MovieNite!Featuring Pamela, Nora, Peter, Stuart and Guests

Hour of the Wolf (1968)

2012-01-08T23:00:00.000-08:00

Heathers (1989)

2012-01-01T22:18:00.000-08:00

The Trouble with Angels (1966)

2011-12-18T22:17:00.000-08:00

The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951)

2011-11-20T22:16:00.000-08:00

Misery (1990)

2011-10-30T22:15:00.000-07:00

Tristan and Isolde (2006)

2011-10-23T22:14:00.000-07:00

Straight TIme (1978)

2011-09-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

Peter's nite.

Harvey (1950)

2011-09-04T22:13:00.000-07:00

The Whistleblower (1987)

2011-07-24T22:11:00.000-07:00

The Killing (1956)

2011-06-26T22:09:00.000-07:00

The Thing (1982)

2011-06-19T22:08:00.000-07:00

Highlander (1986)

2011-06-05T22:35:00.000-07:00

Love in the Afternoon (1957)

2011-05-22T22:31:00.000-07:00

The Dead Poets Society (1989)

2011-05-08T22:30:00.000-07:00

Forbidden Games (1952)

2011-04-17T22:28:00.000-07:00

Charley Varrick (1973)

2011-01-09T22:27:00.000-08:00

The Bells of St. Marys (1945)

2010-12-12T22:26:00.000-08:00

The Swimmer (1968)

2010-12-05T20:00:00.000-08:00

Pet Sematary (1983)

2010-11-28T23:12:00.000-08:00

Panic in the Streets (1950)

2010-10-24T23:07:00.000-07:00

The Karate Kid (1984)

2010-10-17T22:04:00.000-07:00

Nora's Nite.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005)

2010-09-12T22:24:00.000-07:00

The 60-Day Course in Perfect Fake Piano Playing (Via New York Times)

For his role in "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," Mr. Duris - like his character, Thomas - labored over Bach's Toccata in E minor (BWV 914), a technically demanding piece that leaves no room for error or approximation.

But Mr. Duris didn't need to look far for a coach. His sister, Caroline Duris, 36, is a professional pianist and piano teacher in Paris. He worried at first that working with his big sister would be too comfortable, that it wouldn't be intimidating enough to make him practice.

"But I love her perceptions about music so much," he said, "and I realized that being a good student with her would be a question of the family's honor."

Ms. Duris did more than teach her brother; she played the music heard throughout the film. And an accidental moment of frustration that was captured during one of her recording sessions, in which she complained that her heart was beating too fast, made its way into the movie, depicting the voice of Thomas's mother on an old tape he listens to again and again.

Mr. Duris worked with his sister for three hours a day over two months, usually at their parents' house or at a music shop in Paris, where they had a practice room.

Like his character, he stayed up late in his flat playing a rented digital piano with headphones. But training his fingers was only part of the learning process. Mr. Duris says he wanted to understand what kind of mental space a pianist inhabits.

"When they sit down to play, are they nervous?" he asked. "Are they inspired?"

To find out, he watched videos of famous pianists. He learned that there were few physical rules, that each pianist had distinctive gestures and a personal style. "They all fed me," he said.

In the film, Thomas repeatedly watches a black-and-white video clip showing the fingers of Vladimir Horowitz curling down the piano in a long run. This obsession with watching performance videos was just one detail from Mr. Duris's real-life study that inspired Mr. Audiard's piano scenes in the movie.

Another source of inspiration was the real-life rapport between teacher and student, which informed Thomas's scenes with Miao Lin. She speaks virtually no French in the film, so she and Thomas communicate through imitation, repetition and body language. Even this, Mr. Duris says, mirrored his lessons with his sister, though they had the luxury of speech communication.

"Speaking or not speaking, it's the same," he said. In any music lesson, the teacher models good technique, watches, listens, waits and says, "Again" (one of the few words Miao Lin speaks), many, many times.

Stuart's Nite.

My Brilliant Career (1979)

2010-09-05T22:27:00.000-07:00

Nora's Nite

The Browning Version (1951)

2010-08-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

Peter's nite.

Murder, My Sweet (1944)

2010-08-08T19:31:00.000-07:00

Nora's nite.

Indescreet (1958)

2010-08-01T23:05:00.000-07:00

Pamela's Nite. (Date may be inaccurate).

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

2010-08-01T15:43:00.000-07:00

Host: Pamela

Dinner: Chicken Piccata, Rice Pilaf, Puree of Butternut Squash and Carrots

Dessert: Gluten free Strawberry Shortcake, Delicious Cupcakes

Knife in the Water (1962)

2010-07-25T23:14:00.000-07:00

Stuart's Nite.

Knife in the Water (1962)

2010-07-25T22:04:00.000-07:00

Bigger Than Life (1956)

2010-05-16T21:57:00.000-07:00

B. Kite via Criterion Collection:

The film has often been read as a critique of nuclear family values, and the case is powerful and persuasive. Jonathan Rosenbaum puts it concisely: “Bigger Than Life is a profoundly upsetting exposure of middle-class aspirations because it virtually defines madness—Avery’s drug-induced psychosis—as taking those values seriously. Each emblem of the American dream implicitly honored by Avery in the opening scenes (his ideas about education, his respect for class and social status, his desire for his son ‘to improve himself’) is systematically turned on its head, converted from dream to nightmare, by becoming only more explicit in his behavior.”

Bigger Than Life, then, might be said to pose the question, What would happen if the patriarch returned as an archetype, in all his inexplicable strength? Ed tries on a number of patriarch roles in the film, but they all prove too small. He’s the cheery father of the Oldsmobile ads when he takes his family on their shopping expedition, but somehow his forced smile and slightly sweaty face push past the smug comfort that’s a prerequisite for the part. Ed the athlete fares no better, defeated by the degeneracy of his offspring. Ed the instructor puts in long hours but winds up thwarted by the meddling of his inadequate wife. The church service offers yet another possibility—the forgiving father who welcomes the return of his prodigal son—but Ed rejects such “fuzzy-minded” permissiveness almost instantly, flipping to the Old Testament to find a father with a stiffer spine.

He lands, of course, on Abraham, Kierkegaard’s “father of faith.” In fact, Kierkegaard anticipates Bigger Than Life, and specifically the disjunctive tones of its climax, in Fear and Trembling. Pondering the challenge to ethics offered by the story of Abraham and Isaac, he wonders what would happen if the story of God’s demand was overheard by the wrong party, say “a man suffering from sleeplessness”: “then the most terrifying, the most profound, tragic, and comic misunderstanding is close at hand . . . The tragic and comic make contact here in absolute infinitude.” This contact occurs in the film, too, in the uneasy admixture of horror-movie lighting, loud carnival music, and an awkward, almost slapstick tussle that tips over the couch in its course through the living room, only to right it again on the return journey.

It may be, though, that the cosmic scope of the film’s blasphemy has yet to be fully appreciated. What Ed is finally proposing, in all the rigor of his madness, is a rewriting of the New Testament—a sort of inverse Crucifixion. He realizes that killing his son is a morally abhorrent act, but he sees also that his son seems destined to bring every sort of chaos into the world. Such circumstances demand the greatest sacrifice of all, the sacrifice of himself. Or Himself, since Ed has finally grown to such a stature that the only role scaled to his contours is that of God the Father. Somewhere in suburbia, the order of creation is turning over.

The Falcon and the Snowman (1985)

2010-05-09T23:22:00.000-07:00

Nora's night.

Via San Francisco Chronicle

Christopher Boyce, the Cold War traitor whose spying for the Russians was chronicled in the film "The Falcon and the Snowman," is free after spending almost half his life in federal prison.

Boyce, 50, was paroled at 4 a.m. Friday from a halfway house he hated in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. He will remain on parole until Aug. 15, 2046, his original release date.

It was not immediately clear where Boyce was headed, but he recently married a San Francisco woman he met several years ago. Boyce, an intensely private man who shuns the media, could not be reached for comment.
Boyce was 22 when his father, a former FBI agent, helped him land a job at TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach. He eventually gained access to the "Black Box" vault that held communications with CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

Boyce and his childhood friend Andrew Daulton Lee -- they had been altar boys together -- soon started selling classified intelligence documents to the Russian Embassy in Mexico City.

They sold thousands of documents, compromising a sensitive satellite system and damaging negotiations over nuclear weapons treaties, over the course of a year. They were paid $77,000 before they were caught.

Boyce was convicted of espionage in 1977; Lee also was convicted of espionage and was paroled in 1998.

In 1997, Boyd persuaded the U.S. Parole Commission to grant him early release. After spending almost half of his life in various federal prisons, Boyce was released in September from a medium-security prison in Sheridan, Ore. , and sent to a halfway house in San Francisco.

He made headlines in 1980 when he escaped from federal prison in Lompoc; he remained on the run for 19 months and supported himself by robbing banks in the Pacific Northwest.

But it was the 1985 film "The Falcon and the Snowman" that cemented his fame. The film starred Timothy Hutton as Boyce, who loved falconry, and Sean Penn as Lee, nicknamed "Snowman" because of a drug habit.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/03/15/MN205136.DTL#ixzz0nZd6eGX9

Just the facts at Crime Library:

Christopher Boyce was paroled March 14, 2003. The graying 50-year-old, who had spent 25 years in prison, was released from a halfway house in San Francisco, California. He will remain on parole until his original release date of 2046.

Perhaps part of Boyce's preparation for parole can be seen in the fifteen opinion pieces he published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune while being held at Minnesota's state prison at Oak Park Heights (OPH) from 1988 to 1999.  It was here that he publicly expressed remorse for his spying. However, that remorse seemed to be more for the pain he had caused his former FBI agent father than the damage he had done to his country.

Boyce wrote, "Espionage was a cruel wound to inflict on a father who loved me.  "He noted that the end of the Cold War showed that the "titanic struggle of the age is over — and I am drowning in the realization that I chose the wrong path."  But Boyce also acknowledged that it was "impossible for me to ever be patriotic in a nationalistic sense."

Boyce wrote columns decrying the gang-related violence that infests prison life and championing education and conjugal visits as vital to rehabilitation.  He also wrote poignantly of his yearning for nature.  "The one punishment at OPH that cuts me deepest is my removal from the world of nature," Boyce asserted. "Each cell is like a concrete womb. There are no trees here in the penitentiary, but treetops are visible far beyond the walls.  Sometimes I watch the distant branches sway in the wind. I have not got close to a tree in 14 years, and my memories of them are fading away in my mind like the features of my long-dead grandfather."

Interview with John Schlesinger:

TA: The whole fantasy thing is another thread through many of your films. And the notion of "the big idea gone awry." Certainly in Midnight Cowboy, but Billy Liar also is a great fantasizer about what he might be. And Falcon and the Snowman, with the notion of "I know I can help my country get back on the right course...if I just commit this little treason." What is it about the fantasy theme and your obvious view that you're doomed to fail if you have these big ideas?

JS: See, I don't believe it's failure. I don't think the Cowboy fails. I think he succeeds in bettering the possibilities of Ratso. I'm much more optimistic than you give me credit for. Now Billy Liar, admittedly, he doesn't have the courage to follow his dream, and therefore resorts to his own private fantasy. Falcon is a rather different animal. I think what appealed to me about Falcon, and perhaps it is cynical, was that it was a sort of black farce, partly, about much-touted American security, which can be easily circumvented. It dealt with a kind of misplaced idealism which I can understand, though I would never advocate taking revenge on your own country. Like the Oklahoma bombing, which may be a result of extreme frustration with federal institutions. I can't condone it but I understand why he might, in his cockamamie way, have thought that was the right thing for him to do. Fortunately the Falcon was shacked up with a partner who was a total fantasist, a drug addict, also a very interesting character, who ran rings around the whole establishment. I thought he was a wonderful farce, and I enjoyed that aspect of it, albeit with the tragic implications within it.

Wild Strawberries (1957)

2010-04-25T21:56:00.000-07:00

Being Julia (2004)

2010-04-18T22:22:00.000-07:00

The dinner Pamela served made up for any deficiencies in the movie. Line of the evening: I like pie.

Beat The Devil (1953)

2010-04-11T23:18:00.000-07:00

Loves of a Blonde (1965)

2010-03-21T23:17:00.000-07:00

Barbarians at the Gate (1993)

2010-03-07T23:49:00.000-08:00

Every Which Way But Loose (1978)

2010-02-21T23:16:00.000-08:00

Temple Grandin (2010)

2010-02-07T23:15:00.000-08:00

Sid and Nancy (1986)

2010-01-24T23:14:00.000-08:00

A Room With A View (1985)

2009-11-15T23:13:00.000-08:00

Phantasm (1979)

2009-11-01T23:12:00.000-08:00

A Touch of Class (1973)

2009-10-25T23:11:00.000-07:00

Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

2009-10-11T23:10:00.000-07:00

The Bad Seed (1956)

2009-09-27T23:08:00.000-07:00

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

2009-09-13T23:07:00.000-07:00

Private Benjamin (1980)

2009-08-09T23:06:00.000-07:00

Born Romantic (2000)

2009-08-02T23:58:00.000-07:00

Hobson’s Choice (1954)

2009-07-05T23:57:00.000-07:00

Dillinger (1973)

2009-06-28T23:00:00.000-07:00

Peabody Award

2009-06-10T09:39:00.000-07:00

Never on Sunday (1960)

2009-06-07T23:12:00.000-07:00

Stuart's Nite

Jules Dassin obit via NYT:

Mr. Dassin left the United States for France in 1953 because, he said, he was “unemployable” in Hollywood. In Paris, unable to speak much more than restaurant French when he arrived, he encountered hard times and remained largely unemployed for five years. In need of money, he agreed to direct “Rififi,” a low-budget production about a jewelry heist. A memorable sequence is of the robbery itself, lasting about a half-hour and filmed without music or dialogue.

Mr. Dassin also acted in the movie, under the name Perlo Vita, playing an Italian safe expert. He won a best-director award for the film at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. By the time he wrote and directed “Never on Sunday,” a comedy about a good-hearted prostitute (Ms. Mercouri), the anti-Communist witch hunt in the United States had been discredited, and he had been accepted again.

Mr. Dassin also had a role in the movie, as a bookish American from — like Mr. Dassin himself — Middletown, Conn., who tries to reform the prostitute. His directing and screenwriting were nominated for Academy Awards.

The movie was a moneymaker and its title song was a hit, though some critics found the script predictable. Ms. Mercouri became Mr. Dassin’s second wife in 1966, two years after he directed her in “Topkapi,” another film about jewel thieves, the prize in this case being gems from the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul.

Jules Dassin was born in Middletown on Dec. 18, 1911, one of eight children of Samuel Dassin, an immigrant barber from Russia, and the former Berthe Vogel. Shortly after Jules was born, his father moved the family to Harlem. Jules attended Morris High School in the Bronx.

He joined the Communist Party in 1930s, a decision he recalled in 2002 in an interview with The Guardian in London. “You grow up in Harlem where there’s trouble getting fed and keeping families warm, and live very close to Fifth Avenue, which is elegant,” he told the newspaper. “You fret, you get ideas, seeing a lot of poverty around you, and it’s a very natural process.”

He left the party in 1939, he said, disillusioned after the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler.
....
He had always been demanding of himself and often critical of his own work. In 1962, with his best films largely behind him, Mr. Dassin told Cue magazine: “Of my own films, there’s only one I’ve really liked — ‘He Who Must Die.’ That is, I like what it had to say. But that doesn’t mean I’m completely satisfied with it. I’d do it all over again, if I could.”

Encyclopedia Britannica on Melina Mercouri:

Mercouri came from a politically prominent family. She graduated from the Drama School of the National Theatre of Greece. Her first major role, at the age of 20, was Lavinia in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, but perhaps her most memorable parts were Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire and the good-hearted prostitute in the film Never on Sunday (1960). This film gained her an international reputation that would serve her well in politics. Her involvement in politics was triggered by her indignation over the military coup that brought a handful of army colonels to power in Greece in 1967.

Married to the French-born American film director Jules Dassin (who directed most of her films), she was abroad when the coup occurred. She dedicated herself to stimulating opposition against the junta in Europe and the United States, to the extent that she was deprived of her Greek citizenship by the colonels’ regime. After the collapse of the dictatorship in 1974, she returned to Greece and promptly joined Andreas Papandreou’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK). She ran unsuccessfully that year for deputy from the same Piraeus district that had made her famous in Never on Sunday, but she was elected when she ran a second time, in 1977.

Reelected in 1981 when Pasok won a general election, she was appointed by Papandreou to be his minister of culture. One of her major efforts was an attempt to persuade the British government to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece; she also increased government subsidies for the arts. She served in the post until 1989, when PASOK lost power; she was reappointed after their electoral victory in 1993. In 1971 Mercouri published an autobiography, I Was Born Greek. In 1997 UNESCO created the Melina Mercouri International Prize for the Safeguarding and Management of Cultural Landscapes; the prize is awarded every two years.

