After a lengthy hold-out, I’ve galloped into the loving arms of Blu-Ray. It’s the right time to jump in, as the studios are (rather desperately) pushing the format hard, cutting prices across the board. You can pick up a player for around $150, with many library titles on sale for $10 (most new releases are set at $25). Starting in 2010, Warner Brothers will release every new theatrical release exclusively in “Blu-Ray combo packs”, which will contain the high-def disc along with the standard-def DVD (forcing consumers to buy the Blu-Ray and push them to upgrade). With HDTV prices finally starting to come down as well, Blu-Ray is finally a financially feasible option for cash-strapped cinephiles like myself.

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Careening across the countryside in a gypsy wagon, a lovesick hunchback cries out piteously for release from his twisted form. A hardworking Jewish-American father tries to appease his young son on his birthday, seeking to interest him in a baseball bat rather than an expensive violin.

A tired general on the Western frontier finds a few moments of solace in soldiers’ singing. An Italian soldier, willing to do anything to get back to his wife and baby, is stranded in the war-torn desert. A stoic Indian chief joins a wild west show, finding a way to keep his dignity despite his reduced circumstances. A broken matador tells an up and comer some hard truths. A Mexican dictator regretfully but decisively goes to war. A Japanese editor tries to correct his American-educated son’s corrupt Western ways.  And a half-monkey, half-man broods endlessly about his plight, especially since he’s stuck being an unpaid houseboy for his creator.

What do each of these diverse (and sometimes pretty outlandish) characters and at least 200 more have in common? Character actor and changeling J. Carrol Naish (1896-1973). I can’t possibly touch on the range of Naish‘s roles in this blog, but his remarkably productive career includes an enormous range of characters, far beyond the roles as heavily accented types he is often best remembered for today.

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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

“I’ve never played anyone but myself on screen.”
~ Glenn Ford (1916-2006)

He never won an Academy Award, nor was he recognized by the American Film Institute with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Yet, in over 200 movies, the seamless, artless quality in actor Glenn Ford‘s work enabled him to fly under the radar of the ballyhoo that surrounds much of Hollywood. His very squareness illuminated something of value for audiences: the effort to survive, the desire to preserve some integrity, some shared insight into the nature of good and evil, and the things of value that we might try to pass on. Whether behind a badge, roaming on horseback, wearing a business suit, a uniform or a pair of well-worn jeans, his characters could be good and bad. He didn’t really care if he played “the villain or the hero,” the actor once pointed out. “Sometimes the villain is the most colorful. But I prefer a part where you don’t know what he is until the end.” Commentators have pointed out that much of the career of Glenn Ford was based on “niceness”, with decency and morality running consistently through his characters. I find the struggle and inability of Ford‘s characters to remain “nice” in an increasingly complex, unfair world to be one of the factors that makes him an interesting actor. His occasional slow burns on screen in roles such as The Violent Men, Trial, Ransom, The Big Heat and Human Desire, and his overwhelmed comic characters, such as the widower in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, brought out something unexpectedly mercurial in his screen persona. You cannot always predict where he is going to go with a characterization.

When TCM trots out a plethora of Glenn Ford movies this Friday, August 7th, as part of the Summer Under the Stars celebration, I’ll probably be watching–warily. Until the last few years, you see, I didn’t think I liked Glenn Ford. But that was my mistake. Now I know better and can appreciate some of his work. Besides, I need to hang out till the ends of his movies to find out if his character was good or bad.
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Whenever I watch a silent film at the Portage Theater, an old movie palace on Chicago’s north side, it’s like stepping back in time and escaping the pressures of the day. On Friday evening, I saw Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld as part of this summer’s series from the Silent Film Society of Chicago. Underworld is a well-crafted and well-acted film that stands the test of time, so I don’t want to imply that the movie was in any way “old-fashioned.” What I am referring to is the way the Silent Film Society takes great care to recreate the movie-going experience of the silent era, and this stands in stark contrast to today’s tacky, uncomfortable cineplexes with their self-absorbed, cell-phone-addicted audience members.

The Portage, which originally opened in 1920, now seats a little more than 1300; on Friday, the theater was well over half full with an attentive audience of all ages and types. Before the program started, people milled about the lobby looking over the t-shirts and books for sale, or they sat in their seats actually talking to each other instead of yapping on cell phones. I liked that the audience consisted of people from different generations who had all come to see this famous 1927 gangster saga, though probably for different reasons.

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Have you a favorite cab driver from classic movies?

Is he (or she) loud, pushy and aggressively seeking a faster route and big tip–maybe a Alan Hale, Sr. or Nat Pendleton type, quick with his mouth and his fists when needed? Or is the celluloid cabbie you cherish a comical “hail fellow well met” type, eager for conversation and filled with an inexplicable sense of bonhomie–perhaps played by a George Tobias, Red Skelton or Frank McHugh? Might another compelling favorite be those Charon-like figures behind the wheel, ferrying passengers across the dark city, musing philosophically about the pulse of the lifeblood of the city while guiding those in the back seat to a physical and spiritual destination–weightier characters captured by such diverse actors as Tom D’Andrea and Paul Lukas?

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My heart flutters as I begin my first week here at Movie Morlocks. I’ll need time to settle into my new Tuesday digs before I can work out any cinephilic kinks, so please forgive my youthful enthusiasms and wild hyperbole. I’ll settle down eventually, but not quite yet.

Let’s get the introduction out of the way. By general life expectancy standards, I’m young, so the current economic crisis hasn’t destroyed my non-existent wealth. Any previous possibility of easy living was scuttled by my decision to attend NYU to study cinema. Bad move! Now destitute, my only solace is the moving image and the multifarious pleasures it brings. That’s what I’ll be writing about here, hopefully in a lucid and engaging manner.

Speaking of economic devastation, Film Forum in NYC has recently concluded a wonderful series of Depression-era films entitled “Breadlines & Champagne”. An eclectic mix of social-realist dramas, high-society screwball comedies, and gangster operatics, it was a revelatory peek into the incredible richness and diversity of the films from that early sound, pre-code period. I received the greatest kick from Raoul Walsh’s unclassifiable 1932 experimental gangster- romantic comedy, Me and My Gal.

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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.

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I remember spending one perfectly nice Christmas day in my dark basement watching Cannibal Holocaust. Now, aside for that whole business of eating the body of Christ during the Last Supper, this was clearly not a Eucharist-themed movie spree I was engaged in (although, hey! – there’s an idea)… Nah, this was just a bloody and depressing mistake on my part – but one I was able to indulge in since my family celebrates Christmas Eve together and then leaves me to my own devices on Christmas proper. While I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to watch this December 25th, there’s a good chance it’ll be on the dark side because, to make a cliche out of appropriate movie titles, Bad Habits.. Die Hard. It’s not that I’m a nihilist myself, but I do feel a kinship to those who might smuggle in a copy of Nietzsche to a Sunday mass so as to appreciate the sermon that much more. With that in mind, here are my (unholy) three, in – of course – descending order: READ MORE