniting bourgeoisie and barbarians in a simultaneous Pax and Pox Brittanica. With the “legitimate” help of cops and city councilors, Shand controls a criminal empire built on every vice except narcotics. His gun moll is a vision of class, aptly named Victoria; you can’t tell whether she’s joking or for real when she says she played lacrosse with Princess Anne. In this feverish 1979 thriller, Shand plans to buy up moribund London dockyards and redevelop them for the 1988 Olympics. His call for a “new London” wickedly echoes the Christian call for a “new Jerusalem.” Yet on the very Good Friday that Shand meets with an American Mafia chief to seal a financial partnership, somebody kills two of his right-hand men, attempts to murder his mother, and blows a favorite pub to smithereens.Directed by John Mackenzie and written by Barrie Keeffe, The Long Good Friday is a rabidly engaging, complex melodrama, brimming over with moxie. Unlike classic gangster heroes like Little Caesar, who fought their way out of the faceless mob and were punished for brutality and ambition, Harold Shand struggles to control his animal urges and to act like a civic-minded businessman. He detests anarchy and tries to use violence only as a tool. If he’s doomed, it’s because his left-handed brand of capitalism can’t defend itself against the terrorism of the IRA. Harold Shand becomes a sacrificial lamb for all our Western sins. After Shand—the apocalypse!
A student's blog entry on a Q & A with Barrie Keeffe (all spelling and punctuation hers!):
‘Kind of luck sometimes” he said when referring to how he was able to write “Long Good Friday’ in 3 days and get the right funding after a screening in Edinburgh festival and the right actor who came to the audition to keep a friend company and hearing the right bit of dialogue in a pub or a sign on the van leading to the ‘hotdog line’ in the last scene.
From there he segwayed into advice for the beginning screenwriter.
“It’s a collaboration so don’t write it like a novel. What it should do is give the smell of it.” He said with also noting we (the students) should get the script to our favorite film, read it bit by bit and watch the film as we go to see how much description is actually used.
“I’m an ease dropper. I sit at the pub with the Evening Standard but I’m really listening.” - BF
His passion for theater and the actor’s journey really came through when he spoke in our hour and a half session. He writes characters as parts he, as an actor, would want to play. (Hoping to be a young British James Dean back in his time) he was disappointed with the options for actors and began to really make sure that even if he wrote a small part it would be exciting and interesting, a real full person. He mixes in with people he has meet in real life or heard about to help round the characters out.
“I’m not afraid to be a voyeur and leech” BF
His antidotes of teasing reporters/critics and real people to tell a story or to get one were very amusing. When he first sat down I thought goodness that man looks tired. As we began he became alive, blunt, and funny with his stories in screen trade and theater.
“It’s a lonely job.” - BF
Along with witty antidotes about the business he also told us more then once how his passion for writing broke up his first marriage because he wouldn’t take a holiday, he would write from Friday to Sunday, selfishly he said. He repeated his mantra of ‘it’s a lonely job’ over and over. His drive for succeeding as a working writer was evident in his stories of his youth. He made mention of if you are a writer how everyone says they have an idea for you, or if you get something produced they say they could have done better then that, with the all talk and little action notion.
“I like to be judged on the work over my life time.” When asked about being a beginning writer he made it known that your first script won’t sell and that you will get many rejections. That it is a progression. When you finish one script start another so when you get those rejections it’s okay because you have another project you are excited about. “You have to be cocky.” He told us more then once with his… ‘It a lonely job.” But then with that came… “ Do you know the best two words in the English language are?” ‘The end.’
(I have to say we all went to the pub after and when introduced to him he asked)
BK: What part of America are you from?
Me: Well born and raised in South FL, went to school in Chicago,
then moved to LA, then NYC.
BK: Wow I’m surprised you remained sane after all that.
Me: Who says I did? It’s always the crazy ones that seem the most
sane.
I continued to hold my deadpan expression. Once again I made another memorable and idiotic first impression. He smiled politely, fiddled with some clothe on his jacket and hightailed it to several other students on the opposite end of the pub. I guess he doesn’t need any character research on crazy American’s.
Peter's niteJanet Maslin in the New York Times:
As he demonstrated in ''Tex,'' Mr. Hunter has an extraordinarily clear understanding of teen-age characters, especially those who must find their own paths without much parental supervision. But the S. E. Hinton story for that film is a great deal more innocent than this one, and a lot more easily understood. While Mr. Hunter retains his ear for adolescent dialogue (the screenplay is by Neal Jiminez) and his eye for the aimless, restless behavior of these characters, neither he nor we can easily make the necessary leap to understand their casualness about Samson's crime. That Mr. Hunter is brave enough to avoid easy moralizing and easy explanations finally makes his film harder to fathom.