Duck Soup (1933)

2009-05-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

Nora's Nite

Michael Koller via Senses of Cinema:

Duck Soup is indisputably the Marx Brothers' greatest film. It is the last of the five films the Brothers made for Paramount Pictures during their most creative and anarchic period. The first two films, Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930) were adaptations of their hit stage comedies and suffer from a theatrical inertia, while the next three, Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup, were based on original screenplays. Duck Soup was the only one of these films that fully integrated and balanced all of the Marx Brothers' comic elements.

For the five Paramount films there were four brothers, a fifth, Gummo, left the line-up before they moved into the cinema. These brothers were so different to each other they seemed unrelated. Groucho was the leader, the slick greaser whose chief weapon was his mastery of the English language, yet he was as phoney as his moustache. Chico, with his fake Italian accent, represented the poor European immigrant who had arrived in America in search of a better future. Chico's strength, or weakness if you like, was his catalogue of bad puns.

During his trial as a spy in Duck Soup he is asked, "Isn't it true you tried to sell Freedonia's secret coded plans?" He replies, unembarrassed, "Sure I sold a code and 2 pair of plans." Curly, blonde-haired Harpo was mute, yet his lack of speech was never a hindrance, frequently being placed in a position were speech was mandatory and always coping. For example, in Monkey Business he attempts to get through the American customs by carrying a gramophone and pretending to be Maurice Chevalier. At one point in Duck Soup he answers the phone for Groucho. I wonder if his character really was mute!

Finally there was the much-maligned Zeppo. The ersatz WASP of the team, almost the comic straight-man and yet he was always in on the joke. He is generally regarded as the least talented of the four and yet he was in their best movies. Is this purely a coincidence or did he contribute significantly to their artistic success? Zeppo left the team to become a theatrical agent just after their Paramount contract was terminated.

The Marx Brothers are justifiably seen as the cinematic auteurs of their films partly because, apart from Duck Soup, the direction of their films is competent at best and frequently rudimentary. Nevertheless, Duck Soup is the product of a fortunate collaboration with the masterful comedy director Leo McCarey who understood his performers' comic genius. Duck Soup is definitely one of McCarey's better films even if it is not his best.

Duck Soup's trite B-grade drama operates in parallel and contrast to the Marx Brothers' absurdist comedy. This is beautifully illustrated in Margaret Dumont's first scene with Groucho. Dumont is serious, with a pompous dignity, her reactions to Groucho's misplaced humour are various, including outrage and moral indignation, yet she never acknowledges Groucho's 'wink'. She describes Firefly as "a progressive, fearless fighter" but Groucho never displays any responsibility and to the contrary undermines the notion in his opening song. "If you think this country's bad off now, just wait until I get through with it," he sings. Dumont perfectly demonstrates why she is one of the great 'straight men' of all time. Her performance alone is a joy to watch. And this demonstrates one of McCarey's strengths as a director.

He builds his film around actors, yet there is also an intuitive understanding of the technical power of filmmaking. McCarey allows his comedians to milk their humour without remaining subservient to narrative logic or character consistency. Chicolino (Chico) and Pinky (Harpo) are two spies who, along with Firefly, display no real allegiance to either of the opposing factions. This helps to maintain the comic pace of the film and says much about nationalistic jingoism and patriotic hysteria.

French Connection II (1975)

2009-05-24T23:57:00.000-07:00

Peter's Nite

Stephen B. Armstrong on French Connection II via CinemaRetro:

The original script for French Connection II was prepared by Robert Dillon, whose previous credits included, most notably, Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Once production commenced in the summer of 1974, however, Frankenheimer decided that he needed to have his script re-worked. For the job, he recruited the novelist Pete Hamill, who’d actually known Eddie Egan, the New York City police detective upon whom Hackman’s character Popeye Doyle was based. In 2006, Hamill recalled his involvement in the project:

[When Frankenheimer] called me from Marseilles, asking me to help, I said I would try to get there within two days. "Why not one?" he said, and laughed nervously. I never asked why he called me. Someone hand-delivered a script to my place in New York and I read it on the plane.

John, at that time, had a major problem. He had already shot nine days of the existing script. He had developed a reputation for going over budget, so had no flexibility. He couldn't re-shoot what was already in the can.

That gave me a problem too, since I had to write around the existing pieces, which, as always, had been shot out of order. It was like working on a jigsaw puzzle. The basic problem was that Hackman, a great movie actor, had nothing to act. And the reason for that was that Roy Scheider was not in the sequel, and Hackman had nobody to bounce his lines off. He would never talk to a French cop the way he talked to Scheider in the Billy Friedkin original.

….My first work was on the following day's pages, trying to make the character sound like Popeye Doyle….Within a day-and-a-half (with naps in between) I had written enough for them to keep shooting for six or seven days….Hackman was ecstatic. He had something to act!

Frankheimer interviewed by Gerald Pratley:

Another example of course are the races of Grand Prix seen in Ronin as high-speed chases through the streets of Paris. They are so brilliantly done and so exciting throughout that the director finds himself questioned by almost everyone asking "how did you do this?" Frankenheimer replies, "Well, I spent hours recently recording commentaries about this for the DVD disc giving viewers an almost complete account of how we worked out the car sequences. First we sent out the art director -- or production designer as they call them now -- with a group of experts to determine where we would stage all this. Everything was pre-planned. We sketched them, with Ted Boonthanakit, as story boards; we put cameras in crash boxes, on cars and in cars, took shots of actors in and out of cars, towed cut-up cars, we used right-hand versions of the cars from England for close-ups of the actors who appeared to be driving but the actual driver was out of the shot driving on the right-hand side of the cars. We drove at the speeds you see in the picture and there were no special effects. Every car coming and going, passing or swerving, was driven by an expert racing driver. We had 300 French drivers at the wheels of all other cars on the road and for help in all this I have to thank Jean Claude Lagniez. There were all manner of ways and techniques we used, cameras with different lenses, and every move for every car was worked out in advance. It was very exciting, it was terribly dangerous, lives were often in jeopardy and it took a great many weeks -- and then I did 28 days on second unit filming; all the roads were blocked off to traffic, we controlled everything we shot and the French police were extremely helpful. And it all came together in the editing process with Tony Gibbs, one of the best editors still working today."

The bars, cafes, houses, and other interiors have the look, and create the atmosphere, of classic French films from past eras. This, said Frankenheimer, was what he set out to achieve, adding with a laugh, "I think I now have 'my trilogy' (a reference to the works of other directors, among them Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Kobayashi, Donski) with The Train, French Connection II and Ronin, which have several traits in common: a graphic French realism and characterization, pervaded with tragedy and humour." (The director has made two other films in France: Grand Prix (in part) and the little-known but memorable, Impossible Object.)

And what did all of this cost? For Frankenheimer, never known to be an "over-budget" filmmaker and who has achieved remarkable results on low budgets, Ronin was his most expensive film at $US54m. "Well," he said with a touch of humour, "I didn't waste money. We live in inflationary times, it's expensive shooting in France and the money is all there up on the screen. The studio got its moneysworth, car chases do not come cheap, and De Niro doesn't work for scale!

"I'm not lightning fast, but I'm not slow either. I tend to shoot a lot of set-ups. I was an editor and director in live television, that's what I did, and I watched every shot on the screen -- in rehearsal and in performance. I knew what was needed in editing and I still do. I shoot a lot of coverage, and making Ronin was an experience I enjoyed immensely."

Escape from Alcatraz (1979)

2009-05-16T23:11:00.000-07:00

Pamela's Nite

Point Blank (1967)

2009-05-10T23:25:00.000-07:00

Stuart's Nite

The Great Santini (1979)

2009-05-03T22:42:00.000-07:00

Nora's Nite

If.... (1968)

2009-04-26T23:07:00.000-07:00

Peter's Nite
Nora's pasta salad, gluten-free brownies

Lindsay Anderson bio at Screenonline:

Born in Bangalore, India, on 17 April 1923, younger son of a Scottish army officer stationed there, Anderson was named for Australian poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, much admired by his mother. Educated at Cheltenham College, he announced there his intention to 'rebel' and spent the rest of his life carrying out this aim. At Cheltenham, he began a life-long friendship with writer-to-be, Gavin Lambert, drawn together by their love of American films; sixty years later, Lambert would write an elegant account of Anderson's (and his own) life and work.

Following World War 2 service as a cryptographer with the Army's Intelligence Corps, he read Classics at Wadham College, Oxford. Here, very significantly, he co-founded (with Lambert) the short-lived but influential critical journal, Sequence, in which he set down his passionately held views on such filmmakers as his heroes John Ford and Humphrey Jennings, on Hollywood musicals - and, with almost uniform severity - on the British cinema of the day, which he saw as irredeemably middle-brow and middle-class. In Sequence he indulged the luxury of 'saying exactly what [he] liked', and maintained the habit, sometimes to his own cost, for the rest of his life. He was not a man who changed his mind, and the passions of those early years informed the rest of his life.

John Harris on Lindsay Anderson via The Guardian:

Exactly 40 years ago, the film director Lindsay Anderson was preparing for the release of If..., the surreal story of a revolt in a public school in which the masters and prefects stood as signifiers for Britain and its atrophying establishment. This was 1968,and the cabal of libertines who drive the film's plot crystallised the political excitement that had been evident that year in London, Paris, Prague and Berlin. Their leader - all lips, hair and animal magnetism - was a character called Mick Travis, played by the young Malcolm McDowell. With good reason, his image has since been used on scores of record sleeves and club flyers, and tacked to successive generations of undergraduate walls.

Improbably, If... had been shot at Cheltenham college, Anderson's alma mater, whose cooperation had been secured via the crafty use of a 40-page fake script. "I kept saying, 'Why are they letting us shoot here? I can't believe it,'" says McDowell. "And Lindsay said, 'For God's sake, Malcolm - shut up! They think it's very nice, like a Tom Brown's Schooldays kind of film.'"

Eventually, the penny dropped. "Before the film opened," says McDowell, "they had to show it to the headmaster. It was the only screening Lindsay was not present at, which tells you something - and a week later, a letter arrived from Cheltenham college which sat unopened on his mantelpiece for at least seven years. I kept saying, 'Let's open it!', and he'd say, 'No! Put it back.' He didn't want to read the words, 'You betrayed us.'"

As a portrait of the rebel who retained a sentimental attachment to much of what he attacked, the anecdote has Anderson off to a tee - as I have been discovering over the past six months, working on a Radio 4 documentary that involved tracking down some of the people who were closest to him, as well as going back to the so-called Mick Travis trilogy: the three films that made Anderson's name - and, by the end, came close to destroying it.

If..., which won the Palme D'Or at the 1969 Cannes film festival, was the most brilliantly realised. O Lucky Man!, released in 1973, was more flawed, but an ambitious journey into our national character. To finish, there was 1982's Britannia Hospital, an unsatisfactory but fascinatingly swingeing attack on the NHS, trade unions, the monarchy, academia, science, television - and thereby Britain itself. It was released during the patriotic frenzy of the Falklands war, and according to one of Anderson's close associates, its outraged reception left him "a broken man". He remains one of British film's truly underrated talents, responsible for films full of an imagination and brio that most cinema long ago mislaid, but never quite accorded the reputation he deserves.

Anderson's last years were not as productive as they should have been, though in 1985, there came one high-profile and hilariously unlikely offer of work, when he was invited to film Wham! on their visit to China.
The result was a documentary Anderson titled If You Were There, which David Sherwin showed me on a portable TV at his home near the Forest of Dean: a rich, poetic, panoramic portrait of China's strangeness to the eyes of outsiders that George Michael thought wasn't "modern" enough, and Anderson claimed was guilty of one cardinal sin: there wasn't enough Wham! in it. To his annoyance, it was taken off him, recut and released as Wham! in China. "I do think that between them the Whammies have destroyed, or suppressed, an enjoyable, informative, entertaining and at times even beautiful film," he wrote in his diary.

Anderson died in August 1994, after suffering a heart attack while staying with friends in the south of France. A memorial celebration was held at the Royal Court, where David Storey dispensed an opening introduction to the evening. "He was a man with a set of values seemingly in place since birth," Storey said. "They were values by which he observed, scrutinised and judged everything around him, [and he had] an appetite for a world nobler, more charitable and above all more gracious than the one in which he found himself." If that description jars against Anderson's legendarily acerbic side, you do not have to look far for a more salty kind of remembrance; Malcolm McDowell, for example, later recalled that Anderson had expressed the hope that his gravestone might feature the inscription: "Surrounded by fucking idiots."

Better Call Saul!

2009-04-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

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Black Beauty (1971)

2009-04-12T23:57:00.000-07:00

Pamela's Nite
Special guests: Tess and Fiona.

Mark Lester on starring in Black Beauty via Daily Mail:

We had two ponies playing the young Black Beauty, with the famous white blaze on their foreheads, and I loved spending time with them. Patrick Mower [now Rodney Blackstock in Emmerdale] played the cruel squire. He was a nice bloke and a good laugh but I couldn't work out why my mother, who had accompanied me to Ireland, was so excited to meet him. I didn't realise Patrick already had something of a reputation as a heart-throb.

Although in my memory that summer seems to stretch on for ever, as they do when you are a child, I was there for only about three weeks. After that the cast and crew left for Spain to shoot the rest of the film.

I can't recall what I was paid for Black Beauty but I do remember in 1967, when I was making Oliver!, proudly telling the Daily Mail's Lynda Lee-Potter that I was earning £200 a week and banking the lot with a view to buying an E-type Jag! I made my last feature film, The Prince And The Pauper, in 1976 when I was 18. I'd never really seen acting as a long-term career.

I became an osteopath and today I have a successful practice in Cheltenham. I haven't acted in three decades but there is a possibility I may return to the screen. I have been asked to play King Harold in a film called 1066.

Swimming Pool (2003)

2009-04-05T23:44:00.000-07:00

Stuart's Nite.

François Ozon on his film, via fm.com:

Q: This is your first movie in English. What motivated you to take this step?

FO: Once I made the lead character an English author and cast Charlotte, I thought it only natural. Also, I thought it would be fun to try to direct actors in English. I do speak the language but have not completely mastered it. Since Charlotte speaks fluent French, I didn't think it would be too complicated. The language did become a game in that, first, I wrote the script in French. Then I had it translated. Going from French into English, the script evolved, because some of the nuances in French did not translate exactly into English. We had to find equivalents.

Q: That's another part of the creative process, which Swimming Pool addresses as a whole.

FO: Yes. People are constantly asking me, "How is it possible for you to make one film after the other? Where does your inspiration come from?" To answer that question, I had the idea of projecting myself onto the character of an English writer instead of talking about myself as a director. So then the exploration became, how does a writer find inspiration and create a story, and what links that story to reality?

For her work, Sarah Morton needs to be alone, to lock herself away in a comfortable house and follow a strict regimen with rules that she imposes on herself. Then, suddenly, reality comes knocking on her door. Her first reaction, of course, is to reject it and to withdraw into herself. But then she decides to let this reality enter into her project. Sooner or later, the artist is forced to make a pact with reality.

Q: Sarah is an English mystery writer. Why, and how, were you so specific?

FO: Because I think it is not the style that is most important, but rather the narrative - the intrigue and the accumulation of clues that ultimately lead to the murderer or the solution. Writing a screenplay is similar in that all of the elements are put into place so that they can be brought to life during filming. In filmmaking, I like throwing the spectator off guard, going someplace unexpected.

Ever since Agatha Christie, there is a tradition of English women writers who like to describe particularly troubling or horrible characters and situations. I met with François Rivičre, who has studied these writers and gave me some insight into their psychologies. A number of them drink too much, have repressed lesbian tendencies, and are fascinated by perversions.

Before we started the film, I sent the script to the author Ruth Rendell and proposed that she imagine the book that Sarah would write in Swimming Pool. She answered me right away with a very sharp letter; she thought I had the nerve to ask her to write a novelization of the script, and she let me know that she has never needed anyone's help with her writing. Charlotte was amused by this and told me this was exactly how Sarah Morton would have reacted.

Q: Did you work closely with Charlotte Rampling to create the character of Sarah Morton?

FO: While the character of Marie in Under the Sand fed off of Charlotte's personality, this time the character is completely invented. In real life, Charlotte is very far from Sarah Morton.

With Pascaline Chavanne, our costume designer, Charlotte and I looked at photos of Patricia Highsmith, Patricia Cornwell, P.D. James, and Ruth Rendell. They all have something masculine about them, and they all give the impression that life stopped in the 1970s. Charlotte agreed to cut her hair and to go in that direction. As Swimming Pool progresses, Sarah evolves in both her attitudes and her clothes. She blossoms, becoming more feminine and luminous.

