“He [D.W. Griffith] missed a certain beauty he thought had disappeared from film, from the way people saw life — ‘the beauty of the moving wind in the trees, the little movement in a beautiful blowing on the blossoms in the trees. That they have forgotten entirely. . . We have lost beauty.’ On that [...]

Last week I looked at six of the Best Picture nominees from 1943, the last year the Academy nominated ten films for Best Picture, until they expanded the category once more in 2010. Today I’ll look at the remaining four titles, with James Agee and Manny Farber again providing perspective with their reviews from [...]

The Movie Morlocks Oscar blog-a-thon continues today and goes through the end of the week. Suzi kicked things off yesterday with a look at actors who were nominated for historical roles. Today I look at the Best Picture race from 1944’s Academy Award ceremony (for the films of ‘43).
The big news at this year’s Oscar [...]

The top image is from High Sierra (1941), of Humphrey Bogart slugging Alan Curtis in the jaw with his pistol. The bottom image is from the same scene in its remake, Colorado Territory (1949), of Joel McCrea knocking out James Mitchell with a meaty right hand. Both films were directed by Raoul Walsh – the first [...]

Moira Finnie, one of the contributing writers here, wrote a long and fascinating comment in response to my post on My Son John below. It is a searching and heartfelt take that goes into detail about the conflicting emotions and ideas the film dredges up, and one that captures the multiplicity of positions it places [...]

Last Wednesday, TCM presented the first television screening of Leo McCarey’s MY SON JOHN in decades. It screened as part of the “Shadows of Russia” series, which tracked Hollywood’s depiction of the country from Tsarist times through Soviet rule. Programmed by the NY Post’s Lou Lumenick and the Self-Styled Siren’s Farran Smith Nehme, it offered [...]

Following the tendentious example of the Warner Archive, Universal and MGM have quietly started their own DVD burn-on-demand services. With seemingly no publicity, a dozen MGM titles became available through Amazon’s CreateSpace in December (press release here), with DVD-Rs including Sidney Lumet’s The Group (listed at $19.98, discounted to $17.99). Twenty-five Universal titles became [...]

Akira Kurosawa is a director I’ve long taken for granted. I’ve never bothered to look much farther beyond the recognized classics: Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Kagemusha, Ran. The latter two floored me with their blood-red blood in my image-besotted youth, but I repressed that enthusiasm to make the usual auteurist arguments – belittling Kurosawa in order [...]

Early yesterday, news broke that Eric Rohmer passed away at the age of 89. Dave Kehr has a fine obituary up at the NY Times, and I would recommend Michael J. Anderson’s essay on My Night at Maud’s and The Green Ray for an analysis of his style. The Six Moral Tales will remain his [...]