Much of ''River's Edge'' - which is based on several actual incidents, especially one in Northern California - is acted with utter conviction by a fine and largely unknown young cast. But the uncertain conceptions of a few key characters are damaging, especially that of Layne, who in his confusion becomes Samson's accomplice. Layne thinks himself more daring than his classmates, and without question he is more stoned. That leads him to conclude that loyalty to Samson is the only practical option. Samson and Jamie were both friends, he reasons, but it is Samson who's still alive and needs support. This is the film's key moral position, but it is explicated cartoonishly by Crispin Glover, who makes Layne a larger-than-life caricature and creates a noisy, comic impersonation instead of a lifelike character. Nor does it help that one of the film's other moral polarities comes from a 60's-minded, hipper-than-thou schoolteacher who declares, ''We took to the streets and made a difference!'' To his bored, jaded 80's high-school students, this kind of self-righteousness makes no sense at all.
Most of the performances are as natural and credible as the ones in ''Tex,'' with Mr. Roebuck a sad and helpless figure as Samson, and Keanu Reeves affecting and sympathetic as Tim's older brother; a different kind of generation gap already exists between these two, and the threat of fratricide between them leads to the film's most frightening confrontation. The ravishing Ione Skye Leitch (daughter of the singer Donovan) seems convincingly troubled as the character who must wonder why she feels more watching television tragedies than she does about her dead friend. And Mr. Hopper, whose scenes with the party doll ought to be thoroughly ridiculous, once again makes himself a very powerful presence. For better or worse, Mr. Hopper is back with a vengeance.
Crispin Glover via MTV:
"Personally, there are three [of my] films I like on the whole as films. ... 'The Orkly Kid,' which was a short film I made at [the American Film Institute] when I was 19, 'River's Edge,' which I think is an excellent movie, and 'What Is It?,' which I made. ... There was a reshowing of 'River's Edge' at one point in time, and [writer Neal Jimenez] said to the audience, 'When I first saw "River's Edge," I thought Crispin had ruined the film. But now, I feel like he ultimately made the film.' "
NYT on Neal Jimenez:
By the time the screenwriter Neal Jimenez had reached his mid-20's, his career seemed golden. A script that he had written in film school for what would become the well-received "River's Edge" was set for production. Agents and studios swarmed around dangling job offers even before he graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles.On a personal level, Mr. Jimenez's life was more complicated. He was having a serious affair with a married woman who was considering leaving her husband.
Then one night in July 1984, while on a camping trip near Sacramento, he slipped and fell into a shallow lake, breaking his neck. Within days, Mr. Jimenez, now without the use of his legs, was wheeled on his back into a rehabilitation center, where he found himself surrounded by other patients with similar injuries. His life, he felt, was as shattered as his spine.Mr. Jimenez, now a 31-year-old paraplegic, has drawn upon his experiences at the center to create "The Waterdance," which opens Wednesday. The film, written and co-directed by Mr. Jimenez, won an award as the most popular film at the Sundance Film Festival in March and also received the festival's prestigious Waldo Salt screenwriting prize. Its co-director is Michael Steinberg, a film maker and friend of Mr. Jimenez's since student days, who was brought into the project to add his personal perspective and, since Mr. Jimenez had never directed before, to help with technical matters.
Stuart's NiteVia William Richart's site:
Helming his own adaptation of Richard ("The Manchurian Candidate"; "Prizzi's Honor") Condon's novel, Richert crafted a jet black comedy starring Jeff Bridges as the younger brother of an assassinated president who becomes embroiled in a mind-boggling conspiracy as he searches for the real assassin. Though "Winter Kills" was his first fiction feature as a director (having previously helmed several "cinema verite" documentaries), Richert managed to round up an extraordinary cast in support of Bridges including John Huston as the patriarch power broker, Anthony Perkins, Toshiro Mifune, Sterling Hayden, Eli Wallach, Dorothy Malone and Elizabeth Taylor. Not surprisingly, his powers of persuasion are legendary.
Production began in 1976 and screeched to a halt a few weeks before completion when union representatives arrived on the set. "Winter Kills" was shut down for non-payment of salaries. MGM impounded the negative and the production went into bankruptcy. A bad situation became surreal as one of the neophyte producers was found dead in his apartment, handcuffed and shot through the head, while the other was arrested for drug smuggling as part of the biggest marijuana bust in California history. The making of the film had become every bit as dark, convoluted and absurd as its plot.
