On first impressions this may look like just another grade B bank heist thriller but don’t be fooled. This 1957 independent pickup by United Artists is a genuine loose canon and highly peculiar within its own specialized genre. In the best heist thrillers, the robbery is usually ingeniously planned and executed (Rififi) but when it goes awry, it’s usually due to festering hatred among the instigators (Odds Against Tomorrow) or bad luck or timing (The Killing). In THE BIG CAPER (1957), the glaring flaw is the organizer who appears to be a shrewd and cautious businessman until you see the wacko team he assembles for the job. And he might be the biggest nutcase in the lot. It’s not a comedy, but it should be, and you may very well find yourself laughing uncontrollably at times.     READ MORE

As the saying goes, “#%*! happens.”

This is true in moviemaking as much as any walk of life. Getting a large number of people to all march in rhythm and conform to a single agenda is a challenge under the best of circumstances. When that large number of people consists of temperamental artistic personalities and high-strung egos, and the single agenda entails trying to create a coherent story out of discontinuous fragments created out of order, the expectation should be for mistakes, and lots of ‘em.

Which is why I object to this site:  The 15 Worst Movie Mistakes in History

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It’s always a pleasure when I find the new issue of Steven Puchalski’s Shock Cinema in the mailbox and I’m calling issue 41 an early Christmas gift this year. Because I write a lot about actors, directors, writers and what-have-you, I have to read a lot of interviews and so many of them are terrible – particularly current interviews with contemporary celebrities. The lag time between birth and fame seems to get shorter and shorter every year, which means that noted personalities (as the almanac used to call them) become progressively less interesting, less able to call upon pre-fame life experience, less likely to have anything to say to the world beyond “Here I am!”. Add to that the fact that so many people doing the interviews don’t have a thought in their (so very often) expensively-schooled heads and you’ve got a highly stultifying reading experience. For this reason, Shock Cinema is such a tonic, focusing as it does on actors, filmmakers, writers, stuntmen, make-up men, producers and sundry folks who worked in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, people who have weathered (and in some cases still do enjoy) 20, 30, 40 and even 50 year careers. The new issue of Shock Cinema boasts long and revealing talks with actress Nancy Allen (the bad girl in CARRIE, the hooker with the heart of gold in both DRESSED TO KILL and BLOW-OUT, and ROBOCOP‘s partner), Michael Beck (THE WARRIORS, XANADU) and smiley Burton Gilliam (who made his film debut in PAPER MOON and went on to hayseed glory in such films as BLAZING SADDLES, GATOR and HONEYMOON IN VEGAS). Once again, Steve’s interviewers do a great job of teasing the stories out of these performers. Also interviewed in this issue is Judy Pace, a familiar face on screens big and small during the late 1960s and early-t0-mid 1970s, whom you may remember from roles in COTTON COMES TO HARLEM, FROGS and THE SLAMS with Jim Brown (Cool trivia: one of her acting coaches was Thalmus Rasulala, from BLACULA. Hip!) and director Larry Yust, who made the black con artist film TRICK BABY, the senior citizen shocker HOMEBODIES and an educational adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery that many remember as a particularly chilling highlight of their primary educations. For some reason, it was Yust’s interview to which I most looked forward. Shining a light into the more obscure corners of cult cinema is one of the things Shock Cinema does best, illuminating the fact that even those movies you think you dreamed were planned, paid for, cast, directed, shot and acted, just like real movies. Think of that the next time you watch TERROR IN THE JUNGLE or MANOS: HANDS OF FIRE. READ MORE

I enjoy reading about the movies I love almost as much as I enjoy watching them and this year I found myself doing a lot of reading. This was partially due to the fact that I’m more housebound lately but publishers were also very generous this year. I received many press releases as well as books for review during the last few months that caught my attention. Some books I encountered didn’t appeal to me but a surprising number of them kept me eagerly turning pages until I was finished reading. From lush coffee table gift books to intimate autobiographies, the range of interesting reading material I came across in 2011 was surprising, thought provoking and entertaining so I decided to compile a two-part list of my favorite film related books of the year. Some of the books on my list are fun and frivolous, while others are more weightier affairs. No matter what your reading tastes might be; these selections should appeal to all types of film fans.