Q: The author physically changes as she writes.

FO: Yes, I wanted to start off with the cliché of the old Englishwoman uncomfortable in her own skin - who was probably radiant in her youth. I also wanted this aging body to become an object of desire, maybe even more than Julie's.

Most importantly, I wanted Sarah and Julie's bodies to each take on the qualities of the other. Sarah undresses little by little, her clothes become more feminine, and a portion of life is reinstated. Julie, on the other hand, begins to lose her former artifice and move towards purity. She turns into a child again, whereas she begins the story as a very aggressive and sexual young woman. There is a mutual exchange between these two women.

I've created an unusual rhythm since we do not immediately step into the story proper. The establishing scenes are very important. First, in London, we discover Sarah in her daily little world - interacting with her publisher, her family situation as a spinster living with her father, her taste for alcohol…Then there is a second introduction to Sarah, which shows her setting up shop in Lubéron and settling into work.

This way, we step into Sarah's story - the way she works, the tangible methods of a writer who requires a specific environment what with her habits and her odd little ways. Swimming Pool adheres to the rhythm of the creative process: things fall into place bit by bit, and in the last half-hour everything speeds up. Then you're dealing with highly concentrated twists and emotions.

Q: The end of the film suggests that not everything Sarah's seen has been real.

FO: In the creative process, things are never simple: What is real and what is not? How do you differentiate fantasy from reality? This theme also echoes Under the Sand, where Charlottte's character kept mixing fantasy and reality. Although in Swimming Pool, everything related to fantasy is part of the act of creation, so it is more channeled and less likely to end up causing madness.

In terms of directing, I've treated everything that is imaginary in Swimming Pool in a realistic way so that you see it all - fantasy and reality alike - on the same plane. When you tell a story, or when you film it, your process of identification with your characters is such that you completely immerse yourself in their logic and their perceptions. It's as if you're experiencing the same emotions that they are.

Breaking Bad wins a Peabody!

2009-04-01T10:54:00.000-07:00

The intent of the Peabody Awards is to recognize the most outstanding achievements in electronic media, including radio, television and cable. The Award is determined by one criterion – "Excellence." The Peabody Awards are presented only to "the best of the best."

First presented in 1941, the George Foster Peabody Awards recognize distinguished achievement and meritorious service by broadcasters, cable and Webcasters, producing organizations, and individuals. The awards program is administered by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. Selection is made each spring by the Peabody Board, a 16-member panel of distinguished academics, television critics, industry practitioners and experts in culture and the arts.

Today the George Foster Peabody Awards are often cited as the most selective and prestigious in electronic media. Each year, from more than one thousand entries, the Peabody Board selects the most outstanding works by unanimous vote. Though there is no set number of awards, no more than 36 have ever been presented in a single year.

Breaking Bad (AMC)
AMC, Sony Pictures Television, High Bridge Productions, Gran Via Productions
Bleak, harrowing, sometimes improbably funny, the series chronicled the consequences of a mild-mannered, dying science teacher's decision to secure his family's future by cooking methamphetamine.

Time Magazine in 1941:
A new type of accolade, which radio piously hopes will rank with journalism's Pulitzer Prizes and cinema's Oscars, was awarded for the first time last week. The trophies were four bronze medallions, each the size of a hockey puck. Their name: the George Foster Peabody Award "for conspicuous service in radio broadcasting." Selected for the first honors were: CBS (among chains), Cincinnati's 50,000-watt WLW (among big stations), Cleveland's 5,000-watt WGAR (among middle-sized stations), Columbia, null 250-watt KFRU (among small fry).

The idea of the awards was conceived by Lambdin Kay, public-service director for station WSB in Atlanta, and strenuously pushed by University of Georgia's publicity-minded dean of journalism, John E. Drewry. The University of Georgia itself awarded them, dubbing them after its late patron, Philanthropist George Foster Peabody, great & good friend of Franklin Roosevelt, who helped to found the Warm Springs Foundation.

Odd Man Out (1947)

2009-03-29T22:59:00.000-07:00

Nora's Nite
Chinese Food and home-baked brownies
First MovieNite streamed from Netflix

Paul Tatara via TCM:

Director Carol Reed is most often hailed as the creative force behind The Third Man (1949), a highly stylized meditation on friendship and post-War morality. Many critics, however, feel that Odd Man Out (1947), which was filmed two years prior to The Third Man, is Reed's real masterpiece. Though just as imaginatively photographed and edited as The Third Man, Odd Man Out is anchored by James Mason's breathtaking performance as a critically wounded I.R.A. agent who encounters both tenderness and betrayal while on the run from the authorities. Viewers who are only familiar with Mason's later work in such films as Lolita (1962) and Georgy Girl (1966) will be startled by his forcefulness in this role. This is a character, and a movie, that you won't soon forget.

Reed, who optioned F.L. Green's Odd Man Out in 1945, felt that there was a shortage of talented screenwriters in England, so he insisted that Green himself should adapt the book for the screen. Green was flattered by the suggestion, but had never written a script before, and was leery of flying solo with so much at stake. Acting against his own instincts, Reed then hired R.C. Sherriff to more or less keep the project on track while Green got his bearings. Reed also tinkered with the script himself, but that was to be expected, since he had a hand in virtually every aspect of his productions. This tendency to spread his talents around was one of the reasons Reed, who could have used the financial support of a major studio, long resisted working on the Hollywood assembly line.

Reed's European investors, not surprisingly, were concerned with making movies that would appeal to American as well as British audiences. Reed, however, felt that British filmmakers should stick to the sort of material that they knew best. Although the politics of Odd Man Out would be somewhat difficult for Americans to follow, Reed was convinced that viewers would respond to any narrative, so long as it was perceived to be honest. He noted that, in the past, Brits had failed at the American box office when they tried to pander. "The films were not genuine and did not ring true," he said, "and the American public realized it. Instead of making pictures for a country we don't understand, we must make pictures our way."

Apparently, belief in the British film industry had reached a low ebb by the late 1940s. Mason felt that there were only a handful of worthwhile directors in England at the time, and Reed was among them. Thus, he was thrilled when the filmmaker approached him to play the lead role in Odd Man Out. Reed was famous for giving his actors free reign while "discovering" their characters, and Mason obviously ran with the chance. He delivered one of the key performances of 1940s cinema, and it permanently solidified his standing as an actor of international prominence. Mason's co-star in the film, Dan O'Herlihy, noted years later that "...James was almost too intellectual for his own good, but he had much more depth than most. Although he wasn't very emotional he could indicate emotion on screen superbly: there was an austere vulnerability about him which could be immensely powerful." Certainly, viewers around the world latched onto the complex gravitas of Mason's portrayal.

It seems, however, that Reed was never completely satisfied with Odd Man Out. Years after its release, while watching the picture with screenwriter Ben Hecht, Reed decided that about 30 seconds of footage needed to be removed from the print. He offered a startled projectionist 100 pounds to take a pair of scissors to the offending seconds, but the man wisely refused. God only knows which 30 seconds were bothering Reed. The film seems close to perfection to everyone else.

John Hill via Film Reference:

Unlike much of the British cinema's wartime output, the film has little truck with social realism. Formally, the film is heavily indebted to both German Expressionism and French poetic realism—indeed, its ending is practically a copy of Julien Duvivier's Pepé le Moko (1936)—and has much in common with its similarly stylised postwar US counterpart, the film noir. This is evident in the film's approach to both plot and visual presentation. Like classical tragedy, the film's story is concerned with the irreversible consequences of an initial error. Johnny McQueen (James Mason) is shot following an illadvised, and armed, mill robbery and is left to wander the city at night. Despite the efforts of others to save him, his fate is already sealed and, in a moving climax, Johnny meets his death in the arms of the woman he loves, while his last remaining hope of escape, the ship, is seen to sail off without him.

This aura of doom is reinforced by the film's iconography (the recurring appearance of the Albert Clock, the deteriorating weather) as well as its distinctive visual style. As in film noir, both lighting and composition are used to striking effect. Lighting is predominantly low-key, creating strong chiaroscuro contrasts and vivid patterns of light and shadow. Compositions tend to be imbalanced and claustrophobic, with characters either cramped into enclosed interiors (as at Granny's) or rendered small by their surrounding environment (as in many of the night scenes). The use of a tilted camera (almost a Reed trademark), acute angles, and wide-angle lenses adds to these effects, especially in the chase sequences involving Dennis (Robert Beatty) as he races down long and imprisoning alley-ways or clambers his way through a maze of scaffolding. While such scenes as these, with their imaginative combination of real locations and expressive visual design, have retained an air of freshness, the film's resort to full-blooded expressionism in its subjective sequences has worn less well. Although much admired at the time, the attempts to visualize Johnny's hallucinations by superimposing faces onto beer bubbles or by putting paintings into flight now seem simply belaboured (and, no doubt, represent the type of device which led Andrew Sarris to include Reed, somewhat unkindly, in his category of "less than meets the eye").

Debate over the merit of Reed's technique, however, has also tended to discourage too close an inspection of the meanings which the film projects (although the documentarist Edgar Anstey did attack the film at the time of its release for apparently importing French existentialism). For while the film's opening title disclaims any specific connection to the conflicts in Northern Ireland and the film itself studiously avoids referring to either Belfast or the IRA by name, it is also quite clear from the film that it is dealing with a recognisable setting and situation. Indeed, critics have, at various times, praised the film for both its distinctive Irish flavour and the enduring relevance of one of its apparent messages (the futility of violence). What the film does, in this respect, is not so much dispense with local details as deprive them of their social and political dimension. For, by employing the conventions of expressionism, and introducing an element of religious allegory, the film's interpretation of events is inevitably metaphysical rather than social. It is not history and politics which can explain the characters' motivations and actions, only an inexorable fate or destiny. In doing so, it also reinforces a view of the Northern Ireland situation as fundamentally irrational. As Tom Nairn has noted (in The Break-up of Britain), it has become quite common to account for the "troubles" in terms of what he labels "the myth of atavism." It is only "a special historical curse, a luckless and predetermined fate," he observes, "which can account for the war." And it is this viewpoint which is effectively reinforced by Odd Man Out. For Johnny too is "cursed," by virtue of his adoption of violence, and becomes, in his turn, the victim of an apparently "luckless and predetermined fate."

See also MovieNite's take on The Fallen Idol.

Behind the scenes!

2009-03-24T17:28:00.001-07:00

Additionally, Peter embarrasses himself in a podcast: Breaking Bad Insider Podcast Episode 203.

Don't Look Now (1973)

2009-03-08T23:46:00.000-07:00

Peter's Nite

Roger Ebert on Don't Look Now:

Venice, that haunted city, has never been more melancholy than in "Don't Look Now." It is like a vast necropolis, its stones damp and crumbling, its canals alive with rats. The cinematography, by Anthony B. Richmond and an uncredited Roeg, drains it of people. There are a few shots, on busy streets or near the Grand Canal, when we see residents and tourists, but during the two sustained scenes where John and Laura are lost (first together, later separately) there is no one else about, and the streets, bridges, canals, dead ends and wrong turns fold in upon themselves. Walking in Venice, especially on a foggy winter light, is like walking in a dream.
The city is old and ominous. John struggles to raise a statue to its perch on a church wall, and then uncovers it to reveal a hideous gargoyle, sticking its tongue out at him. A church scaffold collapses beneath him. The hotel where the Baxters are staying is eager to close at the end of season; the lobby furniture is already shrouded. The canals yield drowned bodies. And John's concern mounts as his wife listens to the two strange sisters, and becomes convinced their daughter is sending them messages. "She's dead, Laura," John says. "Our daughter is dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead."

But it is John who has second sight. "He has the gift, even if he doesn't know it, even if he's resisting it," the sisters tell one another. And after Laura is called home to be with their son, who has had a minor accident at boarding school, John sees her and the sisters standing at the front of a motorboat passing him on the Grand Canal. How can she be here and there? Those who have been to Venice will recognize it as a funeral boat.

The plot of "Don't Look Now," if it were summarized in a realistic way, would be fairly standard horror stuff. The identification of the red-hooded figure is arbitrary and perhaps even unnecessary. It is the film's visual style, acting, and mood that evoke its uncanny power. Like the recent films of M. Night Shyamalan, it works through apprehension, not plot or action. The "explanation": is perfunctory but the dread is palpable.

Another Country (1984)

2009-03-01T23:00:00.000-08:00

Pamela's nite.

Wikipedia on Guy Burgess:
Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess was born at 2 Albemarle Villas, Devonport, Plymouth, England the elder son of Commander Malcolm Kingsford de Moncy Burgess RN and his wife, Evelyn Mary, daughter of William Gillman. He attended Lockers Park Prep School and then a period at Eton College. Burgess spent two years at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, but poor eyesight ended his naval prospects and he returned to Eton. He won an open scholarship to read modern history at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1930, gained a first in part one of the history tripos (1932) and an aegrotat in part two (1933), and held a two-year postgraduate teaching fellowship. Whilst at Cambridge, where he was recruited into the Cambridge Apostles, a secret, elite debating society, whose members at the time included Anthony Blunt. Like Blunt, Burgess was a homosexual.

Notorious for his bad behaviour and overt alcoholism, Burgess initially worked for The Times and, briefly, the BBC, as the Producer of The Week in Westminster, covering Parliamentary activity - wherein he was able to further his acquaintance with important politicians. He spent some time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. At Cambridge, he had been a friend of Julian Bell, the English poet who was killed while driving an ambulance in that conflict. Burgess and the other members of the "Five" were divided with regard to the impact of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which compromised their hard left ideals.

Burgess was most useful to the Soviets in his position as secretary to the British Deputy Foreign Minister, Hector McNeil. As McNeil's secretary, Burgess was able to transmit top secret Foreign Office documents to the KGB on a regular basis, secreting them out at night to be photographed by his controller and returning them to McNeil's desk in the morning. When assigned to Washington, D.C., Hector McNeil cautioned him to avoid three things: "the race thing", contact with the radical element, and homosexual adventuring. "Oh," quipped Burgess, "you mean I shouldn't make a pass at Paul Robeson?"

Assigned to the British embassy in Washington, Burgess continued his life as an unpredictable heavy drinker and indiscreet homosexual. He lived with Kim Philby in a basement flat, perhaps so that Philby could keep an eye on him. Nonetheless, Burgess was irrepressible, once insulting the wife of a high-ranking CIA official at one of Philby's dinner parties.

Burgess accompanied Donald Maclean in an escape to Moscow after Maclean fell under suspicion for espionage, even though Burgess himself was not under suspicion. The escape was arranged by their controller, Yuri Modin. There is some debate as to why Burgess was asked to accompany Maclean, and whether he was misled about the prospect for him returning to England. Unlike Maclean, who became a respected Soviet citizen in exile and lived until 1983, Burgess did not take to life in the USSR very well. Homosexuality was far less acceptable in the Soviet Union, and this may have been a problem, even though he had a state-sanctioned lover. Also, unlike Maclean, he never bothered to learn Russian, and even continued to order his clothes from his Savile Row tailor.

Becoming ever more dependent on drink, he appears to have been killed by his alcoholism, aged 52.

New season almost here!

2009-02-25T15:25:00.000-08:00

Black Rain (1989)

2009-02-16T22:41:00.000-08:00

Nora's Nite

Tom Mes on Yusaku Matsuda:

To gauge the impact and enduring popularity of Yusaku Matsuda in Japan, one need only walk into a Tokyo bookstore. In the cinema section, at least half a shelf will be taken up by photo books, essays, tributes and biographies of the late actor. Toyshops stock action figures and dolls, both vintage and new, based on his best-loved characters. In the numerous second-hand video stores of the Jimbocho area, it's easy to pick out Matsuda's films among the thousands of brightly coloured boxes: his are the ones that are twice as expensive as everything else.

Yusaku Matsuda is a phenomenon. His early death in 1989 at the age of forty has given him the kind of idolised immortality that the rest of the world bestows upon the likes of James Dean, Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee. The comparison with these giants is valid in more ways than one. Matsuda had a bit of all three: looks, acting range, cool machismo and a flair for action.

Yet, Matsuda remains a virtual unknown outside his home country. His misfortune was to have shot to fame at a time when the rest of the world had virtually forgotten that Japan even had a film industry: Matsuda reached his peak in the 80s, the most maligned decade in the annals of Japanese film history as seen through western eyes. Whereas stars of previous eras - Mifune, Takakura, Sugawara, Kaji - deservedly enjoy adulation beyond their own borders, Matsuda - who should be mentioned in the same breath - remains hidden from Western eyes, his work relegated to the dusty basement of Japanese cinema where few white men ever venture.

