Recent TV spots for the remakes of FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980) and MY BLOODY VALENTINE (1981) have got me thinking back to the g(l)ory days of 70s and 80s grindhouse and drive-in horror and exploitation, when movie trailers had a greater ability to beguile, to attract and to frighten.  READ MORE

No, that isn’t exactly what I’m talking about…

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Who is the delicate looking girl at left with the brimming eyes and the heart-shaped face, who once described show business as “the world’s roughest gamble”?  In her own way, Sylvia Sidney (1910-1999) rolled the dice against the house and managed to stay in the game for seven decades. Why don’t more people know her?

Well, they do, but contemporary viewers may be familiar with only a small portion of her graceful talent. Sylvia Sidney may be best remembered as the ancient woman who still smokes like a chimney in the afterlife, as she appeared as the brashly amusing ghoulish bureaucrat in Beetle Juice (1988) or in Mars Attacks (1996), as the Slim Whitman-loving granny who saves the world in those imaginatively surreal Tim Burton movies.  With only a few of her movies available to contemporary viewers, her finely drawn portraits of earlier decades may be increasingly unfamiliar. Perhaps a small nod her way will encourage more of us to seek out her memorable gallery of characters from long ago.

I first became aware of Sylvia Sidney as a kid when I encountered her somewhat hapless good girl moll in Mary Burns, Fugitive(1935) on one of those channels that broadcast old movies repeatedly in the ’60s and ’70s. She won my heart playing a plucky, almost fatally naïve hash slinger in a rural diner whose boyfriend (Alan Baxter) turns out to be a very bad apple. Caught up in the media frenzy over her gunsel paramour, Mary Burns soon lands in the pokey, and only becomes liberated from society’s narrow expectations and her poisonous honey when she plugs him. The movie, which is a hybrid of the “woman’s picture” and the socially aware  ”I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang” flick, limns the downfall and rise of a person whose unexamined life is turned on its head by chance and by the coldness of the justice system. The gradual assertion of this overwhelmed young woman’s will to survive was more riveting for me because of the petite Sylvia Sidney‘s ability to convey such a highly feminine blend of fear, outrage, and her growing understanding of the thinness of civilization’s veneer.

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Do you know where you were 40 years ago today?  I do, at least for a moment out of that day so long ago.  I’m 47 now, so my memories of that time are sketchy at best but I have a very strong recollection of being with my Mother in the kitchen of our Connecticut home on February 3, 1969, and hearing the news over the radio that Boris Karloff had died the previous day at the age of 81. READ MORE

For my day job, I work for Facets Multi-Media in Chicago, which prides itself on bringing foreign, independent, and classic films to the public by selling or renting them on DVD or by exhibiting them in a small theater. Our fabulous programmer Charles Coleman knows more about contemporary foreign cinema than almost anyone, and he has booked some very interesting films into the theater throughout the years. For a change of pace, he has booked a series of Russian films from the 1930s that feature the Soviet Union’s most famous movie star, Lyubov Orlova. Incredibly popular during the 1930s and 1940s, Orlova specialized in musical comedies that were patterned after Hollywood musicals of the day. Though you can easily see the similarities between old Warner Bros. musicals and their Russian counterparts, the latter are definitely in a league of their own.    READ MORE

I finally got a chance to see the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in, 2008), directed by Tomas Alfredson and based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Several people told me they thought it was the best film of 2008. High praise that makes me think of my own favorites for the year, films like WALL-E, The Edge of Heaven, Tropic Thunder, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Persepolis, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, The Wrestler, Gomorrah, and Man on Wire. But after seeing Let the Right One In I have to concur with my friends; this film about a harassed 12-year-old boy who develops a crush on a strange “girl” gets top-shelf honors. READ MORE