The Warner Archive is murdering my bank account. The latest culprits are Jacques Tourneur’s Experiment Perilous (1944) and Anthony Mann’s The Tall Target (1951). After my first purchase, documented here, I’ve tried to stay away from the service, what with its un-restored prints and overpriced DVDs ($20 is a lot for a burned disc), but they are pumping out an endless array of rare goodies that would tempt even the cheapest cinephile. I couldn’t stay away for long.

READ MORE

Whenever I am interviewed about Elvis Presley and the phenomenon that surrounds him 30 years after his death, the reporter or writer will often ask, “No other pop culture figure has attracted the level of devotion that Elvis has. How do you account for that?” And, then I quietly correct him, “Well, there was Valentino.”

Though Valentino’s star has dimmed for new generations of film fans, he was the object of intense adoration decades after his death. No doubt genuine on the part of his fans, this dedication was fueled and exploited by those who had a proprietary interest in his lasting legacy—not unlike the situation today between the Presley estate and Elvis, particularly after American Idol-owner Robert Silverman purchased controlling interest in all the King’s things.

Layers of myth and legend envelop Valentino, masking his true talents as a silent-screen actor and his contributions to Hollywood—again something he shares in common with Elvis. Yet, the myths, stories, and outrageous claims help maintain an interest in him, particularly because few watch his movies, which—like all silents—are not on the public’s movie-going radar. I thought I knew a lot about Valentino simply because I had heard the myths and stories, but when I had the occasion to investigate his life and death, I found that I didn’t know much at all—and I wonder if many film fans really do.

READ MORE

Last weekend my film series was privileged to host the Colorado premiere of Stingray Sam – the latest creation by talented director/musician/writer/artist/actor Cory McAbee. Although it’s tempting to draw parallels between this film and Cory’s other sci-fi/western/musical, The American Astronaut (2001), they are two very different creatures. For one thing; Stingray Sam was designed “for screens of all sizes” and was meant to be distributed as six downloadable webisodes, with each episode being about ten minutes in length. Also; each episode has a song and cliffhanger. And although both feature planet-hopping around from a seedy interstellar space saloon to other planets with serious gender issues and onward, Stingray Sam has a different cast of characters, a different rhythm, a different style, and zips along at a nice clip with more material condensed into shorter bits. READ MORE

From the time she made ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) up through the late seventies, Mia Farrow was the go-to actress if you wanted imperiled fragility with a nymphet sex appeal. With her delicate porcelain beauty and flower child navieté which allowed her to play years younger than her real age, she could immediately engage any audience’s sympathy by her seemingly innocent nature. That’s why it seemed almost an act of cruelty for filmmakers to cast her in movies like SEE NO EVIL (1971, released in England as Blind Terror), which airs on TCM on Monday, September 28th at 11:45 pm ET, or the unsettling supernatural thriller, THE HAUNTING OF JULIA (1977, released in England as Full Circle), or the little rich girl gone quietly mad in SECRET CEREMONY (1969)..       READ MORE

I first became aware of the work of New Jersey-based artist Rob Kelly last October via Pierre Fournier’s Frankensteinia- The Frankenstein Blog, which I recommend with all my parts, both original and after-market. By way of introducing Rob to the horror blogger community, Pierre showed off some incredible, eye-popping movie posters for classic horror movies.  Right away I got from Rob a passion for the classics, combined with a sensibility seeking to celebrate the classic monsters in unexpected ways. READ MORE

“This gift, which I never asked for and don’t understand, has brought me only unhappiness!” ~ Edward G. Robinson as a fake mentalist who is cursed with the power of second sight in Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948)

Have you ever wished you could see into the future? A kind of cautionary tale about the unpredictable nature of such a dubious gift is told in this movie. It begins at night, naturally.

The first striking image seen, amid a swirl of steam, reveals an enormous locomotive, bearing down on the camera like blind, arbitrary fate itself. As the veil of billowing smoke fades, the next sight shows a young man (John Lund) stumbling across a rail yard, picking up a trail of dropped objects, beginning with a glove, and leading to a compact, purse and watch, which he checks to see if it is still keeping time.

Frantically, he spots a young woman (Gail Russell) on a catwalk above the tracks, just as another train is entering the yard. Just in time, he pulls her back. Murmuring “Why did you stop me?”, she is led away by the man while she tells him “that the stars…they keep watching, like a thousand eyes…”  Stopping at a cafe, the pair are met by a strange man, who, the young man has explained, told him where to find the suicidal young woman–a bit of information that he had no way of knowing other than psychically. There follows a flashback  of some considerable length, even for a film noir, in which it is revealed that Russell is the daughter of Robinson’s former fellow vaudevillians, played by Jerome Cowan and Virginia Bruce.