His obscurity is a paradox however, since millions around the world have seen Matsuda's final screen performance as the slippery villain Sato in Ridley Scott's Nihon-noir cop thriller Black Rain. An atypical role in many ways, it is the proverbial exception to the rule. In the part of his career that has come to define him, Matsuda played brash, cool, rebellious heroes, his tall figure and chiselled features furthermore lending him a virility and sex appeal that none of his forebears could match. As indisputably charismatic as Toshiro Mifune, Ken Takakura, Koji Tsuruta and Bunta Sugawara were, there was very little about them that would make women swoon or that would make scriptwriters decide that they should get the girl before fade-out.

Shameless promotion

2009-02-11T17:43:00.000-08:00

Great teaser trailers for season two:

No Way Out (1987)

2009-02-08T23:08:00.000-08:00

Stuart's nite. Finally.

Roger Donaldson via Popcorn Reel:

Roger Donaldson, an easygoing persona who looked relaxed and well-rested at a local hotel suite here in town, typically fills his films with energy, passion, sexiness and charm -- take "No Way Out" (1987) for example -- which he said he saw on cable television on a recent late night. He confessed to taping it and then watching it early the following morning. "Once I started watching it, I couldn't stop watching it! I suddenly saw it for what it was . . . I see why it succeeded as it did. The movie has got a great sort of cynical quality to it. It's sexy and it's funny and it's a good thriller. You're not sure how it's gonna turn out. And I think I saw in "The Bank Job" a movie with a similar sort of appeal to me." While the stories in both films are completely different, the director said that in tone the two films probably shared quite a lot in common.

Marathon Man (1976)

2009-02-02T21:32:00.000-08:00

Stuart's nite -- but... he doesn't show up. Peter rescues the evening by transforming this into his nite.Conrad Hall obit via The Independent

One of Hall's teachers at USC was the Yugoslavian montage expert Slavko Vorkapich. After Hall's short film Sea Theme won first prize for photography in a USC amateur contest, he formed a small production company, Canyon Films, with some fellow students, and, after adapting a short story My Brother Down There into a screenplay, they raised money to make a movie version. Hall said:

When it came time to decide who would do what, we all wanted to be the director. We couldn't do it by committee, of course. So we thought about what other jobs would need to be done to make the movie: producer, editor, cinematographer. We wrote them all down and put them in a hat. I happened to draw "cinematographer" . . . Eventually I learned what a great opportunity it is to be able to tell a story visually. I've found that I can be a storyteller, like my father, by using visuals and not be in competition with him.

Canyon Films proved short-lived, and Hall then worked in several capacities in the industry, including photography, editing and production, contributing to commercials, industrial films and features, including providing 16mm footage for Disney's acclaimed "True-Life Adventure" The Living Desert (1953).

He was given his first screen credit as one of three photographers on a low-budget black-and-white thriller, Edge of Fury (1958), but he continued to serve as camera assistant and camera operator with such noted cinematographers as Ted McCord, Ernest Haller, Floyd Crosby and Hal Mohr. For Robert Surtees, he was camera operator on the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando.

Also in 1962, he worked with Ted McCord on the television series Stoney Burke for the producer Leslie Stevens. Stevens admired Hall's work, and retained him to photograph episodes of the science- fiction series The Outer Limits (1963-65), after which Hall was the cinematographer on Stevens's feature film about the occult Incubus (1966). Starring William Shatner, it was notable for having its dialogue spoken entirely in Esperanto (a would-be universal language developed in 1887) and though considered stilted and pretentious at the time the film now has a cult following.

One of the first major films on which Hall received sole credit was Morituri (1965) starring Marlon Brando as an anti-Nazi German. Directed by Bernhard Wicki, a German director working for the first time in Hollywood, the black-and-white film was poorly received, with only the cast (Yul Brynner and Trevor Howard co-starred) and Hall's strikingly vivid camerawork winning praise. The film won Hall his first Oscar nomination.

Another black-and-white film lauded for Hall's photography was Richard Brooks's true crime story In Cold Blood (1967), based on Truman Capote's book about two psychopathic killers. "I started off my career in a sort of naturalistic style, as opposed to an operatic style," said Hall, "and I've refined that over the years to fit the stories."

Hall preferred to work in black-and-white, but by the mid-Sixties most of Hollywood's films were being made in colour, and Hall's work on Harper (1966), The Professionals (1966) and Cool Hand Luke displayed his mastery of the form. Disliking the artificial style of Hollywood lighting, he favoured a naturalistic or impressionist approach. His superb, dream-like rendering of the Old West in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid won him the Academy Award, and he also won the film's leading lady Katharine Ross, to whom he was married from 1969 to 1975.

Able to be selective in his assignments, he liked to work on projects about "moral and ethical dilemmas". "I look for stories about humanity," he said,about choices a person has to make. I don't like thrillers. They're not made about the human condition. They exist to torture you. I'd rather do something like Day of the Locust about the losers who don't make it in film, but make their lives worthwhile by pretending.

After shooting Marathon Man (1976) Hall spent a decade running a production company making commercials with his fellow photographer Haskell Wexler, though he shot Bette Midler's concert scenes for The Rose (1979). He returned to feature-film making with the thriller Black Widow (1987), and subsequent films included Love Affair (1994) and A Civil Action (1998).

Hall was to receive nine Oscar nominations during his 50-year career (and may well receive another for Road to Perdition). He won his second award for his surreal evocation of the world of a dysfunctional family in American Beauty. "This was Sam Mendes's first film," he said,

but it never felt like his first film. He's actually a kind of control freak. I mean that in a good way. It's one thing to be directing. It's another to be directing and to have a vision and communicate that. Sam has vision. I helped contribute to that vision and to that wonderful screenplay.

The dream-like shot of cascading rose petals featured in the film has already become an iconic image of Nineties cinema, but Hall confessed to some initial trepidation with the project. "I kept asking Sam, 'How are we going to light these people? They're all so unlikeable.' " He was also perturbed to discover how much was cut from the film in its final editing. Though he came around to the final version ("When he showed it to me on the big screen, it was a revelation") Hall hoped that some of the cut material would be put back for the film's DVD release.

In 1994 Hall, whose son, Conrad W. Hall, took up the same profession and shot The Panic Room (2002), received a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Cinematography. "Every film that he worked on was something beautiful to the eye, and very imaginative," said Zanuck. "Connie was not known for his speed, but neither was Rembrandt. He was known for incredible genius."

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

2009-01-25T09:45:00.000-08:00

Pamela's movie. Dinner was a delicious roast beef, amazing kale/bacon/potatoes (Nora had 2 servings), and slightly over-roasted sweet potatoes. Dessert was a fantastic apple tart (Nora had 2 servings). Special guest: Rebecca. This night was memorable because it was the last EVER telling of the 9/11 Stony Lake Peter's Birthday Cake gluttony story.

Boxofficemojo interviews Sydney Pollock:

Box Office Mojo: Let's talk about Three Days of the Condor. Why did you prominently feature the World Trade Center?

Sydney Pollack: I was looking for the logic of where the [Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)] might be [located]. I didn't want to have a building that said CIA on it because I didn't think that would exist. I figured they would want some kind of anonymity and that the best kind of anonymity are these two massive buildings with thousands of offices and you wouldn't know who's where. [Production Designer] Stephen Grimes was great—he had a nose for locations—and he found the Twin Towers. He found the alley, which was spooky and eerie and weird, for the [climactic] meeting in Three Days of the Condor.

Box Office Mojo: Did you shoot inside the Twin Towers?

Sydney Pollack: Yes. We shot the lobby, the second floor mezzanine lobby, the hallways, the elevators, down the hallway to the office. I loved them. I used to go [there] with my kids. My youngest daughter and her new husband came to visit me in New York and it was the first place I took them—the World Trade Center—up to the top. I loved those buildings. I used to occasionally use a helicopter to come in from [John F.] Kennedy [International Airport] or wherever and, coming in at sunset, looking at Manhattan, it was the view of the city—it made the composition of the shot—the skyline—perfect.

Box Office Mojo: What is the theme of Three Days of the Condor?

Sydney Pollack: Suspicion. From a behavioral point of view, in terms of defining and writing the characters, of directing the picture, it's about a man in a paranoid business who trusts everyone—and he turns from that to a man who's suspicious of everyone because of what happens to him. In the process, he meets a girl who trusts no one, who has her worst nightmare happen—a guy kidnaps her at gunpoint—and she finds that she blossoms. So, at the end of this movie, when they say goodbye, he's the suspicious one, suspecting that she may tell on him. That was the way we wrote it, trying to imagine these two separate arcs going in opposite directions.

Box Office Mojo: Isn't it based on a book?

Sydney Pollack: Yes. The book [Six Days of the Condor by James Grady] was about a bad group of guys inside the CIA who wanted to smuggle heroin. It was a potboiler. They hollowed out books and put heroin in the books.

Box Office Mojo: You excised the heroin from the motion picture version.

Sydney Pollack: I wasn't interested in heroin. It was boring. There were a million pictures about dope and, also, I wasn't interested in bad guys and good guys. I was interested in something much more complex. The Sixties were just over and I was remembering what happened when all cops were referred to as "pigs." I thought it must be a bitch if you're a really good cop—suppose you're a really good cop—and you know there's a bomb in that trunk but you do not have the legal right to search the trunk. What would you do? So the metaphor was: suppose there were a group of people inside the CIA that know about an impending crisis but also know they can't do anything above board about it. That they know for a fact that the oil supply, if it was choked off, could bring this country to a standstill.

Box Office Mojo: This was following the 1973 Arab oil embargo?

Sydney Pollack: Yes. But it was before the lines at the [gasoline stations]. We were prescient on this picture by accident, not by design. We were saying, let's find a crisis where these aren't a bunch of bad guys trying to make money for themselves; these are guys that honestly think they're saving America—that's why Cliff Robertson['s character] says: "what do you think [Americans are] going to want us to do when the cars don't start or when there's no food on the table? Are they going to want us to be moral or are they just going to want to get the oil? You know damn well what they're going to want. They're going to want the oil."

Box Office Mojo: Robertson's character also makes a point about what would happen when one of those hostile states gets plutonium—?

Sydney Pollack: That's right. I'm much more interested in the CIA guys who are trying to help us and do something [widely considered] immoral than I am about guys who are just immoral because they want to sell dope and make money. That's boring to me. It's much more complicated to say, here's a bunch of guys whose job it is to protect us and they're saying there's no way we're going to sell the fact that the Middle East [states] control the oil and if we don't get control of the oil and they [seize its production], we're going to end up with what we have now.

Box Office Mojo: That's what happened in reality—what the Three Days of the Condor conspirators predicted.

Sydney Pollack: Exactly. You've got every Middle Eastern country now trying to get an atomic weapon—or they already have them. Our point [in Three Days of the Condor] was that [the oil crisis] is not a simple problem.

The Big Clock (1948)

2009-01-18T09:48:00.000-08:00

Peter's movie, but Nora made a superb meatloaf with roasted veggies. Peter made his signature gluten-free brownies for dessert.

Robert M. Ryley on the life of poet and novelist Kenneth Fearing:

Consolation, however, came almost immediately at Yaddo, where he met Nan Lurie, a handsome thirty-two-year-old artist. She had grown up speaking Yiddish in New Jersey, gone to Paris on her own after high school, and won a scholarship to study under Yasuo Kunioshi at the Art Students League. She and Fearing met within a week of their arrival at Yaddo and stayed on together during the winter after most of the other residents had left. On Christmas day, with less than a dollar between them, they ate their first meal alone together at a restaurant in the Black district of Saratoga Springs. By the spring, when they were both back in NewYork, Fearing was wildly, deliriously, giddily in love and writing notes and letters of astonishing sentimentality, even falling into such clichés as "I am not good enough for you." He cherished what he called Nan's "sheer lunacy"--her "vitamins," her "stray cats," her "religious quarter hour," the "confessions" she wrote in the dark, blindfolded. (In his poem "Irene Has a Mind of Her Own," published four years later when his ardor had cooled, he looked on similar flakiness with a less benevolent eye.) In the winter of 1944-45, he moved into Nan's loft on East 10th Street, and, his divorce having become final the year before, they were married in Greenwich, Connecticut, on June 18, 1945.

While still at Yaddo in March 1943, Fearing had been having trouble mapping out a new novel. Inspiration had to wait for two events: the sensational murder in October 1943 of the New York heiress Mrs. Wayne Lonergan, and the publication in 1944 of Samuel Michael Fuller's little-known thriller The Dark Page. Transformed and refined, details from the Lonergan case and Fuller's novel would coalesce in Fearing's imagination to produce the plot of his most famous book, which he wrote between August 1944 and October 1945.

Published in the fall of 1946, The Big Clock made Fearing temporarily rich. Altogether he took in about $60,000 (roughly $360,000 in 1992 dollars): about $ 10,000 in royalties and from the sale of republication rights (including a condensation in The American Magazine), and $50,000 from the sale of film rights to Paramount. In 1947, Nan won $2,000 in an art competition, a sum they dismissed as negligible but that only two years earlier would have seemed a fortune. But Fearing's successes always contained the germ of disaster. Overestimating his business acumen, he had negotiated his own contract with Paramount, permanently and irrevocably signing away his film rights, and relinquishing his television rights till 1952, by which time, he discovered to his rage and frustration, Paramount was showing late-night reruns and had thus cornered the market.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)

2009-01-11T09:54:00.000-08:00

Nora's movie. Nora was at a MoveOn congressional action training event till very late, so had to rush to LaLa's for takeout, and was late to her own MovieNite. Serviceable lemon tartlets for dessert.

BFI on Seance on a Wet Afternoon:

Séance On A Wet Afternoon (d. Bryan Forbes, 1964) is easily the darkest, and maybe the finest, of the five films which Richard Attenborough and Bryan Forbes co-produced. Forbes adapted it from a 1961 novel by Mark McShane, a British-based crime writer whose penchant for odd titles resulted in such books as The Crimson Madness of Little Doom (1966), Ill Met by a Fish Shop in George Street (1968) and Lashed But Not Leashed (1976). Although the story's protagonist, Myra Savage, later returned in McShane's sequel Séance for Two (1972), the film turned out to be the last, and least financially successful, of the Attenborough/Forbes collaborations.

Despite the critical and commercial success of Attenborough and Forbes' Whistle Down the Wind (d. Forbes, 1961) and The L-Shaped Room (d. Forbes, 1962), financing for Séance was hard to secure. In addition, although Attenborough agreed to co-star as the hen-pecked husband, Bill, the main role of Myra, the clairvoyant wife, proved very hard to cast, with actresses like Margaret Lockwood, Anne Bancroft and Simone Signoret proving to be either unavailable or uninterested, or simply not considered sufficiently commercial. At one point, Forbes even toyed with changing the role to that of a man, hoping to get Alec Guinness and Tom Courtenay for both leads, before finally settling on American stage actress Kim Stanley.

The film's opening is slowly and deliberately paced, as we see Myra and Bill exchange increasingly strained and sinister dialogue while making rather mysterious and methodical preparations around their house. Strong character scenes between the submissive husband and the increasingly unbalanced wife play effectively alongside the suspenseful kidnap and ransom sequences. This approach is seen at its best in the film's central twelve minute section, in which Bill's frantic collection of the ransom at Piccadilly Circus underground station is intercut with a sedate policeman's interview with Myra back home. The scene effectively juxtaposes big city anonymity with suburban familiarity.

Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, Les (1953)

2008-11-16T22:31:00.000-08:00

Ebert on Hulot:

It is not a comedy of hilarity but a comedy of memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer. There are some real laughs in it, but ``Mr. Hulot's Holiday'' gives us something rarer, an amused affection for human nature--so odd, so valuable, so particular.

The movie was released in 1953, and played for months, even years, in art cinemas. ``Mr. Hulot'' was as big a hit in its time as ``Like Water for Chocolate,'' ``The Gods Must Be Crazy'' and other small films that people recommend to each other. There was a time when any art theater could do a week's good business just by booking ``Hulot.'' Jacques Tati (1908-1982) made only four more features in the next 20 years, much labored over, much admired, but this is the film for which he'll be remembered.

The Jerk (1979)

2008-11-09T23:10:00.000-08:00

The Man Who Never Was (1956)

2008-11-02T15:15:00.000-08:00

Alan Bellows via Damn Interesting:

The idea to plant false military documents on a dead man and let them fall into the hands of the Germans was conceived by Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu at British naval intelligence. His was a variation of an earlier idea proposed by Flight Lt. Charles Cholmondeley of the counter-intelligence service MI5. Cholmondeley had suggested that a wireless radio could be placed on a dead soldier whose parachute was rigged to appear to have failed, which would provide the Allies with a channel to provide disinformation to the enemy. But his plan was deemed impractical, so Montagu's death-at-sea ruse was implemented instead, and dubbed Operation Mincemeat.