While struggling to raise money to complete "Winter Kills", Richert scripted (from a Larry Cohen story) and directed another off-beat satire starring Jeff Bridges, "The American Success Company/American Success/Success" (1979). The targets were capitalism and machismo as Bridges portrayed a rich and passive young man who spices up his life by developing an alternate persona. Made in Munich with German tax shelter money, the film was barely released to mixed reviews. Deemed quite funny but uneven, "The American Success Company" has its share of ardent admirers including Steven Spielberg who owns a print that he shows to friends.
Meanwhile, Richert convinced Avco-Embassy to put up the money for two more weeks of shooting on "Winter Kills". He reassembled the necessary cast members and finally finished the film in late 1978. The $6 million budget had inflated to $8 million but many creditors were never paid. "Winter Kills" was released briefly in 1979 to mostly perplexed reviews and quickly pulled by the studio in favor of a less estimable flop, "Goldengirl", with Susan Anton. In contrast, the reputation of Richert's film has only grown over the years.
In 1980, Richert and former studio exec Claire Townsend formed the Invisible Studio, an unorthodox distribution company which re-released "The American Success Story" as "American Success" in 1981 (the title was later shortened to "Success"). "Winter Kills" was revived, re-edited and re-released with its original ending restored in 1983.
Via American Masters:
Born in 1912 into a large middle-class Irish family in Pittsburgh, Kelly's father was a traveling record salesman and his mother was possessed with a formidable determination to expose her children to the arts. By his teenage years, Gene and his brother Fred took over a failing dance school with their mother and their father slid deeper into alcoholism. After choreographing local shows and playing nightclubs with Fred, by 1938 Kelly felt he was good enough to buy a one-way ticket to New York City and eventually won the lead role in the original Broadway production of Pal Joey.
Seeing him on stage, MGM head Louis B. Mayer assured Kelly that the studio would like to sign him without so much as a screen test but, through a series of miscommunications, a screen test is requested and Kelly refused. Writing an acerbic letter to Mayer accusing him of duplicity, Kelly turned down the counteroffer and set the stage for a lifetime of acrimony between the two men. Ironically, Kelly was put under contract at Selznick International by Mayer's son-in-law David O. Selznick, who had no interest in producing musicals and thought Kelly could exist purely as a dramatic actor. With no roles forthcoming, Kelly was loaned out to MGM to co-star with Judy Garland in FOR ME AND MY GAL. The film was a hit and Selznick subsequently sold the actor and his contract to MGM.
A series of mediocre roles followed and it was not until Kelly was loaned out to Columbia for 1944's COVER GIRL, with Rita Hayworth, that he became firmly established as a star. His landmark "alter ego" sequence, in which he partnered with himself, brought film dance to a new level of special effects. With Stanley Donen as his assistant, Kelly created a sense of the psychological and integrated story telling never before seen in a Hollywood musical. Realizing what they had, MGM refused to ever loan him out again, ruining Kelly's opportunity to star in the film versions of GUYS AND DOLLS, PAL JOEY and even SUNSET BOULEVARD. Back with producer Arthur Freed at MGM, Kelly continued his innovative approach to material by placing himself in a cartoon environment to dance with Jerry the Mouse in ANCHOR'S AWEIGH yet another musical first.
During his marriage to the actress Betsy Blair, Kelly was radicalized and the couple became well known for their liberal politics. In 1947, when the Carpenters Union went on strike and the Hollywood studios were looking for an intermediary to intervene on their behalf, Kelly was chosen much to everyone's surprise. He traveled back and forth from Culver City to union headquarters in Chicago for two months, mediating a strike that was costing the studios dearly. When a settlement was finally reached, Kelly was shocked to learn that the studios felt it was unfair and that they had been cheated by his siding with the strikers. Naively and genuinely trying to help and unaware of unstated expectations, underhanded tactics, and slush funds Kelly's efforts only resulted in further exacerbating his relationship with Louis B. Mayer.
As the Blacklist Era began, Kelly along with Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, Danny Kaye, and others joined the Committee for the First Amendment. Hoping to diffuse the rising situation in Washington, DC, the group created a kind of whistle-stop national tour to present their views to the public prior to their command performance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Their efforts and press conference deteriorated into a fiasco and forced many of the stars to return to Hollywood and focus more on personal damage control than on their original idealistic intent.