“Knowledge itself is power” observed the Elizabethan Sir Francis Bacon, but he never met the 20th century author and father of noir fiction, Cornell Woolrich. In the reclusive Woolrich‘s fascinating if romantically bleak view of life, consciousness and the irony-laden knowledge of the past, present and future made his characters painfully aware of a lonely existence and its likely end. This author refashioned themes around this central problem with an obsessive, luridly poetic skill, and never more so than in his ambitious novel, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, published under the name of “George Hopley” in 1945. The film of  Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948) would explore these themes centering around the life of a fake mentalist who is chagrined to discover he really does have second sight, allowing him to see the future, even when it affects those loves. The adaptation of Woolrich‘s longest novel into an 80 minute “B” movie at Paramount by director John Farrow, (who has been discussed at some length here in a previous blog about Alias, Nick Beal), and his collaborators, writer Barré Lyndon and frequent scenarist Jonathan Latimer, apparently required changing many of the characters and the circumstances of the story. Despite this streamlining, much of the book’s mood of fatalistic suspense remains . Woolrich‘s prodigious output of dark tales had often led Hollywood to his stories of characters who are searching for solutions to their existential dilemmas. In the process, they often learn more than they wanted to know about life’s quixotic and cruel twists as well as their own character.

READ MORE

Two horse traders straddle a wooden gate in a stationary medium shot. The boyish one, Sandy (Harry Carey, Jr.) doffs his hat in an exaggerated curtsy to the passing Mormon travelers. The ruddy-faced Prudence (Kathleen O’Malley) peeks back nervously from her cart, embarrassed to display her interest in the cute stranger. Sandy whoops it up even more in response, waving his cap with adolescent bravado. He turns to fence-mate Travis (Ben Johnson), lamenting the fate of “all those women and children” making the journey across the desert towards the San Juan river. Travis gibes, “yeah, and that red-headed gal” too.  After the wagons recede into the distance in a painterly long-shot composition lensed by DP Bert Glennon, Sandy turns to Travis and starts singing: I left my gal in old Virginny. And Travis finishes the phrase, fall in line on the wagon train. Without further deliberation (aside from another verse), he tells Sandy, “looks like we got a job.”

It’s no surprise it took this long for Wagon Master to appear on DVD. It contains no stars, and the entire film proceeds on this soft-spoken, economically paced path. But thankfully Warner Brothers brought out this sublime piece of Fordian drama last week, in a stunning transfer that includes an anecdote-rich audio commentary with Peter Bogdanovich, Harry Carey, Jr., and an early sixties interview with Ford himself.

READ MORE

If you are in the Chicago area during any weekend in October, please drop in for the third session of Night School at Facets Multi-Media. Facets’s unique take on the tried-and-true midnight movie idea is to make the experience an educational one. Each week, a staff member hosts the midnight movie, offering a brief lecture before the film and moderating a Q&A afterward. Without a doubt, the Facets staff is the company’s best asset, and those who have participated in Night School have proven it with their entertaining but informative introductions to the movies. Staff members express their unique personalities through their movie choices and through their introductions: Some offer entertaining behind-the-scenes information; others offer an academic-style lecture; still others combine their intros with a touch of performance art. Handouts on each movie are offered to patrons as they enter the theater, and a syllabus and reading list are provided to cover each session. And, we are not above bribing our audience, because each week we raffle off a DVD from the Facets label. All of this edification and amusement is available for the low, low cost of five dollars per screening.

READ MORE

What do André de Toth, Michael Curtiz, and Leo McCarey have in common? These three directors were represented at the last Telluride Film Festival thanks to Alexander Payne, a Guest Director who introduced films from these cinematic stalwarts as part of his presentation on Forgotten Hollywood. Payne got his start with Citizen Ruth (1996), and then gave Matthew Broderick a memorable role in Election (1999), he cast Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt (2002), and followed this with an Oscar win for Sideways (2004). Payne’s selection of films for TFF was, as he was the first to admit, a selfish one: these were all rare films that he, personally, wanted to see on the big screen. In his introduction to Curtiz’ The Breaking Point he mentioned how TCM was to blame, because one day he woke up, turned on TCM, and only managed to see the last third of the film, which blew him away. But he’s always wanted to see the rest of it, and it’s not on DVD. Toth’s Day of the Outlaw? That 35mm print had to be secured by the TFF staff from Martin Scorsese’s personal archive. McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow? Well… if you have a PAL player and don’t mind buying the DVD from France, you’re in luck. But if you were in Telluride last Labor Day weekend, you had a chance to see rare 35mm print screenings of all three films that were sure to put you in the clouds. READ MORE