Montagu's team quietly procured the body of a 34-year-old man who had recently died with pneumonia, whose lungs already contained fluid as a drowned man's would. The family of the deceased granted permission to use the body for this mission on the condition that the man's identity never be revealed. As the body waited in cold storage, the fictional life of Major William Martin was fabricated in great detail by the Twenty Committee (often referred to by the roman numeral XX or "double-cross"). The corpse was given identification, keys, personal letters, and other possessions. In order to explain why the man would be found chained to his briefcase, Montagu's team planted evidence suggesting that Major Martin was an absent-minded but responsible chap, including overdue bills and a replacement ID card. Such a man might chain himself to a briefcase full of sensitive documents in order to prevent its loss during the flight.

On 28 April 1943, Major Martin was placed aboard the submarine HMS Seraph in a special steel canister packed with dry ice. The crew set off for the coast of Spain, where it was likely that a citizen of the Axis-aligned country would locate the body and report it to authorities. After two days at sea, the submarine surfaced about a mile off the coast of Spain at 4:30 in the morning. Believing that the heavy canister contained top secret meteorological equipment, members of the crew carried it on deck, after which point everyone aside from the officers was ordered below deck. There in the dark, Lt. Norman L.A. (Bill) Jewell, the commander of Seraph, explained the mission and swore the men to secrecy. Major Martin's body was then removed from the canister onto the deck, where he was fitted with his life jacket and chained to his briefcase. The men read the 39th Psalm and committed the body to the sea, where the tide gradually drew it ashore.

Once the body was discovered, Britain's requests for the return of the briefcase helped complete the illusion that there was sensitive information contained therein. To further the hoax, Montagu arranged to have Major Martin's name included on the next British casualty list in The Times. When the documents were finally returned to the British two weeks later, microscopic examination revealed that the Germans had indeed opened and resealed the letters. Additionally, German transmissions decrypted by Ultra indicated that the Nazis were moving forces to defend Sardinia, Corsica, and Greece. This news prompted a brief cable to Winston Churchill to inform him of the success: "Mincemeat Swallowed Whole."

Bell Book and Candle (1958)

2008-10-26T23:15:00.000-07:00

Village of the Damned (1960)

2008-10-19T22:25:00.000-07:00

Stirling Silliphant interview via Go Into The Story:

"I never intended to be a screenwriter; since childhood I had aspired to become a novelist and/or a poet. But I found films interesting, since I made my living publicizing them. When I met Joe Louis and learned that I could acquire the rights to his life story, it never occurred to me to write the film, only to produce it [The Joe Louis Story], I hired Robert Sylvester, a friend of mine who was a columnist for the New York Daily News and a big fight buff, to write the screenplay. Only when Bob failed to give me some of the scenes I felt were essential to the film, did I step in and write them myself. Later, when I watched the completed movie, I saw that the several scenes I had written were far and away the best ones in the flick--at least to my considerably prejudiced opinion. But, even more, I had discovered the pain of having to sit there and WAIT--as a producer--for the writer to deliver. What the hell, it struck me, why not be the guy everybody's waiting for, rather than the guy who's going crazy waiting?"

"Things in TV were immeasurably different than they are today. In the sixties and seventies, for one thing--and this is KEY--the network commitment to a producer was for a far greater number of episodes than the networks now allot. Half-hour shows usually scored a thirty-six-episodes season. Hour shows seldom less than twenty-four episodes. For this reason, when a producer turned up a writer with whom he resonated, he was more likely than not to ask, even beg, that writer for multiple commitments. Apparently, I was such a writer when I was freelancing.

"I have always felt that the most original writing I have done in the filmed medium was done in the period of 1960 to 1964 when I wrote the majority of the one-hour Route 66 filmed-on-location shows for CBS. These shows caught the American psyche of that period about as accurately as it could be caught. I wrote all of them out of an intense personal motivation; each was a work of passion, conviction, and, occasionally, of anguish."

"My single meeting with Hitch: Joan (series producer) told me the master was actually going to direct one of his TV shows--this one his very favorite story--"The Voice in the Night," to be the flagship episode for his one-hour Suspicion series. Joan drove me to his home up Bellagio Road, one of those canyon streets off Sunset Boulevard where you drive in through a gate.

"Hitch was charming. Congratulated me on the scripts I'd done for the half-hour Alfred Hitchcock Presents shows, personally made me a scotch and soda and sat me down with my yellow pad.

"I wouldn't trade the hour that followed for anything I can think of at the moment... The man was BRILLIANT. He fucking dictated the script to me--shot by shot, including camera movements and opticals. He actually had already SEEN the finished film. He'd say, for example, 'The camera's in the boat with the boy and the girl. The move in is very, very slow--while we see the mossy side of the wrecked schooner. Bump. Now the boy climbs the ladder. I tilt up. i see him look at his hand. Something strange seems to have attached itself. He disappears on deck. I'm shooting through this foreground of--of stuff--and I'm panning him to the cabin door. Something there makes him freeze. He waits. Now the camera's over here, and I see the girl come to him. Give me about this much dialogue, Stirling.' He holds up his hand, thumb and forefinger two inches apart. I jot down--'Dialogue, two inches.' As I say, the whole goddamned film--shot by shot, no dialogue--just the measurements of how much dialogue in the entire short story. It's all introspection and the memory of horror, and the writer didn't want to spoil it with dialogue. Lotsa luck, screenwriter. 'Give me two inches of dialogue right here.'"

Wolf Rilla obit from The Independent:

Piccadilly Third Stop (1960) was a disappointment, a routine tale of an embassy heist, but it was followed by his finest film (the first of two for MGM), Village of the Damned, with Rilla extracting every chill to be found in Wyndham's eerie tale of a country village where 12 of the women are impregnated while asleep - it is theorised that the aliens deposited the children in the women's wombs, the way cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of host birds. Although the children are lovingly raised by the women, it gradually becomes apparent that they are wicked beings with plans to take over the planet. Rilla said,

What interested me was not to make a fantastic film but a film that was very real. To take an ordinary situation and inject extraordinary events into it.

The children's power is first indicated when one of the babies compels his mother to put her hand repeatedly into boiling water because she has given him a bottle that is too warm. Costing only $82,000 to make, the film grossed $1.5m in the US and Canada alone. "That film has become a classic," said its star Barbara Shelley a few years ago: It's shown - I've never been invited - in places like Brazil; I know that Wolf Rilla goes off, all expenses paid, as the director.

Its minimal budget meant that special effects were few, but particularly unsettling was the way the children's eyes glowed when they were using their powers. "Beware the eyes that paralyse!" warned the advertisements. Tom Howard, a photographic effects specialist, created the effect by cutting a negative print in over the positive, turning the irises nearly white. The children's leader was effectively played by young Martin Stephens, now an architect and meditation teacher, who later described Rilla as "a very good director. A very clear director, and a patient one." Rilla said later, in conversation with his former child actors,

People always ask how did I get such good performances out of you lot. Simple - I asked you to do nothing except be still and stare. Children fidget and are never still, and I wanted you all to be absolutely still and steady and just stare. Very unchildlike, and, of course, very unsettling.

The Mating Season (1951)

2008-09-14T23:25:00.000-07:00

Thelma Ritter:
Ritter did stock theater and radio shows early in her career, without much impact. Ritter's first movie role was in Miracle on 34th Street (1947). The 45-year-old made a memorable impression in a brief uncredited part, as a frustrated mother unable to find the toy that Kris Kringle has promised to her son. Her second role, in writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's A Letter to Three Wives (1949), also left a mark, although Ritter was again not listed in the credits.

Mankiewicz kept Ritter in mind, and cast her in his All About Eve the following year. An Oscar nomination led to popularity, and a second Oscar nomination followed for Mitchell Leisen's' classic screwball comedy The Mating Season (1951) starring Gene Tierney, John Lund and Miriam Hopkins. Ritter enjoyed steady film work for the next dozen years. She also appeared in many of the episodic drama TV series of the 1950s, such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, General Electric Theater, and The United States Steel Hour.

Throughout her career, Ritter was nominated for an Academy Award six times giving her the dubious honor of being nominated for the award the most times without a win (tied with Deborah Kerr). She co-hosted the Oscar ceremony in 1954, trading wisecracks with Bob Hope.

The diminutive, gravel-voiced Ritter gained great acclaim as a premier character actress, known for her comic timing and sassy one-liners. She was most typically cast as the sardonic, seen-it-all housekeeper who saw through her boss's vanity and frequently told him or her so. But she was also fiercely protective, and neither trusted nor tolerated fools or con men. Ritter would trade on this irascible screen persona for the rest of her life.

Her unsentimental, hard-boiled fatalism could be used in other ways. In occasional non-comedic turns, she projected an unglamorous world-weariness, notably in Pickup on South Street (1953). In this film, she gave a touching and believable performance in her climactic scene opposite a communist spy (played by Richard Kiley) who has come to kill her: she knows she cannot stop him, but she is determined to let him know her contempt for him and all his kind.

Some of her best-known roles include Bette Davis's devoted maid in All About Eve (1950), as Gene Tierney's maid/mother-in-law in The Mating Season (1951), James Stewart's nurse in Rear Window (1954), and as Doris Day's housekeeper in Pillow Talk (1959). Her turn in John Huston's The Misfits (1961), where she played opposite Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, also garnered favorable reviews.

Dangerous Beauty (1998)

2008-08-17T16:01:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia on Veronica Franco:
In 1565, when she was about 20 years old, Veronica Franco was listed in Il Catalogo di tutte le principale e più honorate cortigiane di Venezia, which gave the names, addresses, and fees of Venice's most prominent prostitutes; her mother was listed as the person to whom the fee should be paid. From extant records, we know that by the time she was 18, Franco had been briefly married and had given birth to her first child; she would eventually have six children, three of whom died in infancy.

As one of the più honorate cortigiane in a wealthy and cosmopolitan city, Franco lived well for much of her working life, but without the automatic protection accorded to "respectable" women, she had to make her own way. She studied and sought patrons among the learned. By the 1570s, she belonged to one of the more prestigious literary circles in the city, participating in discussions and contributing to and editing anthologies of poetry.

In 1575, Franco's own volume of the poetry was published, her Terze rime, containing 18 capitoli (verse epistles) by her and 7 by men writing in her praise. That same year saw an outbreak of plague in Venice, one that lasted two years and caused Franco to leave the city and to lose many of her possessions. In 1577, she unsuccessfully proposed to the city council that it should establish a home for poor women, of which she would become the administrator. By then, she was raising not only her own children but also her nephews, who had been orphaned by the plague.

In 1580, Franco published her Lettere familiari a diversi, "Letters written in my youth," which included 50 letters, as well as two sonnets addressed to King Henry III of France, who had visited her six years earlier. We have little information for her life after 1580. Records suggest that she was less prosperous in her later years but was not living in poverty. However, she published no more writings.

Summertime (1955)

2008-08-10T15:53:00.000-07:00

The Crimson Pirate (1952)

2008-08-03T23:23:00.000-07:00

His Girl Friday (1940)

2008-06-29T23:10:00.000-07:00

Mike Wallace interviews Ben Hecht in 1958 via University of Texas:

HECHT: How do you know I wrote “The Iron Pettycoat”? I took my name off it.

WALLACE: I know you did. For reasons best known to Ben Hecht, the New York Times said, “He declined to have his name mentioned in the credits. A witness to the finished picture may readily figure out why.” Uh – why – why do you get involved in such trash?

HECHT: Well, uh, it wasn’t trash when I started. You see a movie begins like most things with an idea and then it turns out that the inventor of the idea who was usually the writer is a stowaway. He has the privileges of a stowaway. He has no powers to assert himself and about ten or fifteen villains including his own incompetence usually corrupts that he – the reason he thought of – in this particular case, “The Iron Pettycoat,” the corruption came through the recutting of the movie and the movie was written for a lady, Miss Katherine Hepburn, and ended up instead as a role for the hero, Mr. Bob Hope, Miss Hepburn was removed from in by fifty percent. I got irritated and took my name off it – it had nothing to do with the movie I wrote.

WALLACE: But the fact of the matter is that you’ve said time and again, Ben, that you’ve sold out – you sold out to make a buck, isn’t that true?

HECHT: Well, what do we all do – you’re making a buck, I’m making a buck, I don’t sell out anything. I’ve written three hundred short stories and kept alive by working in the movies. You cannot have two homes – one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast …

WALLACE: Well wait, wait, wait, Ben. Now in one breath you say Hollywood puts together trash and the next breath you say, “Give me a hundred thousand dollars and I’ll grind out whatever you tell me and who cares what it does to the American mind.” Isn’t that about what you say?

HECHT: No, well I – I leave that guilt up to the movie makers. I just do what I’m told. I take assignments, I used to work on newspapers. I took assignments. I take assignments from movie people and there’s very little a writer can do to improve a movie. The writer’s usually paid not to assert himself, not to intrude and one of the reasons that Hollywood has – come a cropper.

WALLACE: Well, now wait….

HECHT: The writer has had nothing to do with the situation.

WALLACE: The writer has nothing to do?

HECHT: Nothing to do.

WALLACE: We’ve talked about this – this week with another top screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky, who admires you very much, by the way. He’s the fellow who wrote “Marty” and “The Bachelor Party” and he said this, he said, “It’ all up to the individual writer.” Chayefsky said, “I’ve never written just for the money in my life, I’d rather hand the money back than write something just because somebody else tells me to.”

HECHT: He sounds like little Goldilocks. (Laughs) He’ll change his mind after he’s been out here a while.
WALLACE: If I may switch the subject … abruptly Ben … do you get any consolation at all from religion?

HECHT: Uh, no. I regard religion as a part of a rather odd mythomania which has persisted in the world … I think that anybody that gets consolation from religion is much the same as scientists who might get consolation from the delusion that the world was flat. Religion is changed … God has different coloration, different meaning today…

WALLACE: You’re a Jew?

HECHT: Yes.

WALLACE: …. Means nothing to you?

HECHT: … no more other than I was a Kentuckian.

Easy Living (1937)

2008-06-22T21:53:00.000-07:00

Senses of Cinema tries rescue director Mitchell Leisen's reputation by assassinating Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges:

“Leisen was competent and stylish at his best.” Film historian Steven Bach gives the majority view. “He could always make a picture look better than it was, but never play better, for he had no sense of material.” (1) Condescending but benign next to Billy Wilder or Preston Sturges, writers whose early Hollywood careers were built on their scripts for Leisen films: “On TV,” Wilder said, “I would watch only a picture by a director I hated. There is no director I hate that much. Not even Mitchell Leisen.” (2)
Wilder and Sturges, in later years, bewailed the havoc Leisen wreaked on their scripts. Painted him as a flamboyant gay aesthete, who preferred décor to drama, party dresses to pithy dialogue. Who deleted pages of script at the whim of his leading lady – focusing instead on a vase of white lilies on a table, a muscular Grecian statue in a corner of the Grand Salon. Flickering and insubstantial as a celluloid ghost, his oeuvre embodied Susan Sontag's definition of camp. It was “decorative art, emphasising texture, sensuous surface and style at the expense of content.” (3) For Wilder, the problem with Leisen was simple. “He was a window dresser.” (4)

Ironically, though, Midnight (1939) – a frothy romantic farce directed by Leisen from a Wilder script – is a sharper and more stylish satire than Wilder's own Sabrina (1954) or Love in the Afternoon (1957). A socially-conscious soap opera, Hold Back the Dawn (1941) – again, written by Wilder but directed by Leisen – packs a far greater punch than Wilder's own Ace in the Hole (1951). Lacking Wilder's pervasive sourness and contempt, Hold Back the Dawn views its hicks and whores and schemers through a veil of sympathy, suggesting they might have reasons to act as they do

Similarly, Easy Living (1937) – a “screwball” comedy shot by Leisen but scripted by Sturges – is as frenetically funny as The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944). Yet it has a quality that Sturges' film wholly lacks, a visual and emotional grace. Their second teaming, Remember the Night (1940) parades Sturges' love of small-town Americana. But Leisen, with his drastic cuts to the screenplay, makes it heartfelt rather than hokey. Mercifully, he eschews those Sturges forays into cornball excess.

Leisen, glimpsed in this new light, is no longer a swishy hack. He's a subtle and stylish auteur who could add heart and humanity to the brittle sophistication of Billy Wilder, lend grace and elegance to the boisterous Americana of Preston Sturges. In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson hails Leisen as “an expert at witty romantic comedies, too reliant on feeling to be screwball, too pleased with glamour to be satires – and thus less likely to attract critical attention.” (5)

Cornball excess? Has this guy even SEEN these movies?!?! There has to be a way to appreciate the work of one director without making this childish and two dimensional argument against Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges.