More mediocre roles in "revue" films followed and Kelly's frustrations mounted. He was, however, able to continue refining and showcasing his unique appeal and approach to new material with standout numbers in THE PIRATE AND WORDS AND MUSIC, among other films. Determined from the start to differentiate himself from Fred Astaire, Kelly concerned himself with incorporating less ballroom dancing and more distinctly American athleticism into his choreography. Easter Parade and the chance to co-star with Judy Garland would have been Kelly's opportunity to get away from what he considered substandard fare. But, in a show of bravado in his own backyard, Kelly broke his ankle during one of his infamously competitive volley ball games and, ironically, had to turn the film over to Fred Astaire.
Finally, Kelly and Stanley Donen were assigned their own film to co-direct 1949's On the Town. In just five days of shooting selected sequences, they opened up the genre as no one had ever done before, creating another first a musical film shot on location. Followed by his two masterworks, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, with its 17-minute ballet sequence, and SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, Kelly achieved icon status at the age of forty. In 1951, he was awarded a special Oscar for AN AMERICAN IN PARIS for his "extreme versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, but specifically for his brilliant achievement in the art of choreography."
Peter's NiteGun Crazy deserves a place by itself. First, because it's a nearly unclassifiable work. Gangster film? But here the gang is reduced to the minimum, to the association of two murderers. Criminal psychology film? It contrasts absolutely with the tone of that genre. Besides, the ambivalence of the story permits two very different interpretations.In effect, it's a question of a man with a mania for guns and his desperate attempts to conquer his virility through means other than murder. His companion, who plays the determining role in their career outside the law, is a splendid specimen of bitch. She has a strong preference for pants or cowboy outfits, and polarizes the aggression of the couple. The final episode, in the marsh, becomes an avenging execution by her lover: he prefers her death to that of the sheriff, his boyhood friend, whom she is about to shoot.
But rather than consider Gun Crazy as a story with an edifying conclusion, supported by pathological causes-as we appear to be invited to do-we prefer to see in it one of the rarest contemporary illustrations of L'AMOUR FOU (in all senses of the word, of course) which, according to André Breton, "takes" here "ALL THE POWER". Gun Crazy would then appear to be a kind of Golden Age of American film noir.
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Could one say that the poetry misleads one a little? But everything is done here, visibly, so that the viewer, oblivious of his involvement with murderers, passes to the other side of the barricades with John Dall and Peggy Cummins. The memory of their death immediately joins the recollection of the deaths of other celebrated lovers in cinema and literature. Dall, throwing out his last scruples, becomes an outlaw. This is so as to be welcomed back by a triumphant woman stretched out on the bed, wearing only stockings and a robe. Taken with a veritable frenzy of passion, she waits in silence, nostrils quivering and mouth parted, for the embrace of her lover; their attitude-they seem to want to snap each other up voraciously-shows a singular desire. And one understands, in the presence of such consuming passions, how they could have lost their senses of traditional morality.
Peter Matthews via Criterion Collection:
The particular battlefield for La Strada was the 1954 Venice Film Festival, where right-wing Catholic critics lustily endorsed what they saw as Fellini’s turn to religion. It proved a red flag to their Marxist and leftist counterparts, who fired back that the movie represented a grievous abdication of social responsibility. Fellini had made three previous films (including the sly small-town satire I Vitelloni), yet he was still chiefly known as co-screenwriter on Rome: Open City and Paisà, both directed by Roberto Rossellini, the founding father of Italian neorealism. Arising from the ashes of the Second World War, that enormously influential school had astonished the world with its raw photographic immediacy and fervent championing of the dispossessed. But though acclaimed abroad, the neorealists were increasingly isolated figures at home —attacked by the church for wallowing in filth and by the state for a reckless defeatism that threatened to sap the spirit of Italy’s postwar recovery.
It didn’t help that their gritty, downbeat films mostly bombed at the domestic box office. Italian audiences favored so-called pink neorealism, which retained a working-class ambience, but usually amounted to Silvana Mangano or Sophia Loren parading her charms around some rambunctious peasant hamlet. The movement in its unalloyed form was declared obsolete when 1950s consumer affluence changed the national mood from black markets and street urchins to la dolce vita (a stereotype that Fellini himself would later enshrine in the movie of that title).
The leading lights were obliged to strike out on their own. Vittorio De Sica settled down to those rose-tinted sex comedies, Luchino Visconti mounted gorgeously operatic costume spectacles, and Rossellini launched a series of cryptic existential dramas starring his wife, Ingrid Bergman. Hard-liners were naturally aghast at these developments, and spoke of a crisis in neorealism. For them, the shift to upper-class settings and interior probing could only be a shameful desertion of first principles. Rossellini and the others had betrayed the collective struggle by succumbing to the vice of bourgeois individualism. The filmmakers answered that neorealism was never a testament carved in stone, and that they must be free to explore and invent as their artistic consciences dictated.
