This is part 2 of a discussion that began last week.  Our participants continue to be Jeff Allard, Dennis Cozzalio, Greg Ferrara, Paul Gaita, Nicholas McCarthy and yours truly, Jack the Ripper. READ MORE

Tippi Hedren modeling a Jacques Fath dress in 1954

I love to waste time flipping through old women’s magazines. There’s something strangely appealing about the vintage advertisements and forgotten articles that told women how they should dress and explained how to cook a Thanksgiving turkey. It’s easy to imagine my own grandmother or mother taking fashion notes or cutting out recipes so they could plan their next family gathering while reading these dusty publications. Now that so many magazines seem to be going out of print and readers are more likely to search for recipes and beauty tips online, there’s something vaguely comforting about loosing myself in the past for a few hours while reading an old issue of McCall’s or Better Homes & Gardens.

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Like a herd of cattle ready to run down a restive kidnapper, Olive Films bursts into stores today with a phalanx of five DVDs licensed from Paramount Pictures: Union Station (1950), Appointment With Danger (1951), Dark City (1951), Crack in the World (1965, our Richard Harland Smith wrote about it here), and Hannie Caulder (1971, which Kimberly Lindbergs dealt with here). A wholesale distributor and retailer of independent and art-house releases, Olive is now expanding its own acquisitions slate, starting with this brawny group of  genre titles. With multiple studios now experimenting with the mixed blessings of burn-on-demand technology (more releases, but higher prices and less quality control) for their library titles, it’s encouraging that a company is still willing to put out fully authored discs, in strong new transfers.

With the forthcoming, and essential, Josef Von Sternberg collection coming from Criterion, it’s clear that Paramount is becoming more aggressive in licensing its material.  Olive will release 27 Paramounts over the next year or so, including Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents, Otto Preminger’s legendary and fascinating flop Skidoo, and Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face. I spoke with the Director of Acquisitions and Sales at Olive, Frank Tarzi, and he confirms that much more is on the way. Olive has closed deals with multiple studios, and their future slate shows off adventurous and eclectic taste, with Tarzi confirming the following: Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming, Billy Wilder’s Fedora, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Despair, The Stationmaster’s Wife (uncut), and I Only Want You to Love Me (uncut), Abel Gance’s J’Accuse, Claude Chabrol’s Ophelia, and, most exciting of all, Jean-Luc Godard’s complete Histoire(s) du cinema.

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A few days ago, Morlock Jeff offered a list of movies that suffered from at least one horribly miscast actor whose performance and character distracted from the rest of the film. The list was topped by the preposterous casting of Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi, Holly Golightly’s Japanese neighbor, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Few can dispute that this character not only represents insensitive stereotyping but also disrupts the ultra-romantic tone of the movie. Breakfast at Tiffany’s has come to symbolize a certain sophistication because of Audrey Hepburn’s star image and her stylish look as Holly Golightly, a reputation that makes Rooney’s character seem even more out of place to us now. As Morlock Jeff pointed out in his post, even Rooney didn’t think much of the role.

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Although Shadow of a Doubt (1943) precedes what is typically considered “Hitchcock’s Golden Age” it was a personal favorite for the director. Teresa Wright puts in an exceptional performance as Charlotte Newton, aka: “Young Charlie” – affectionately named after her uncle Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten). While the younger Charlie is clearly an innocent, the elder Uncle Charlie is not. When Uncle Charlie returns to his hometown to lay low for a while the two Charlies begin a dance that is the epitome of all Hitchcock films, for it’s a dance between evil and innocence that swirls around in a waltz that has Ying-Yang-like precision. The ground it covers goes far beyond the duality of human nature and hints at darker things. I screened Shadow of a Doubt last Saturday in my backyard cinema and invited one of my weekly poker buddies to introduce the film. Paul Gordon’s card-playing skills are beside the point; he is teaching a course on Hitchcock and Freud this summer and is thus perfectly poised to tease out a little psychoanalytic fun from the master of suspense. READ MORE

Remember Big Jim McBob (Joe Flaherty) and Billy Sol Hurok (John Candy) as the hayseed hosts of “Farm Report” on the legendary SCTV comedy series? These farmer-turned-film-reviewers loved movies where people and things blew up and eventually their hog report turned into a talk show where they blew up famous celebrities every week like Meryl Streep, The Village People, Brooke Shields, singer Neil Sedaka or Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie. Well, these guys would love Rod Steiger in HENNESSY (1975) because he blows up real good.      READ MORE

My posse has changed over the past few years.  Now that I’m a father of two kids under 5 years old, I don’t get out to many rep screenings or conventions and I turn down most invitations to sneak peeks and movie premieres.  As such, I don’t hang with the black tee shirt crowd anymore and find I’m commiserating with other parents online … and a (perhaps not) surprising number of these are horror lifers who either carry the creep torch blog-wise or actually make horror movies.  I decided to corral some of these horror dads for a roundtable discussion of the challenges involved in raising children when one’s tastes run to the grotesque and arabesque (to put it diplomatically). READ MORE

Photographer Julius Shulman may not be a household name but you’ve probably seen his work or at least its influence in Hollywood films. Shulman spent much of his life photographing architectural wonders in Los Angeles and his photos of private homes, office buildings and public structures helped shape the way that we all see the “City of Angels.”

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“Do you miss it – directing?

-I miss it only when I see things on the screen that make me want to vomit.”

Peter Bogdanovich interviewing Joseph H. Lewis, Who the Devil Made It

I should let this magical quote stand on its own, but I’m a writer, so I’ll write.  Last week, TCM devoted a night to the films of Joseph H. Lewis, including some rare items surrounding his acknowledged masterpiece, Gun Crazy (1950). The tastiest morsel was So Dark the Night (1946) (made soon after the modest success of the equally awesome, but better known, My Name is Julia Ross (1945)). A rural psychological thriller, it’s an extreme example of Lewis’ idiosyncratic visual sense (the son of a NYC optometrist, he grew up with lenses). As he went on to tell Bogdanovich:  ”What interested me most was telling the story through the eyes of a camera. I didn’t like words – wherever I could, I cut words out, and told it silently through the camera.”

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