The Life of Emile Zola (1937)

2008-06-15T21:48:00.000-07:00

Pat and Mike (1952)

2008-05-25T21:43:00.000-07:00

Watch Recount!

2008-05-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

Miller's Crossing (1990)

2008-05-18T22:22:00.000-07:00

Peter's Nite
Salmon, roasted potatoes, spinach, brownies, sorbet.
Stuart in Cannes cat burgling jewelry from celebrities

Time Magazine's Top 100 Movies:

Leave it to the Coen brothers -- the writer-producer-director team who were the film finds of the '80s -- to discover ferocious drama in words, character, atmosphere. Their inspiration for Miller's Crossing was a pair of Dashiell Hammett novels: Red Harvest (which provided the milieu of a corrupt city ruled by warring gangsters) and The Glass Key (which provided the plot of an aging boss and his young adviser involved with the same woman). To this blend the Coens have brought a teeming cast of sharpies, most of them spectacularly, thoughtfully venal. They speak wittily but often don't mean quite what they say; listeners must find clues in their equally eloquent silences.Like Red Harvest, but unlike most movies, Miller's Crossing has a good novel's narrative density. The film finds a dozen angles in the battle between Leo O'Bannion (Albert Finney), the Irishman who has run the town for years, and Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), the volatile, flirtatious Italian who is itching to seize control. Their bone of contention is Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro), a gambler too greedy to live long but too cunning to stay dead. His sister Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) has stolen Leo's heart and is ever ready to fence it. Nice crowd. Shuttling among them, wooed and wounded by them all, is Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), an existential hero with a black Irish soul. We spend most of the movie racing after Tom's mind, trying to figure what devious plan it will spin next.The Coens have tempered their style from the daredevil camerabatics of Blood Simple and Raising Arizona; they now seek the extra fillip of incident and character in the corner of every frame. Each of the hard gents in Miller's Crossing finds his own space and his own reasons for pushing others out of it. Leo, for example, is given a blaze of glory as he defends his life against Caspar's goons. To the strains of Danny Boy he strides from his home, machine gun flaring, a dinosaur who refuses to die. "The old man," one friend says wistfully, "is still an artist with the Thompson." The Coens are artists too, and their cool dazzler is an elegy to a day when Hollywood could locate moral gravity in a genre film for grownups.

Miller's Crossing,The Glass Key and Dashiell Hammett by Paul Coughlin via Senses of Cinema:

Joel and Ethan Coen's film, too, is influenced as much by the casting of Gabriel Byrne as any specific reference to Hammett's heroes. The Continental Op of Red Harvest is middle-aged, overweight and short. The casting of Byrne allows for the psychological assurance, self-confidence and icy demeanour to be physically reproduced in the sturdy and unruffled presence of the tall and lean actor. Tom is 'a man who walks behind a man, whispers in his ear', he is the brains behind Leo's operation, and he is the heartless centre of Miller's Crossing. Hearts and minds vie for attention in the Coens' film. Tom contemplates the importance of reason in his decisions, he uses an analytical approach to support a basis for all of his actions. On several occasions Tom is framed alone in his room, pensively smoking a cigarette, the consternation on his face signifying a man lost in the realm of his own thoughts. The central enigma of Miller's Crossing is Tom's agenda, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) suggests it is to woo and win her, Leo implies that Tom is motivated by loyalty, but Tom remains implacably obscure about his strategies and their intentions. Arguably, Miller's Crossing is precisely about Leo's revelation to Tom of his intentions to marry Verna, for it is this incident which precedes and then instigates the events which follow; events which culminate with a bonding so substantial between Leo and Tom that it must eventually become untenable.

The King of Kong (2007)

2008-05-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

Nora's Nite
(Stuart flaked!)

AV Club interviews Billy Mitchell:

The story didn't end with the movie, though: Billy Mitchell, a successful restaurant owner and hot-sauce mogul in Florida, unsurprisingly took umbrage at the way he was portrayed. Though the beginning of the film paints him as a hard-working businessman who bettered himself via the same principles that made him good at gaming, it quickly casts him as a man who a) may have sent minions to examine his rival's game console, b) won't face a worthy opponent in a live match, c) may have cheated to keep his title, and d) is generally self-absorbed and awful. To what degree those things are true is a matter of debate. While Mitchell claims to this day that he hasn't seen the movie, he insists (in the few interviews he's given) that he was portrayed unfairly, and that the film is inaccurate. That's where The A.V. Club was willing to leave things—with an excellent documentary that, like all documentaries, can't possibly paint a completely accurate picture. Until about a week before the DVD release of The King Of Kong, when Billy Mitchell called our office.

He was ostensibly just thanking us for ordering some of his hot sauce—and looking for our suite number for the shipment—but after I'd chatted with him for about 10 minutes, I asked if he'd like to continue our conversation, and make it an official interview. He agreed, and an hour of sometimes-pointed, sometimes-rambling conversation followed. To his credit, Mitchell is well aware that a Donkey Kong score isn't the most important thing on earth, or even in his life. But he's at least slightly bitter—and heartily determined to get his side of the story across. He comes across as friendly but almost amazingly self-centered, and a good deal more charming than Kong lets on. (Some of the DVD's bonus footage offers a better glimpse into what may be the "real" Billy.) He had plenty to say about specific points the movie raises—for instance, he says that in one key scene, the filmmakers edited out several seconds to make it look like he snubbed his nice-guy rival. In the interest of fairness, The A.V. Club tracked down Ed Cunningham and Seth Gordon to respond to some of the allegations. And the saga continues. What follows is two separate conversations that took place about a week apart, the first with Mitchell, and the second with Cunningham and Gordon. They're edited together for the purposes of clarity and flow.

Billy Mitchell: You see me in the movie, and I'm wearing different types of patriotic ties. You saw the movie. What impression did the movie give you? And then I'll tell you the real truth.

The A.V. Club: Well, the movie clearly makes you out to be the bad guy. Or do you mean specifically about the ties?

BM: Did I come across like a staunch Republican, or like a NRA guy or a 9/11 guy, or something like that? The truth is, I started wearing those ties to competitions in 1999, because in the race for a perfect game of Pac-Man, there was another guy, a counterpart from Canada who's really good, and we were in our race, in our quest for a perfect game. He called himself Captain Canada, and he actually wore a Canadian cape, a flag. I just wasn't gonna be that goofy. The American flag tie's about as goofy as I would go. Sometimes interviews take a funny angle like that. Sometimes they want real serious questions about truth and lies and deception. And sometimes they just want the humor, the funny stories, and that's fine, too. And whatever you wanna do is fine.

AVC: Let me ask you about a specific scene in the movie…

BM: Okay, I'm ready. You're gonna ask me about the scene where I walk behind Steve.

AVC: Yeah.

BM: Do you believe that I actually told you the question you were gonna ask me? So find humor in that, and go ahead and put it in your review.

AVC: I'd guess this is a question you're getting a lot.

BM: Either that, or I can read your mind, and you should hang up the phone quickly. Recall the scene in your mind. I'm walking with my wife—my trophy wife, which we'll talk about later. Um, what part of the country are you in? Chicago? Is that where you were born? Or where you grew up?

AVC: I grew up in Milwaukee.

BM: Very good. That plays a point later… We're on the record here so, I'm gonna watch what I wanna tell you. Are we on the record?

AVC: Yes.

BM: After spending a night out with my family, and dropping off one of the people who was participating in the contest there, I went to drive away, and my wife said, "You don't wanna go inside?" And so we walked in, and Ed Cunningham put the microphone on me. I didn't have any objection to that. I wouldn't—I mean, I don't have anything negative, period. Walking into the arcade, I went game to game, and at each game, I reminded my wife who the person was that was playing. One of the very first games—I don't know that it was the first, but it was one of the first—was Steve playin' Donkey Kong. And as I walked past him… Now you've got the movie in your mind, the camera is looking at me from behind or from the front? As I'm walking toward him.

AVC: I don't recall.

BM: You've gotta watch this movie, man! I'm givin' you these test questions! Okay, so the camera's watchin' us, and as we walk past him, this guy in the movie [Sarcastically.] who I've never met and I've never even said hello to, because I'm so nasty and arrogant… As I was just about behind him, he turned and he said, "Hi, Billy." Okay. You don't really—somebody you've never met—would you just say "Hi, Billy," that casually? Then it cuts from a perfectly good camera angle that's following us to the opposite side, where me and my wife continue walking, and I say something to the effect of, "Some people, I don't wanna spend too much time talking to." Is that what you're talking about?

AVC: Yes.

BM: Okay. Now this is what you do for a living? I'm only being funny here to drive a point home. I don't want you to put across that I was mean to you, because I'm not, I'm happy here. But let's think of this: This is what you do for a living? Now I'm gonna say it again, and you tell me what this means: "Some people, I don't wanna spend too much time talking to." You don't hear somethin' in that?

AVC: I'm not getting it. You'll have to let me know what I'm missing.

BM: I obviously stood there and talked to him. "Some people, I don't wanna spend too much time talking to." That's why they cut one camera angle to the other, 'cause when I stood behind him, and I waited for the precise moment, knowing Donkey Kong… You know where the monkey falls down on its head? You've got like, maybe 10 seconds of little rhetoric that you can, whatever, without disturbing somebody? And I reminded my wife, "This is Steve, remember we met him? He's the guy from Seattle. He's the other Donkey Kong guy." She goes, "Oh, yeah." I go, "How they treatin' ya?" That—my line to him is, "How they treatin' you," or "How is it treatin' you?" And he said, "Not good." And I go, "No?" He goes, "No, I just can't get it together," and he didn't get a good score that weekend. And I said, "All right, well, hang in there." And I walked away.

AVC: And you're saying they cut that out, right? None of that's actually in the movie.

BM: Right. So what they did was, he says, "Hi, Billy," cut! And then it's: "Some people, I don't wanna spend too much time talking to." If I stood there and talked to him and his guy died, [people would say] "Look at this: He can't even let the guy play in peace." You can see that angle, right? I didn't wanna stand there, I didn't want him to feel intimidated, I didn't want anyone to think that I was stealin' his secrets.

Move Over, Darling (1963)

2008-05-04T23:25:00.000-07:00

Pamela's Nite

Trivia via Wikipedia:

This was originally to be a comeback vehicle for Marilyn Monroe, under the working title of Something's Got to Give. Dean Martin was cast as Nick Arden, and the director was George Cukor. Monroe was fired for seldom showing up for shooting early in its production cycle, appearing in only about 30 minutes of usable film. Unable to complete the movie, and having already sunk a considerable amount of money into the production and sets, 20th Century Fox went ahead with the project, under a new title, new director, and recast stars. At first, they tried to continue with Lee Remick in Monroe's place, but Martin balked at working with anyone else and that version was never completed. Doris Day and James Garner were eventually cast in the roles originated by Irene Dunne and Cary Grant in My Favorite Wife. Chuck Connors played the Randolph Scott role, replacing Tom Tryon, who'd been cast in the Monroe version.

Garner accidentally broke Day's rib (during the massage scene, when he pulls her off of Bergen). Garner wasn't even aware of what had happened until the next day, when he felt the bandage while putting his arms around her.

The producers scheduled the scene with Doris Day riding through a car wash for the last day of shooting because they were concerned that the detergents might affect her complexion. When the scene went off without a hitch, they admitted their ploy to Day, then used the story in promotional materials for the film.

Context via DVDVerdict:

Perhaps the most fabled movie of the 1960s, this one was meant to be a comeback vehicle both for Marilyn Monroe, whose career was reeling from three years of flops, and Fox, which was reeling from big budget overruns on Cleopatra. The blonde bombshell was to be teamed with laid-back swinger Dean Martin for some risque business—including a few modest glimpses of a skinny dip on camera.

However, it was not to be. Monroe was fired from the movie for absences due to sinusitis. The actress went on a publicity offensive to win back the role, but died before she could return to the set. Thus, it became Marilyn Monroe's last, unfinished movie—a permanent reminder of a comeback that might have been. The project was buried, but since Fox had a script and was still under financial pressures, they decided to resuscitate it with Doris Day and James Garner as the couple reunited by fate.

Of course, you might not remember those things immediately, since the movie was fabled as Something's Got to Give. When it finally hit theaters in 1963, it had been made over as Move Over, Darling.

It's a comedy reborn from a tragedy in another respect as well, since it was inspired by 1911's Enoch Arden, a silent drama based on Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem about a man lost at sea who returns to find his wife remarried. If you're paying attention when Doris Day talks with Polly Bergen about an old movie she recalls, you'll realize that this one had a previous comic treatment—as My Favorite Wife, with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.

Repulsion (1965)

2008-04-27T23:30:00.000-07:00

Peter's Nite
Microscopic portions of salmon, baked vegetables, brownies
Or, as Stuart would put it: "Dead rabbit, dead rabbit, dead rabbit..."

Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy" via Greenmanreviews:

One could easily get the impression from his films that director Roman Polanski does not recommend apartment life. Three of his films, forming an unofficial trilogy, concern characters -- apartment dwellers all -- who variously succumb to different kinds of insanity.

In Repulsion, Carol (Catherine Deneuve), a young Belgian manicurist, lives with her sister and her sister's fiancee in a London apartment. The couple go away on a vacation, leaving Carol alone in the flat. While they are away, Carol begins hallucinating that she is not alone in the apartment. A man appears in her dressing mirror for a split second then disappears. Hands reach out from the walls and molest her. She is unable to function otherwise, forgetting to eat and leaving food out to rot.

This culminates in a rape sequence where Polanski hints at the reality by including only the "real" sounds -- a clock ticking, Carol's own breathing and heartbeat, and the rustle of the sheets as she fights her "attacker." The trauma of this experience completes Carol's break with reality. When a friend later calls on her, concerned that she hasn't been to work, she takes him for an intruder.

Upon viewing Repulsion, many psychologists commended Polanski's accurate depiction of schizophrenia. They were surprised when Polanski admitted that he and co-screenwriter Gerard Brach had simply written Carol's behavior as a natural response to the circumstances. They had done no research.

Biography on Polanski:

Director, actor. Born Raimund Polanski, on August 18, 1933, in Paris, France. At the age of three, Polanski moved with his family to his father’s native city of Krakow, Poland. In 1941, his parents were imprisoned in various Nazi concentration camps, where his mother eventually died in Auschwitz. In order to escape deportation, Polanski lived with several different Polish families until he was reunited with his father in 1944.

As a teenager, Polanski developed his acting skills in radio dramas and films. In 1954, he enrolled at the Polish National Film Academy in Lodz, where his body of work consisted of short films and documentaries. Upon his graduation, he appeared in a number of movies—many of which were the work of famed Polish director Andrzej Wajda, including Lotna (1959), Innocent Sorcerers (1960), and Samson (1961). In 1962, he directed his first feature-length film, Knife in the Water . The international recognition that followed, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, gave Polanski the chance to bring his movies to a more mainstream audience. The following year, he moved to London, where his next offering, the psychological thriller Repulsion (1965), was considered equally compelling by critics and audiences.

In 1968, Polanski moved to Hollywood, making his American film debut with the classic thriller Rosemary's Baby, which featured exceptional performances by Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. Despite his burgeoning film career, Polanski endured a devastating tragedy the following year when his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered by members of the Charles Manson cult. The extreme violence experienced by Polanski throughout his life was often reflected in his films, which tended to focus on the darker themes of alienation and evil—most notably, in the modern film noir Chinatown (1974), featuring John Huston, Jack Nicholson, and Faye Dunaway.

In 1977, Polanski was indicted on six criminal counts for having sexual relations with a minor. The alleged act took place with a 13-year-old girl, in the home of the actor Jack Nicholson. Both Nicholson and his longtime girlfriend, actress Anjelica Huston, testified against Polanski when the highly publicized case was brought to trial. Polanski pleaded guilty to one charge of unlawful sexual intercourse and underwent six weeks of psychiatric evaluation at a state prison in California. Although additional criminal charges were still pending, Polanski fled the United States after his discharge. (While authorities are not actively seeking him out, he does face the possibility of prison if he returns to America.)

Kim Morgan on Repulsion:

The obscure, slippery and decayed complexities of such desire are conveyed brilliantly in Repulsion. The diseased atmosphere of Carol's womb is meticulously created with Polanski's use of camera angles, sound effects and images of clutter. Though music is used effectively, Polanski relies more on amplifying the sounds of everyday life--the ticking of a clock, the voices of nuns playing catch in the convent garden, the dripping of a faucet--to convey the acute awareness Carol acquires in response to her fear. Polanski also dresses the film with pertinent details that further exemplify both Carol's madness and the aching passage of time: Potatoes sprout in the kitchen, meat (rabbit meat, no less) rots on a plate and eventually collects flies, various debris of blood, food and liquids form naturally around Carol. The film's inventive use of black-and-white film, wide-angle lenses and close-ups creates an unsparing vision of sickness, and Deneuve's performance is effectively mysterious. The viewer, however, is able to empathize with Carol, which is how she lures us into her web in the first place. As Polanski cameraman Gil Taylor muttered during filming, "I hate doing this to a beautiful woman."

