Several times over the last year I have sat down to write something about Four Lions, one of my favorite films of the past couple of years, but each time I abort the mission.  As much as I love the movie and wish to celebrate it, I also know that the chances are few of you will have seen it, much less heard of it—and to date I have a 0% track record of succeeding in convincing even my closest circle of family and friends to watch it.  This is going to be a hard sell—the premise of the thing is just such a turnoff.  Four Lions is a comedy about, and from the perspective of, Islamist terrorists plotting attacks on England.

I know, a laugh riot, right?

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If you are hooked up to the Internet you will, through no fault of your own and in inverse proportion to your native apathy or antipathy towards such things, have to sift through a gauntlet of celebrity gossip concerning people who have in their lifetimes achieved nothing beyond the dubious distinction of media focus. Why, just today I learned that a piece of slunk meat who “stars” on an inexplicably popular reality TV show is having a baby. I even know the gender! KILL ME NOW! Happily, balm for that particular Gilead comes every so often via snail mail, as with yesterday’s delivery of the latest issue of Shock Cinema. And not a moment too soon! READ MORE

*As it is necessary to this piece, MAJOR SPOILERS for the titles discussed within.  You’ve been warned.

I have always loved The Cat and The Canary in every version I have seen, even the 1979 version directed by Radley Metzger, former director of semi-stylish porn.  It had a great cast, including Wendy Hiller and Edward Fox and carried the story off quite well.  The story of The Cat and the Canary, for those two or three of you unfamiliar with it, involves an old rich dead man and his relatives all clamoring about his estate for the reading of the will to see who gets all the money left behind.  No sooner is his niece Annabelle West named the inheritor than a guard barges in to warn everyone that a mad man is on the loose.  And not just any mad man but one who thinks he’s a cat and tears his victims apart.  For the next several hours and into the night, everyone is on edge, especially Annabelle.  As the bodies mount the viewer wonders, “Will the cat be caught before Annabelle is killed?”

And then, we discover, it’s all a fake.  There is no mad man, just a nephew who’s second in line and looking to knock Annabelle off without making it look obvious.   And as much as I love all the renditions I’ve seen (sadly, I’ve not yet seen the Bob Hope/Paulette Goddard 1939 version) I always think, “I wish the mad man were real.”

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The post-WWII economic expansion exploded in 1950, as the GI Bill’s low mortgage rates stoked a housing boom and pent-up consumer demand propped up retail. Success was there for the taking, but not for all. Two early 50s films that are hitting home video in impressive transfers,  Joseph Losey’s The Lawless (1950, on DVD 5/29 from Olive Films) and Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953, now out on Blu-Ray from Twilight Time), documented some of the anxieties caused by this enormous upheaval in American life, what would be the start of the greatest stretch of economic growth in U.S. history. More money meant more crime, and The Big Heat is a nightmare rendering of the American Dream, as good cop  Glenn Ford loses his nuclear family and just goes nuclear. The Lawless is an earnest morality play about the plight of migrant fruit pickers in Southern California, doing the work Americans left for office gigs (by 1956 a majority of U.S. workers held white rather than blue collar jobs).

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Easy ground rules: name the first 10 films that come to mind that give you the feeling of being in a hall-of-mirrors because they are jarringly self-reflexive. That was the question posed to me by a fellow film fanatic. It didn’t take me long to respond with a quick list of favorites that, instead of measuring their success by how well they transported me into alternate realities wherein I forgot I was watching a film, did quite the opposite: they made me über self-conscious of my role as an audience member.  READ MORE

Last week we took a look at Preston Sturges’ Palm Beach Story, and in so doing I took a swipe at Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels.  Well, this week I cycle back to give Sullivan’s Travels a second look.  I still think it’s weak tea compared to Sturges’ more madcap films like Hail the Conquering Hero, Christmas in July, or Palm Beach Story, but it’s got an autobiographical element that deserves some mention.

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I noted the death of Hollywood character actor Woodrow Parfrey with great sadness back in1984. Truth be told, I believe I learned of his passing the following year, with the publication of John Willis’ Screen World 1985, which cataloged every film (domestic and foreign) released in the United States in 1984 and concluded with a necrology for that year. The deaths of film folk were especially weighty that year, with the loss of Richard Basehart, Richard Burton, James Mason, Sam Peckinpah, Janet Gaynor, Sam Jaffe, Joseph Losey, John Marley, James Mason, Walter Pidgeon, Francois Truffaut, Oscar Werner, Johnny Weismuller… and of course Woodrow Parfrey. 61. Heart attack. No picture. But I didn’t need a picture to remember what he looked like. Hollywood got a lot less interesting after 1984, at least for me. I won’t go so far as to cite the death of Woodrow Parfrey as an inciting event turning me off of mainstream Hollywood films but, brother, it sure didn’t help. READ MORE

The 65th Cannes Film Festival is currently underway and I thought it would be fun to take a trip down memory lane and share some early photos of the classic film stars and directors who have attended this prestigious event. Cannes is one of the oldest film festivals in existence and undoubtedly the most glamorous. Photographers from around the world converge on the French Riviera every year to snap photos of well-heeled celebrities who are eager to sell themselves and their latest movies to their adoring public.

Just like today, the Cannes Film Festival of yesteryear was attended by high-profile Hollywood couples often more in love with the cameras than one another as well as sexy starlets willing to bare all in order to get noticed and directors engaged in ridiculous publicity stunts for profit. The only things that have really changed in the last 65 years are the hairstyles and the fashions but while browsing though these old photographs it’s easy to become mesmerized by the charismatic faces that stare back at you. As Norma Desmond famously said in SUNSET BLVD. (1950), “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” Norma may have been talking about silent film stars then but those infamous lines haunted me while I was compiling these images. Of course there’s an element of nostalgia in my opining because these are some of the faces that made me fall in love with the movies and they’re faces that I never get tired of looking at.

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Every ten years, the Sight and Sound poll is released (now run by the BFI) and a list of the greatest films of all time is compiled from separate lists submitted by critics and directors.   There are a few silents on the overall list but not many.  Films like Battleship Potemkin, Sunrise, The General and Intolerance get the most votes while others, like Birth of a Nation or Berlin: Symphony of a City, get a couple or even just one.   Shockingly, on the last poll in 2002, The Crowd didn’t get a one.  Not one for what is, in my opinion, the greatest of all silent films.  As  blogger and New York Post critic Farran Smith Nehme – aka, The Self-Styled Siren –  once wrote, “…this isn’t merely the best silent movie the Siren has ever seen. Without hesitation she will name it as one of the greatest movies ever made in this country or anywhere else. ”    And the movies made earlier, before the twenties or the teens, get even less respect.   The one and two reelers that paved the way for all of cinema are roundly ignored or given a bemused nod before moving on to the bigger more developed sound era.  They’re the cave paintings of film history, admired for their skill and artistry, but never given more than a cursory nod when the conversation gets “serious” and the superlatives start getting thrown around.

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