Here’s my usual drill at TFF: travel in to Telluride for an extended Labor Day Weekend, pick up the TFF schedule on Friday at noon, lazily pour over the schedule and all its offerings, circle the rare and “must see” films that I might never again see on the big screen, come up with “Plan B” options in case I get locked out of anything, allow for guilty pleasures, and in general just map things out as best I can (which is hard to do with all the T.B.A.’s that riddle the grid – but you do what you can). This is usually followed by the Opening Night Feed and dinner buffet. And then the films begin that evening and it’s time to dive into the thick of it. How thick does it get? Despite having a dozen roommates sharing a house, I might not see some of them again until it’s time to pack up the car and return home four days later. This year, that ritual was shattered and things started off with an unexpected bang.  READ MORE

I wanted to end my backyard film series with a bang, so I picked Performance – a film that was released in 1970, but written in 1967 and shot in 1968. The film marked directorial debuts for both Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell, but Roeg is the one who most people remember. Even at my screening the one person who had not only seen Performance before but said she’d seen it five times seemed to have forgotten about Cammell. Now for the surreal bit: when I went to my bookshelf to consult Ephraim Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia (“The Most Comprehensive Encyclopedia of World Cinema in a Single Volume”) and David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film (“indispensable,” “revised,” “up to date” etc.) both featured generous overviews of Roeg, but not a single thing on Cammell. How is this possible? READ MORE

If, like the rest of us peasants, you can’t get enough of ambitious movies set in Mesoamerican times, you might want to check out Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (2006). I’ve tried to watch that recent movie about three times now, but somewhere around the time that the words “I am Jaguar Paw. This is my forest. And I am not afraid” are spoken, I tend to nod off, even when these lines are spoken in the Yucatec Mayan language. My excessive snoring is the only thing that kept waking me up as Mr. Gibson‘s earnest attempt to dramatize the decline of Mayan civilization unfolded into the expected gore-filled spectacle. But enough of those stabs at historical accuracy in the movies–give me an engrossing, epic-sized if ill-conceived distortion to get me through the dog days of summer.

Happily, I’m here to report that no attacks of narcolepsy occurred while discovering the utterly delightful, nearly unknown Yul Brynner movie, Kings of the Sun (1963) recently. That 108 minute movie, shot in richly textured hues of De Luxe Color, is one of those being aired today, August 26th at 1:30PM EDT on TCM as part of Yul‘s moment in the Summer Under the Stars annual August event. An audacious movie–befitting an American financed re-imagining of the rise of a hypothetical ancient Mayan culture—was crafted with enormous professionalism in every frame, from the gorgeous cinematography of Joseph MacDonald to the rousing score from Elmer Bernstein and a cast of Oscar honorees and an industrious troupe of artists and craftsmen. The only problem is the script, darn it!
READ MORE

My eyes were misting over at the sight of Robert Donat, that most “beautiful loser” in the cut-throat world of moviemaking, as I watched the end of The Magic Box (1951) on TCM earlier this month. That actor could break this sap’s heart with a change in the inflection of his voice, but the somewhat romanticized portrayal of cinema pioneer William Friese-Greene in the all star John Boulting-directed film was very well done. Still, it made me think about another pioneer in British movie history, Cecil M. Hepworth (1875-1953).

In Kevin Brownlow and David Gill‘s documentary series on early film pioneers across the pond, Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood (1995), the film historians called their chapter on the British film industry, “Opportunity Lost”. Unlike the flourishing Swedish, Italian and French cinemas of the early years of the 20th century, English movies struggled from inception, with little government protection from foreign filmmakers, and constant copyright violations occurring  among the hardscrabble film companies. This outpost of the British cinema was little more than “a cottage industry”, based in the 8 room house of the of Cecil Hepworth in Walton-on-Thames. Hepworth‘s movies may have had their hand-crafted limitations, but they were also innovative, had charm, and definitely had an off-hand, singular British humor. And their creator was one of the most influential figures in movies internationally–if one of the most obscure today. Since many of this filmmaker’s few existing, brief movies are in the public domain, I hoped it might be interesting to gather many of them together here for readers who might enjoy these, as I have. None of the movies here are any more than a few minutes long.
READ MORE

I wonder if anyone reads James Hilton‘s books anymore?
READ MORE

“Women”, writer-producer Joan Harrison (1907-1994) told the New York Times in 1943, “must have something to pull for, you know, whether it’s a dog, a horse, an old beggar–or even another woman!” Unusually powerful behind the camera in her day, Harrison once admitted that she used her shrewd intellect to carve out a career for herself, but readily confessed that when necessary, “I use my sex.”

If pioneering writer and producer Harrison is remembered today at all, it is often likely for her contributions, along with those of the key figure of Alfred Hitchcock‘s wife, Alma Reville, to helping to shape and present to the world the talent and the image of the great director of suspense and anxiety. An educated Englishwoman, becoming his secretary while in her ’20s, Harrison, who claimed that she was pretty hopeless when it came to normal secretarial duties such as typing and shorthand, helped to shaped six of Hitchcock‘s films in the 1930s and 1940s.

As she explained, “I was probably the worst secretary Hitchcock has ever had. I was too curious about all the departments with which, as a director, Hitch must deal.”  She became an invaluable help to the director as he moved from English movies to American-themed stories and was very close to his family as well. Responding when she was 26 to a London Times advertisement for a “director’s assistant”, the Oxford and Sorbonne educated Ms. Harrison was hired to help with the production of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). Harrison, who would mention in interviews that she felt “stifled” by the prospect of the upper middle class existence, had, she admitted, “wanted to write. I used to attend court sessions at the Old Bailey in London to learn about life. I wrote some short stories. I was eager to get into the cinema.” READ MORE

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.

READ MORE

I’ve never met anyone remotely like Ronald Colman (1891-1958). It’s better that way.

He had an impossible to replicate, highly theatrical blend of the lighthearted and the grave that sparkled behind his brown eyes–a quality that seems to have vanished from this world. Oddly, his quiet, often surprisingly modern style, (especially when compared with his screen contemporaries), seems to be overlooked today, whether he is acting in a playful role such as his first talkie,  Bulldog Drummond (1929), playing a disillusioned husband in Cynara (1932),  the touching  amnesiac in Random Harvest (1942) or in his deeply felt part as Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities (1935). His characters, which he recognized were often shadows of an earlier time in British history even as he played them with such style, have an elusive grace  that was often imitated but uniquely his own.

READ MORE