Yet one loves to do this to a beautiful woman, especially one like Deneuve--at first. Deneuve's loveliness makes Carol's madness more palatable (her unfortunate suitor thinks she is odd, but he can't help but "love" this gorgeous woman), but eventually it becomes horrifying. Carol is not simply a Hitchcockian aberration of what lies beneath the "perfect woman," she is the reflection of what lies beneath repressed desire--in men and women. Polanski has a knack for casting women who are nervously exciting (Faye Dunaway in Chinatown is a blinking, twitching mess), and therefore dangerous to desire. He makes one insecure about longing for them. Deneuve is certainly nerve-racking. She is so physically flawless that she often seems half human: An anemic girl, she can barely lift up her arm, yet at the same time she is highly sensual, an ample, heavily breathing woman with more than a glint of carnality in her dreamily vacant eyes. Deneuve makes one feel the confusion of a corrupted child: She is an arrested adolescent who, like an anorexic, cannot face her womanliness without visions of perverse opulence and violence. Carol is the personification of sexual mystery--she is what lurks beneath the orgasms of pleasure and pain. What Polanski finds intriguing and revolting is perceptively female, making Repulsion a woman's picture more women may want to know.

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

2008-04-20T23:11:00.000-07:00

Nora's Nite

Screenonline:

Originally shot for television in six weeks on a low budget, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) was directed by Stephen Frears, from author Hanif Kureishi's first screenplay. Originally shot on 16mm, it was so well received by critics at the Edinburgh Film Festival that it was internationally distributed for cinema on 35mm. Heralded as one of Britain's most commercially and critically successful films of 1986, it earned Kureishi an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay.

My Beautiful Laundrette was ground-breaking in its bold exploration of issues of sexuality, race, class and generational difference. It also sparked controversy, particularly within the Asian community, which was disgusted by its perceived degrading representation of Pakistanis. At a New York demonstration by the Pakistan Action Committee, banners called the film "the product of a vile and perverted mind".

Much of the outrage was targeted at the homosexual affair between Omar and Johnny, whch develops from a genuine mutual fondness through the buzz of sexual experimentation, before hinting, at the end, at something deeper. On the way, it survives several obstacles, including Johnny's racist connections and Omar's resentment.

The film highlights a dilemma at the heart of the immigrant experience - the desire to belong to Western society while maintaining a clear sense of Pakistani identity. The two brothers, Nasser and Papa, demonstrate this cultural conflict. An ardent intellectual socialist, Papa belongs to old school Pakistan because, like most first generation immigrants, he believes fervently in education combating racism and is vehemently against the greed and conservative economics of Thatcherism.

Shakespeare in Love (1998)

2008-04-13T23:54:00.000-07:00

MOVIENITE 10TH ANNIVERSARY BLOW OUT!!!!!!
Pamela's Nite

Tom Stoppard via New York Times:

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and educated in India and England, Tom Stoppard has consistently brought an insider-outsider's amused detachment to playwriting and a buoyant theatrical athleticism to philosophy, physics and semantics. Born in 1937, he became an international celebrity with his first produced play, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (1967), which re-told Shakespeare's "Hamlet" from the perspective of two hapless courtiers on the sidelines of the main events. The verbal pyrotechnics and philosophical game-playing that animated Rosencrantz" have been part of his signature ever since.

"Jumpers" (1972) is a metaphysical murder mystery, while "Travesties" (1974), set in Zurich in 1911, imagines an encounter among Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara. Occasionally criticized for emphasizing intellectual cleverness at the expense of emotional substance, much of Mr. Stoppard's work in fact directly addresses the conflict between head and heart, between philosophical ideals and debunking reality -- themes eloquently pursued in "The Real Thing" (1982), "The Invention of Love" (1997), "The Coast of Utopia" (2001), a three-play cycle about 19th-century Russian intellectuals, and "Rock 'n' Roll" (2006), set in Czechoslovakia and Cambridge in the late 1960's and the 1990's. Mr. Stoppard's work as a screenwriter includes "Brazil" (1985) and "Shakespeare in Love" (1998)

Mel Gussow on Stoppard and Shakespeare via NYT:

With ''Shakespeare in Love,'' Mr. Stoppard takes a more leisurely approach, opening up his story to include the world of Elizabethan theater: its factionalism, chicanery, self-interest and rigidity. Periodically, Mr. Stoppard has touched on theatrical matters: the play within the play in ''The Real Thing'' and in ''The Real Inspector Hound.'' But in ''Shakespeare in Love'' the theater is center stage, and all contemporary resonances are intentional, as when an actor asks a producer his identity and the man replies, ''I'm the money.''

Queen Elizabeth herself, as incarnated by Judi Dench, proves to be a figure of surprising liberality, at least in the arena of theater and romance. In addition to Marlowe, John Webster is in the lineup as a youth with a sadistic streak, and there is more than a hint that the lady Viola will inspire a future Shakespearean comedy.

Rashômon (1950)

2008-04-06T23:06:00.000-07:00

Stuart's Nite

Ebert on Rashomon:

Shortly before filming was to begin on "Rashomon," Akira Kurosawa's three assistant directors came to see him. They were unhappy. They didn't understand the story. "If you read it diligently," he told them, "you should be able to understand it, because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible." They would not leave: "We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don't understand it at all."
Recalling this day in Something Like an Autobiography, Kurosawa explains the movie to them. The explanation is reprinted in the booklet that comes with the new Criterion DVD of "Rashomon." Two of the assistants are satisfied with his explanation, but the third leaves looking puzzled. What he doesn't understand is that while there is an explanation of the film's four eyewitness accounts of a murder, there is not a solution.
Kurosawa is correct that the screenplay is comprehensible as exactly what it is: Four testimonies that do not match. It is human nature to listen to witnesses and decide who is telling the truth, but the first words of the screenplay, spoken by the woodcutter, are "I just don't understand." His problem is that he has heard the same events described by all three participants in three different ways--and all three claim to be the killer.
"Rashomon" (1950) struck the world of film like a thunderbolt. Directed by Kurosawa in the early years of his career, before he was hailed as a grandmaster, it was made reluctantly by a minor Japanese studio, and the studio head so disliked it that he removed his name from the credits. Then it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, effectively opening the world of Japanese cinema to the West. It won the Academy Award as best foreign film. It set box office records for a subtitled film. Its very title has entered the English language, because, like "Catch-22," it expresses something for which there is no better substitute.
The first time I saw the film, I knew hardly a thing about Japanese cinema, and what struck me was the elevated emotional level of the actors. Do all Japanese shout and posture so? Having now seen a great many Japanese films, I know that in most of them the Japanese talk in more or less the same way we do (Ozu's films are a model of conversational realism). But Kurosawa was not looking for realism. From his autobiography, we learn he was struck by the honesty of emotion in silent films, where dialog could not carry the weight and actors used their faces, eyes and gestures to express emotion. That heightened acting style, also to be seen in Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" and several other period pictures, plays well here because many of the sequences are, essentially, silent.
Film cameras are admirably literal, and faithfully record everything they are pointed at. Because they are usually pointed at real things, we usually think we can believe what we see. The message of "Rashomon" is that we should suspect even what we think we have seen. This insight is central to Kurosawa's philosophy. The old clerk's family and friends think they've witnessed his decline and fall in "Ikiru" (1952), but we have seen a process of self-discovery and redemption. The seven samurai are heroes when they save the village, but thugs when they demand payment after the threat has passed. The old king in "Ran" (1985) places his trust in the literal meaning of words, and talks himself out of his kingdom and life itself.

Fallen Angel (1945)

2008-03-30T23:35:00.000-07:00

Peter's Nite

Nick Pinkerton in The Village Voice:

The elder son of a well-heeled Jewish family, Preminger was born in Austria-Hungary in 1905 and raised in Vienna. He was an erudite, successful theater director by his 30th birthday, though a premonition of the looming Anschluss inspired his relocation to America. He went to work at 20th Century Fox in 1936, but a flare-up of his famous temper toward Hollywood über-producer Darryl Zanuck meant banishment to New York (Preminger was always partial to Gotham—at the height of his influence, he made his headquarters on 55th Street).
After directing for the stage and playing stock SS man, he returned to the studio's good graces with a hit in the classic noir Laura (1944); for the next eight years, the quintessential maverick was a model company man, the go-to guy for thrillers and odd jobs. His noirs are knotty with thwarted sex, characterized by patient characterizations, ellipses of solitude, and the precision- haloed nocturnal photography of Joseph La Shelle. The culmination of this period is 1952's Angel Face, a dyspeptic terror that open-ends onto the abyss. Film Forum's program, however, testifies to the little-acknowledged diversity of Preminger's Fox résumé, with rarely screened one-offs that include a Joan Crawford melodrama (Daisy Kenyon), a Restoration period piece (Forever Amber), and an Oscar Wilde adaptation (The Fan).
Autocrat Otto's great period came with the disintegration of the studio system, from which he emerged as his own industry, an independent producer-director. It's here that his rows with Joseph Breen's censorious Production Code Administration office began—Preminger was the first man of consequence who wouldn't jump through hoops for its Seal of Approval. Self-interest and genuine liberal convictions happily aligned; what was good for Otto's p.r. was almost always good for America, and he helped banish a system that hamstrung popular entertainment with its arcane prudery.
From the innocuous but taboo-busting utterance of "virgin" in his farce The Moon Is Blue (for shame!) through the dope-sick Man With the Golden Arm, Preminger uncovered verboten new territory with every new production and found fresh pricks to kick against when he wasn't sparring with Breen. Bucking convention, he shot two big-money all-black musicals in the '50s—Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess (leading lady Dorothy Dandridge was a longtime girlfriend)—and hired the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to adapt Leon Uris's Exodus, giving Trumbo his first screen credit since the studios let their people go.

Chris Fujiwara via Film International:

When, years after he made them, Otto Preminger was asked about Fallen Angel (1945), Whirlpool (1950), and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), three of the four Preminger films that the British Film Institute has just released on DVD, he had, in substance, but one thing to say. On Fallen Angel: “I don’t remember the picture at all.” Whirlpool: “I cannot remember anything about this film.” Where the Sidewalk Ends: “I remember nothing about it.”
In his autobiography, Preminger likened his role as contract director (and producer-director) for 20th Century-Fox to the job of “a foreman in a sausage factory.” Apart from a few standard anecdotes (such as Spyros Skouras kneeling to the head of the Catholic Legion of Decency to plead for the lifting of the Legion’s condemnation of Forever Amber in 1947, or Joan Crawford requiring that the sets of Daisy Kenyon [1947] be ice-cold), Preminger always preferred, when recalling his career, to jump straight from Laura (1944), which established him as an important film director, to The Moon Is Blue (1953), with which he launched himself as an independent producer. Preminger drew a curtain over the intervening films, pretending that his involvement with them was merely that of an administrator or a technician. The films themselves belie this pretense. Fallen Angel, Whirlpool, and Where the Sidewalk Ends are great films, and Preminger’s personal commitment to them is unquestionable.
These three films constitute, along with Laura, The Thirteenth Letter (1951), and Angel Face (1952), what has been considered Preminger’s contribution to “film noir.” It is pertinent to remember that Preminger repudiated this term, as far as his own work was concerned. Seeing these films as “films noirs” is no more illuminating and no less destructive of any understanding of what the films are doing than seeing River of No Return (1954) as a Western; Carmen Jones (1954), the subject of the fourth BFI DVD, as a musical; or In Harm’s Way (1965) as a war film. Preminger’s films are absolutely heedless of genre, and Preminger never makes the slightest effort to adapt his style to generic norms.

In theme and style, Fallen Angel, Whirlpool, and Where the Sidewalk Ends—no less than Laura, their template in some respects—depart radically from the “film noir” pattern supposed to be exemplified by such films as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945), Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1946), Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946), and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947). This pattern is characterized by scheming femmes fatales, trapped and desperate male protagonists, and unhappy endings. In the four Preminger films, the only figure who remotely resembles a femme fatale, the waitress Stella (Linda Darnell) in Fallen Angel, is viewed realistically and sympathetically as someone who likes the attention of men but puts them on notice that her main goal is to land a husband; her femininity proves fatal only to herself, when one of her admirers turns homicidal. The four Preminger films share, moreover, the theme of a character’s struggle to free herself or himself from destructive behaviors and entanglements, and they all have endings in which the struggle appears to be resolved positively. (Even Angel Face, the sole Preminger film to conform, ostensibly, to the pattern I have outlined, remains demonstrably a work to which “noir” is irrelevant.) Preminger’s revising the end of Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (in the 1955 film of the novel) so that the protagonist walks away free of his drug addiction and cleared of suspicion of murder is a vivid example of the director’s optimism.
Preminger’s handling of the therapeutic theme is, to be sure, frequently ambiguous, not least in Laura, in which he avoids presenting the rejection by Laura (Gene Tierney) of two inappropriate suitors in favor of the film’s policeman-hero, Mark (Dana Andrews), as a clear-cut bid for self-determination. Waldo (Clifton Webb) accuses Laura of being drawn to Mark because of his physique, and Waldo’s implication that she is still following an established self-destructive behavior pattern is allowed to stand unrefuted. Moreover, Mark’s obsession with the Laura he thought dead bodes ill for the future of his relationship with the living Laura: he has fallen in love with a portrait, not a woman (as Rita Hayworth put it, “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda and woke up with me”).

In Fallen Angel, on the other hand, if the triumph of the down-and-out hero, Eric (Dana Andrews), over his past appears conclusive, this is largely because of the force of the mise-en-scene and acting in the hotel-room scene in which he concedes bitterly that his life of hustling and scheming has left him “with exactly nothing.” This recognition, and the redemptive presence of June (Alice Faye), to whom he articulates it, prepare us for the plot resolution in which Eric takes charge of his destiny by gathering (offscreen) the evidence that clears himself of Stella’s murder and points to the retired policeman Judd (Charles Bickford) as the killer. The verisimilitude of this resolution may be questioned, but its emotional movement is convincing.

From internal and external evidence, it’s clear that the makers of Fallen Angel and Whirlpool made a conscious attempt to reproduce certain aspects of Laura. Signs of this effort are to be found in the records relating to the production histories of the films. On an early draft of the script of Fallen Angel, 20th Century-Fox production chief Darryl F. Zanuck penciled the notation: “Everything great up to last act—needs hypo like Laura.” In script conferences for Whirlpool, Zanuck repeatedly urged Preminger and screenwriter Ben Hecht to draw on Laura for inspiration, noting that the villainous Korvo should be “just as interesting as Clifton Webb was in Laura,” remarking that Whirlpool “can have much of the quality and strangeness of Laura,” and proposing changes to the ending (that were adopted in part) that would put the heroine in jeopardy, after the manner of the last sequence of Laura.

Fallen Angel brings back, along with the male star of Laura, its cinematographer, Joseph La Shelle (who would also shoot Where the Sidewalk Ends); the trailer for the film, included as an extra on the BFI’s DVD, even contains the blurb: “The creator of Laura does it again!” Fallen Angel and Whirlpool are both scored, as was Laura, by David Raksin, and Fallen Angel associates its theme song, Raksin’s “Slowly,” with a female character (Stella), just as Laura had been identified with the famous theme of Laura. At one moment in Fallen Angel, Raksin again uses the musical special effect, a kind of tape manipulation that he called the “Len-o-tone,” which had contributed so memorably to the central scene in Laura of Mark falling asleep in the armchair in Laura’s apartment.

Alice Faye via Wikipedia:

Color film flattered Faye enormously, and she shone in the splashy musical features that were a Fox trademark in the 1940s. She frequently played a performer, often one moving up in society, allowing for situations that ranged from the poignant to the comic. Films such as Weekend in Havana and That Night in Rio (atypically, as a Brazilian aristocrat) made good use of Faye's husky singing voice, solid comic timing, and flair for carrying off the era's starry-eyed romantic storylines. 1943's The Gang's All Here is perhaps the epitome of these films, with lavish production values and a range of supporting players (including the memorable Carmen Miranda in the indescribable "Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" number) that camouflage the film's trivial plot and leisurely pacing.

Faye's career continued until 1944 when she was cast in Fallen Angel. whose title became only too telling, as circumstances turned out. Designed ostensibly as Faye's vehicle, the film all but became her celluloid epitaph when Zanuck, trying to build his new protege Linda Darnell, ordered many Faye scenes cut and Darnell emphasized. When Faye saw a screening of the final product, she drove away from the Fox studio refusing to return, feeling she had been undercut deliberately by Zanuck.