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If you had asked me when I was just growing up on the movies in the mid to late seventies who was going to be the big director of the decade, I might have answered Franklin J. Schaffner.  That wouldn’t have been a crazy answer either.  Sure, there was Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, William Friedkin and Hal Ashby.    Not to mention Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg,  John Boorman and Peter Bogdanovich.  Oh yeah, and let’s not forget  Bernardo Bertolucci,  John Cassavetes, Bob Fosse, Roman Polanski, Milos Forman… okay, okay, enough!  The point is, despite all those great talents, Franklin J. Schaffner was the first director I really got to know by name.

Let me rephrase that.  I knew of Welles and Hitchcock, Renoir and Kurosawa, Fellini and Powell and a host of other classic directors but, as a growing cinephile in the seventies, of the contemporary directors, Franklin J. Schaffner was the first one whose name I recognized because it just happened to be on three of my favorite movies when I was young:  Planet of the Apes (POTA), Patton and Papillon, the three P’s of my movie-loving childhood.

So you’d expect I might possibly answer, “Yeah, Schaffner, he’s the one.  He’ll be remembered.”  And then, of course, he fell off the edge of the world.   The culprit?  Some of the worst script selection in the history of Hollywood.

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It is now possible to hold Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema in your hand, after remaining a rumor in the years following its completion in 1998. It was caught in a snarl of copyright issues that lasted almost as long as the ten years it took Godard to make it, with Gaumont not able to clear the fusillade of music and film rights until 2007. Olive Films took the gamble to license the film for a U.S. DVD release, and now Godard’s grand cinematic convulsion can finally be grappled with in the relative privacy of your mortgaged home, starting today.

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On a cold, blustery Chicago afternoon, I was safely tucked in the back row of a theater watching Vertigo as it was intended to be seen—on the big screen in 35mm with a theater full of movie buffs, cinephiles, and Hitchcock fans.  The rich, saturated colors of the new print were a treat after seeing so many contemporary films shot in the drab, flat, burnished colors of digital cinematography. The film was followed by a commentary and discussion led by mystery writer Sara Paretsky and psychologist James W. Anderson, a professor at Northwestern University. Watching Vertigo on the big screen helped me notice details that had eluded me on previous viewings, while comments by Paretsky and Anderson offered a different point of view on the film. I also learned a great deal from the insightful observations of the audience members.

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In case you haven’t heard; 2012 will be known as the official date when most celluloid projection will be tossed into a fiery and remote pit.  Film, “reel” film, the stuff made of organic emulsion that unspools through a projector at 24-frames-a-second, is going the way of the dodo bird. Roger Ebert wrote a eulogy on November 2nd (Chicago Sun Times; The sudden death of film). A.O. Scott followed his lead a couple weeks later on Nov 18th (N.Y. Times; Film Is Dead? What Else Is New?). Leo Enticknap, a cinema director at the University of Leeds in the U.K., went even further on Nov. 20th (INDIEwire; The 35mm Battle Continues) when he facetiously ridiculed a recent petition to save 35mm film with this opening salvo: “OK, and let’s petition Ford to reopen the Model T production line, and ban all performances of Mozart’s piano concertos on anything other than an eighteenth century fortepiano while we’re at it.” (Links to all three essays are provided at the bottom of my post.)

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It’s been a little over a year since I debuted here, and in that time I’ve stirred up a handful of firestorms–but weirdly, not the ones I expected.  I posted a clip of Buster Keaton as a sympathetic Nazi general, and nobody chirped a word of protest.  I ran a whole blog about blackface comedians, and the comments thread it initiated was reasoned, intelligent and low-key.  I facetioustly pretended that The Thing was a Christmas movie, defended Popeye, and praised Charlie Chaplin imitators.

But the one time I provoked serious anger and acrimony was the time I suggested that William Haines–William Haines!–wasn’t all that funny (I got called “hateful” for that one!)

When I wrote last week’s post about the Muppets, I figured I was running a risk.  Critics say nice things about heavily hyped contemporary movies at their own peril.  But my positive thoughts on the new Muppets wasn’t what kicked up dust–heavens, no.  The vitriol came out in my offhanded reference to Orson Welles having appeared in the 1979 Muppet Movie!  Somehow, this prompted the comments thread to start to tear into F for Fake. (how?)

To be fair, it was just one lone voice, wailing into the ether about how much he hated the Muppets, and F for Fake.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a put-on, somebody simply trying to bait me.  But I’m not above being baited.  I won’t stand by and let anybody talk smack about F for Fake, one of my 10 favorite movies of all time.  Consider the battle joined.

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