The recent success of Hugo and The Artist has sparked interest in the silent era and film history in the press and among the public. This attention has already waned, but, in an era when silent film is completely off the radar of most movie-goers, entertainment reporters, and bloggers, the focus was nice while it lasted. As a film studies instructor, I have taken advantage of both films to help my students connect to silent film in a way previous classes could not. After spending a week grading midterm papers, I am proud of my students who wrote about the films with depth and feeling, analyzing everything from the differences between silent and sound-film acting to references to movies or historical figures to the filmmaking techniques used by the directors. I was gratified that students applied what they had learned about Georges Melies and his special effects to draw comparisons to the CGI-laden films of their generation, and I was touched by their passionate declarations that the pioneer should never be forgotten.  Though some of my colleagues dismissed the Oscar-winning The Artist as a pleasant trifle, my students recognized the visual techniques director Michel Hazanavicius used to complement the actors’ performances and to compensate for the lack of spoken dialogue. I liked The Artist very much, but their observations and discoveries made me appreciate the film even more. Recognizing techniques, references, and ideas beyond the level of plot is like having the keys to unlock any film, and, once my students realize this, they are excited by the possibilities.

The prominence of Hugo and The Artist combined with my students’ clever critiques of both films reminded me of another movie set in the silent era that references historical events and real-life film legends. Directed by Blake Edwards, Sunset features Bruce Willis as cowboy star Tom Mix and James Garner as Wild West legend Wyatt Earp. In honor of both Bruce Willis and Wyatt Earp’s birthday, which is today, I thought it fitting to bring some attention to this film.

READ MORE

This is Part Two of a four-part series that looks at the career of director Robert Mulligan. You can find Part One here.

After the success of To Kill a Mockingbird, Robert Mulligan and producer Alan Pakula made five straight films together to close out the 1960s, before Pakula departed to become a director himself. Using Mockingbird as a template, the duo chose projects that dealt with hot button issues (Love With the Proper Stranger and Up the Down Staircase), or were prestigious literary adaptations (Baby the Rain Must Fall and Inside Daisy Clover). Their final collaboration, The Stalking Moon, with a story taken from a Western novel, is the exception. Regardless of their middlebrow origin, these are films sensitively attuned to the social and geographic landscapes of their subjects, to the ebb and flow of urban overcrowding and the oppressive emptiness of the open plains. These films also continue Mulligan’s interest in outsiders adapting to new realities, in “dramas of experience intruding upon innocence”, as Kent Jones eloquently put it.

READ MORE

The Warner Archive continues to summon the ghosts of Hollywood past onto DVD, a bit of studio witchery we should all get behind. One of their most intriguing recent séance jobs is Frank Borzage’s Smilin’ Through (1941), a haunting WWI melodrama. Despite the mammoth Murnau, Borzage and Fox box set, there are still great stretches of Borzage’s career missing on home video (including essential titles like Man’s Castle (’33, hopefully a Sony MOD candidate) and Moonrise (’48), which is streaming on Netflix)). Smilin’ Through, though flawed, has moments of doomed romanticism that rival anything else in his work, with superimpositions establishing the intractable hold the past exerts on the present. A similar theme is lugubriously told in Welcome to Hard Times (’67), a Western in which old studio hand Burt Kennedy flails to channel A Fistful of Dollars on a low budget. Originally made-for-TV, MGM decided to release it into theaters before airing it on ABC, after which it disappeared. Featuring a spate of studio standbys, including Henry Fonda and Aldo Ray, it’s a fascinating failure in which MGM hires old studio craftsman to make a film that blatantly reaches for the youth market.

READ MORE

“You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until it finally buries them under the ground. And there’s nobody who says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to.”
- Bernardo O’Reilly (Charles Bronson) in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960)

I recently became an aunt again so I’ve been thinking a lot about family lately and with Father’s Day right around the corner I thought I’d share some thoughts about my own dad and how the movies we watched together helped make me the person I am today.

READ MORE

Alex Cox was born in Liverpool and later moved to the U.S. and went on to direct some of the most iconoclastic arthouse films of my youth with titles like Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, Straight to Hell, and Walker. That was the eighties. Then came the nineties and I was still being amazed by his unique aesthetic as he spent more time south of the border, directing the criminally under-appreciated Highway Patrolman, followed by Death and the Compass, and also landing several other gigs that put him in front of the camera as well as working on a prodigious number of scripts, including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. By a strange twist of fate, I found myself sharing beers with Mr. Cox at my kitchen counter last Tuesday and he was kind enough to let me interview him for the purpose of this blog. READ MORE

Despondent cineaste Jack Andrus should buck up. First, he’s seated in an eye-blazingly Technicolor red chair, which one assumes is also of sensuously high-grain leather. Second, he’s being played by Kirk Douglas at his most flamboyantly masculine, a dream come true for characters of dissolutely manic personalities like Jack. Third, the Warner Archive has released a fine remastered DVD of the film that houses him, Vincente Minnelli’s convulsively beautiful Two Weeks in Another Town. For the rest of us, they also recently put out a remastered version of Minnelli’s The Cobweb (1955) and an un-restored but handsome-looking edition of Blake Edwards’ Wild Rovers (1971). We’ll start with the last first just to get Jack’s goat, but also because the Minnelli greats have already been covered by more seasoned minds, although I’ll still get my thoughts in.

READ MORE

The next few months promise an embarrassment of film criticism riches. On March 15th, J. Hoberman’s An Army of Phantoms drops, the second entry in his breathless and exhaustive cultural history of Cold War cinema. In April, the long-overdue first collection of Dave Kehr’s writing, When Movies Mattered, will grace bookshelves. I’ll have cowed reviews of both near their release, but for now I’ll stick to a title Hoberman singles out in Phantoms, and which he programmed for his series at BAM: Gordon Douglas’ despairing cavalry Western, Only the Valiant (1951, also available on a DVD from Lionsgate).

READ MORE

I know from comments posted to some of my earlier posts that not all of you in Morlock-land are fans of Spaghetti Westerns.  Fair enough.  They were designed as a European alternative to American Westerns–and like European football or European pizza, they defy American tastes to some extent.  I’ve argued here before that Europeans have as legitimate a claim to Westerns as Americans do–I mean, one of the very first horse operas was literally an opera!  Giacomo Puccini first saw his Western opera La fanciulla del West (“The Girl of the Golden West”) performed in 1910.

Nevertheless, I don’t dispute that these European Westerns differ substantially in tenor and texture from the homegrown kind.  That’s why Americans first started using that “Spaghetti Western” epithet–it was intended as an insult.  Even though the insult has now been embraced by fans and lost its sting, there are still those who would argue that like real spaghetti, Italian Westerns are just empty calories.

This may be true of some–but the vast majority of Italian Westerns weren’t even distributed in the US and many have never been covered significantly by the critical press, and the irony is that some of the best Spaghettis remain the most obscure.  I’d like this week to introduce you to two films that have never been made available in the US, but which you will nevertheless find more than a little familiar.  We’ve already talked about the influence of pulp novelist Karl May on the Western genre–now it’s time to look at another, even bigger, author–William Shakespeare! READ MORE

Last week I saw 20 films in five days at Sundance. With just over 200 films listed in the index, that means I barely covered 10% of the slate. Documentaries are a Sundance forté, so it’s not surprising that almost half of the films I screened fall into this category. Similarly, as most docs these days never get transferred to film that accounts for why about half of all my screenings were digital projections. Happily, despite many rumblings by industry pundits regarding the eminent death of 35mm film, most of the narrative features were still on celluloid. Huzzah! READ MORE