Zanuck hit back, it is said, by having Faye blackballed for breach of contract, effectively ending her film career. Released in 1945, Fallen Angel was Faye's last film as a major Hollywood star[1].

But seventeen years after the Fallen Angel debacle, Faye went before the cameras again, in 1962's State Fair. While Faye received good reviews, the film was not a great success, and she made only infrequent cameo appearances in films thereafter.

Linda Darnell via All Movie Guide:

Daughter of a Texas postal clerk, actress Linda Darnell trained to be a dancer, and came to Hollywood's attention as a photographer's model. Though only 15, Darnell looked quite mature and seductive in her first motion picture, Hotel For Women (1937), and before she was twenty she found herself the leading lady of such 20th Century-Fox male heartthrobs as Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda. Weary of thankless good-girl roles, Darnell scored a personal triumph when loaned out to United Artists for September Storm (1944), in which she played a "Scarlett O'Hara" type Russian vixen. Thereafter, 20th Century-Fox assigned the actress meatier, more substantial parts, culminating in the much-sought-after leading role in 1947's Forever Amber. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz followed up this triumph by giving Darnell two of her best parts--Paul Douglas' "wrong side of the tracks" wife in A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and Richard Widmark's racist girlfriend in No Way Out (1950) (though befitting her star status, Darnell "reformed" at the end of both films). When her Fox contract ended in 1952, Darnell found herself cast adrift in Hollywood, the good roles fewer and farther between; by the mid-1960s, she was appearing as a nightclub singer, touring in summer theatre, and accepting supporting roles on television. Tragically, Darnell died in 1965 of severe burns suffered in a house fire. Ironically, Darnell had a lifelong fear of dying in flames, speaking publicly of her phobia after appearing in a "burned at the stake" sequence in the 1946 film Anna and the King of Siam.

Movienite question

2008-02-22T13:14:00.000-08:00

Awesome site -- one question? When and how did Movienite begin?

East of Eden (1955)

2008-02-03T23:40:00.000-08:00

Pamela's Nite

Discussion Questions (via ReadingGroupGuides):
1. Steinbeck has a character refer to Americans as a "breed," and near the end of the book Lee says to a conflicted Cal that "We are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil." What makes this a quintessentially American book? Can you identify archetypically American qualities-perhaps some of those listed above-in the characters?
6. Sibling rivalry is a crushing reoccurrence in East of Eden. First Adam and his brother Charles, then Adam's sons Cal and Aron, act out a drama of jealousy and competition that seems fated: Lee calls the story of Cain and Abel the "symbol story of the human soul." Why do you think this is so, or do you disagree? Have you ever experienced or witnessed such a rivalry? Do all of the siblings in the book act out this drama or do some escape it? If so, how? If all of the "C" characters seem initially to embody evil and all the "A" characters good-in this novel that charts the course of good and evil in human experience-is it true that good and evil are truly separate? Are the C characters also good, the A characters capable of evil?

Writing East of Eden via Steinbeck.org:

In A Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letter, the writer's diary of East of Eden, Steinbeck calls the novel “...the story of my country and the story of me.” The book spans the history of the nation from the Civil War to World War I and tells the story of two American families, The Hamiltons, Steinbeck's matenal relatives, are the “Universal Family” and the fictional Trasks are the “Universal Neighbors.”

Steinbeck's inspiration for the novel comes from the Bible, the fourth chapter of the book of Genesis, verses one though sixteen, which recounts the story of Cain and Abel. The title, East of Eden, was chosen by Steinbeck from Genesis, Chapter 4, verse 16.

The theme of East of Eden: “All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.”

Steinbeck called this book “The big one as far as I'm concerned. Always before I held something back for later. Nothing is held back here.”

Steinbeck kept track of things while writing East of Eden, and this is the record:

• Eleven years of mental gestation
• One year of uninterrupted writing
• 25 dozen pencils
• Approximately three dozen reams of paper
• 350,000 words (before cutting)
• About 75,000 words in his work-in-progress journal
• And a rock-hard callus on the middle finger of the writer's right hand.

Steinbeck's widow, Elaine, in looking back on the year that he worked on the book, said that his work on the novel affected him deeply. Perhaps the best way to put it would be to say that it was the last stage in putting himself back together after the years that had torn him apart.

As Steinbeck progressed through the early chapters, he noted that his voice would be more apparent in this book than in any other because he wanted it to contain everything he remembered to be true. He would be in this one and not “for one moment pretend not to be.”

Steinbeck states about East of Eden, “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years.” He further claimed, “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.”

East of Eden became a best seller so it was a natural for the movies. East of Eden, the film, was directed and produced by Elia Kazan and starred James Dean as “Cal.” The film opens at approximately Chapter 37 in Part Four of the novel. The film, shot in part in Salinas, California, was finished and released in 1955. The film has now reached the stature of a classic.

The Searchers (1956)

2008-01-20T22:24:00.000-08:00

Nora's Nite

Time Magazine, June 1956:

The Searchers (C. V. Whitney; Warner) is another excursion into the patented Old West of Director John Ford. The place is Texas, three years after the Civil War, and the lone figure moving across the vast plain is none other than lean, leathery, disenchanted John Wayne, still wearing bits of his Confederate uniform, still looking for trouble. Trouble finds him. One day, while John's back is turned, Chief Scar and his wild Comanches swoop down and massacre his relatives, carrying off two young girls for their own fell purposes.

Wayne promptly fills his trusty horse with hay and sets off on a fiveyear, Technicolor, VistaVision search for the girls. His itinerary sounds like that of Lewis & Clark, but the camera never seems to get outside Arizona and Utah's beautiful Monument Valley. Tagging along is Jeffrey Hunter, who spends nearly as much time trying to soften Wayne's vindictiveness as he does hunting Indians. Though the film runs for two hours, it nevertheless races through its individual scenes at so breakneck a pace that moviegoers may be uncertain just what is going on. Director Ford indulges his Homeric appetite for violence of spirit and action. Coming on the corpse of a hated Comanche, Wayne shoots out the dead man's eyes on the debatable theological principle that the Indian's blinded ghost cannot find its way to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

One of the kidnaped girls is raped by four braves and killed off early in the picture. The other (Natalie Wood), when finally found, proves to be a contented member of Chief Scar's harem. Wayne is so annoyed that he tries to shoot her dead and is only thwarted by an Indian attack.

The lapses in logic and the general air of incoherence are only minor imperfections in a film as carefully contrived as a matchstick castle. The Searchers is rousingly played by what Hollywood calls the "John Ford Stock Company"—a group made up of Wayne, Harry Carey Jr., Ward Bond, a half-dozen bit players, seven stunt men who are repeatedly shot off horses, and many of the same Navajo Indians who have been losing battles in John Ford pictures since 1938. By now, all of them perform with practiced ease: the women know just where to stand on the cabin porch as they peer off anxiously into the haze and mesa-filled distances; the men automatically fall into line for a barn dance or a posse. In fact, they may be getting too practiced and familiar. Even John Wayne seems to have done it once too often as he makes his standardized, end-of-film departure into the sunset.

Screenplay structure guru Syd Field gropes for meaning in a cruel, indifferent universe:

While I was watching The Searchers, I tried to relate Campbell's concepts to Ethan's journey. Though Ethan is placed in a situation where he confronts a series of obstacles in order to achieve a higher state of consciousness, he refuses to bend his principles, or his beliefs, to the issue at hand. His journey is both a physical as well as spiritual one, because it takes place inside his head as well as outside in the obstacles he confronts. In Campbell's work, the hero in his journey experiences a symbolic transformation of death and resurrection as he casts off the old parts of his life; he needs to be re-born and emerge into the "birth" of his new self. In mythological terms, Campbell says, the heroes' journey is one of acceptance; the hero must accept his fate, his destiny, no matter whether it is life or death.

This is not the case in The Searchers.
he first thing I noticed is that John Wayne's character doesn't change. There is no transformation in his character; he's exactly the same at the end of the movie as he was at the beginning. Wayne's image, as a man of action, is heroic precisely because he does not change; he refuses to give up, bend or alter his ways until his mission is accomplished; to find and rescue the kidnapped girl. And when he does find her, we don't know whether he's going to kill, or embrace her. Finally, in a dramatic scene, he relents and embraces her. At the end, when the family enters the house to celebrate their return, Wayne remains outside the doorway, a desolate, homeless drifter doomed to wander "between the winds."
In Campbell's analysis, the hero weathers every obstacle but returns home a wiser and better person, sharing his newfound awareness with his fellow man. That certainly doesn't happen in The Searchers. At the end of The Searchers, it is his very strength of character that leads to his isolation and loneliness. In comparing it to other films of the period, this is the start of the "anti-hero," the character who goes his own way even though it may be against the laws of society.

What makes this film a classic, I think, is that the traditional moral lines of good and bad, or right and wrong, and black and white, are blurred. It's is a tribute to Ford's genius that he could combine both the look and feel of an epic Western, as well as reflect the social nature of the times and the very ambiguity of the changing times.

Tim Dirks via Filmsite.org:

The Searchers (1956) is considered by many to be a true American masterpiece of filmmaking, and the best, most influential, and perhaps most-admired film of director John Ford. It was his 115th feature film, and he was already a four-time Best Director Oscar winner (The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952)) - all for his pictures of social comment rather than his quintessential westerns. The film's complex, deeply-nuanced themes included racism, individuality, the American character, and the opposition between civilization (exemplified by homes, caves, and other domestic interiors) and the untamed frontier wilderness.

With dazzling on-location, gorgeous VistaVision cinematography (including the stunning red sandstone rock formations of Monument Valley) by Winton C. Hoch in Ford's most beloved locale, the film handsomely captures the beauty and isolating danger of the frontier. It was even a better film than Ford's previous Best Picture-winning How Green Was My Valley (1941). However, at its time, the sophisticated, modern, visually-striking film was unappreciated, misunderstood, and unrecognized by critics. It did not receive a single Academy Award nomination, and was overwhelmed by the all-star power and glamour of the Best Picture winner of the year, Around the World in 80 Days (1956).

The film's screenplay was adapted by Frank S. Nugent (director Ford's son-in-law) from Alan Le May's 1954 novel of the same name, that was first serialized as a short story in late fall 1954 issues of the Saturday Evening Post, and first titled The Avenging Texans. Various similarities existed between the film's script and an actual Comanche kidnapping of a young white girl in Texas in 1936. The film's producer was C.V. Whitney - a descendant of Eli Whitney, who was a pioneer in the mass production of muskets in the first firearms assembly factory in New Haven, CT.

Ten to fifteen years after the film's debut, and after reassessing it as a cinematic milestone, a generation of "New Hollywood" film directors, French film critics and others, including Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Steven Spielberg, John Milius, Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, and George Lucas, praised the film. They traced their own fascination with film to this mythic John Ford western, and in reverence, reflected his work in their own films (e.g., Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1968), and Mean Streets (1973), Lucas' Star Wars (1977), Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), and Schrader's Hardcore (1979)). Even rock musician Buddy Holly wrote a song based on John Wayne's trademark line: "That'll Be The Day," popularized by the Beatles.
The Searchers tells the emotionally complex story of a perilous, hate-ridden quest and Homeric-style odyssey of self-discovery after a Comanche massacre, while also exploring the themes of racial prejudice and sexism. Its meandering tale examines the inner psychological turmoil of a fiercely independent, crusading man obsessed with revenge and hatred, who searches for his two nieces (Pippa Scott and Natalie Wood) among the "savages" over a five-year period. The film's major tagline echoed the search: "he had to find her...he had to find her."

The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)

2008-01-13T23:05:00.001-08:00

Stuart's Nite
First movie out of the giant boxed Janus set.

Wilde biography via Official Oscar Wilde site:

In December 1881, Oscar sailed for New York to travel across the United States and deliver a series of lectures on aesthetics. The 50-lecture tour was originally scheduled to last four months, but stretched to nearly a year, with over 140 lectures given in 260 days. In between lectures he made time to meet with Henry Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Walt Whitman. He also arranged for his play, “Vera,” to be staged in New York the following year. When he returned from America, Oscar spent three months in Paris writing a blank-verse tragedy that had been commissioned by the actress Mary Anderson. When he sent it to her, however, she turned it down. He then set off on a lecture tour of Britain and Ireland.

On May 29, 1884, Oscar married Constance Lloyd. Constance was four years younger than Oscar and the daughter of a prominent barrister who died when she was 16. She was well-read, spoke several European languages and had an outspoken, independent mind. Oscar and Constance had two sons in quick succession, Cyril in 1885 and Vyvyan in 1886. With a family to support, Oscar accepted a job revitalizing the Woman's World magazine, where he worked from 1887-1889. The next six years were to become the most creative period of his life. He published two collections of children's stories, “The Happy Prince and Other Tales” (1888), and “The House of Pomegranates” (1892). His first and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was published in an American magazine in 1890 to a storm of critical protest. He expanded the story and had it published in book form the following year. Its implied homoerotic theme was considered very immoral by the Victorians and played a considerable part in his later legal trials. Oscar's first play, “Lady Windermere's Fan,” opened in February 1892. Its financial and critical success prompted him to continue to write for the theater. His subsequent plays included “A Woman of No Importance” (1893), “An Ideal Husband” (1895), and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1895). These plays were all highly acclaimed and firmly established Oscar as a playwright.

For more on Joan Greenwood, see the Movienite posts on Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Man in the White Suit (1951).

Amazing connection via ScreenOnline:

The last and most popular of his social comedies, Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnes opened at London's St James' theatre on Valentine's Day 1895. Its initial run, however, was cut short by Wilde's prosecution for immorality, which ironically was brought by one of his social acquaintances of the time, the then Home Secretary (and later Prime Minister)Herbert Asquith. In a somewhat bizarre turn, Asquith's son Anthony eventually made the first film version.

Geoffrey Macnab on the neglected Anthony Asquith via Guardian Unlimited:

"Puffin" (as his mother nicknamed him, because of his bird-like profile) is one of the most exotic and eccentric characters in British film history. A tiny figure with a fay and gentle manner, he was famous for wearing a blue boiler suit on set, and for sitting cross-legged beneath the camera during shooting. "He dressed like one of the electricians. If anything, he was less well groomed," actress Wendy Hiller recalled of him. Despite his aristocratic background, he was the first British director to join a trade union, serving for 30 years as president of industry body the Association of Cinematograph and Television Technicians (ACTT). In the process, he helped improve pay and conditions for workers, and played a key role in the battle to prevent the government closing down film production during the second world war. "He was a unique and indispensable figure in the British cinema," observed Harold Wilson after Asquith's death in 1968.

Actors and technicians revered Asquith. "He was delightful, charming as a man. To me, he was the best director I have ever worked with," says Jean Kent, one of the leading British stars of the 1940s, who made three films with him. Otto Plaschke, second assistant director on his 1958 feature, Orders to Kill, agrees: "Everybody adored Puffin. He was the most enchanting man." While making The Way to the Stars, Asquith struck up one of the more unlikely friendships of his life with Joe Jones, owner of a transport cafe in Catterick, who subsequently employed him as a dishwasher and waiter. "He used to serve the lorry drivers at breakfast time," Jonathan Cecil says. "They [Joe's family] were a kind of surrogate family to him. Joe helped Puffin to kick the alcohol."

Between his stints at Joe's cafe, Asquith was making films such as The Importance of Being Earnest and The Winslow Boy. He was also trying to curb his drinking at a notoriously tough "drying-out" clinic. Even here, Cecil recalls, his trademark courtesy did not desert him. "They'd bring him a bowl of whisky with vinegar in it so it would make him nauseous. They had all these fighting drunks, cursing and being held down, and they'd bring this bowl of revolting muck for him to drink and he'd say, 'Oh, my dear ... that's so kind.' "

By making adaptations of Rattigan, Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw plays, Asquith ensured that he would be pigeonholed as a purveyor of tasteful, middlebrow fare. The influential critic Raymond Durgnat coined the phrase "Rattigasquith" to dismiss these literary adaptations.

In their own unfussy way, Asquith's best movies are superbly crafted. The Importance of Being Earnest, for example, works so well precisely because he doesn't try to open up the material for the screen. Calling it "an artificial comedy of the theatre", he celebrates rather than disguises its stage origins. He also elicits exemplary performances from Margaret Rutherford (to whom he once fed whiskey to calm her nerves), Redgrave and others. "He had a marvelous way of coaxing what he wanted out of you," Jean Kent says. She, at least, is convinced that he is woefully undervalued. "I don't think he was ever given his due ... not that his reputation ever mattered to him."

You are a slacker

2008-01-11T14:14:00.000-08:00

This man has the answers you and your friends have been so desperately seeking, go to www.waltswisdom.com before it's too late!