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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This is the third and final post in  DTV ACTION ITEMS, a three-part series on direct-to-video action movies. Click here for Part 1, an interview with Outlaw Vern, and here for Part 2, a profile of actor Stone Cold Steve Austin.

The Asylum is the most disreputable studio in that most disreputable of markets: direct-to-video. They made their name cranking out cheaply made “mockbusters”, thinly veiled ripoffs of Hollywood blockbusters starring Z-list celebrities, many of which air in constant rotation on the SyFy channel. Last month Universal Studios sued them for copyright infringement on The Asylum’s Battleship take-off, American Battleship, starring Mario Van Peebles and Carl Weathers. Despite a hilariously cocky press release defending their film (” Looking for a scapegoat, or more publicity, for its pending box-office disaster, the executives at Universal filed this lawsuit in fear of a repeat of the box office flop, John Carter of Mars. The Universal action is wholly without merit and we will vigorously defend their claims in Court. Nonetheless, we appreciate the publicity.”), they changed the title to American Warships, which will be released on video May 22nd.

They are a crew of brilliantly amoral hucksters pranking Hollywood for fun and profit — a commendable goal for sure, but are the movies worth watching? When I spoke to Outlaw Vern two weeks back, he didn’t think so, nothing that “I get a laugh from the titles and covers like everybody else, but the parts I’ve seen have been terrible and not in a fun way.” One of their upcoming releases may indicate an uptick in quality, for Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies (out on DVD/Blu on May 29th) is a taut, resourceful piece of survival horror, completely lacking the forced campiness of most of The Asylum product. First-time Asylum director Richard Schenkman is an industry veteran who has made everything from indie comedies (The Pompatus of Love) to sci-fi (The Man From Earth), and his experience pays off. The pace is snappy, the action well-staged, and lead actor Bill Oberst is gruffly engaging as Honest Abe. I’d be surprised if its Hollywood counterpart, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, is as energetically entertaining. I spoke with Mr. Schenkman about his path into moviemaking, his opinion of The Asylum, and his experience shooting Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies.

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This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe, which has motivated me to re-view many of her movies and reread some of the bios about her. Additionally, the anniversary has pushed MM back into the pop-culture spotlight. The television show Smash with its show-within-a-show structure uses Monroe’s life as the basis for the musical play being produced by the central characters. The show’s references to Monroe’s life and career, plus the writers’ understanding of Hollywood history, are impressive in their accuracy and insight. This past week, the enormous statue of Monroe based on the skirt-blowing scene from The Seven Year Itch that has graced downtown Chicago for several months was dismantled and sent on to its next home, Palm Springs. Smash reminds us of MM’s tortured existence as a woman at the mercy of the Hollywood dream factory; the statue incarnates her status as an icon of sexuality; her films reveal her strengths as an actress and charisma as a star.

In revisiting Monroe’s life and career over the past months, some of her films have tumbled down my list of favorites, making way for new ones at the top. Tomorrow afternoon, May 15, TCM will air one of my new favorite MM movies, Niagara. Directed by studio stalwart Henry Hathaway, Niagara does not get the attention of other Monroe films, particularly those by auteurs such as Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, or John Huston. But, I admire Niagara’s taut direction, visual style, and strong performances by Monroe and costar Joseph Cotten.

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This is Part Two of a tribute to that irrepressible force of nature known as Ninian Joseph Yule Jr. (aka Mickey Rooney) and some of the more offbeat, underrated and over-the-top movies he made in the post-MGM years. Part One covered the ‘50s and ‘60s  – http://moviemorlocks.com/2012/04/29/hey-mickey-youre-so-fine-you-blow-my-mind/  – and this post takes us through the ‘70s and beyond.      READ MORE

Hollywood’s fascination with itself has generally meant that movies about movies–or, more precisely, movies that celebrate movies–tend to be overvalued by the film establishment relative to their actual merits. For example, Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels tends to show up on a lot of classic movie lists, it was singled out for the Criterion treatment back before Criterion’s management really cottoned on to the idea that comedies can be classics, and when writers try to summarize why Preston Sturges is important, Sullivan’s Travels is almost always cited as his one or two most significant accomplishments. What Sullivan’s Travels is not, however, is terribly funny–it is one of Sturges’ tamer works. If you want to ask me what Sturges should be most remembered for, I’d have to say Palm Beach Story–a profoundly anarchic comic masterpiece that wholly abdicates any responsibility to make a lick of sense.

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I love film geeks. I love their obsessive affection for cinema, their need to see more, feel more, know more, understand more about their favorite films than anyone else, their gnawing compulsion to watch and rewatch, to freeze frame and grab, to study and mull, and to be transformed by the process, and to channel the transformation process into reimagining movies as other movies, ones that screen to an audience of one in the cinema of the skull. In the spirit of empathy I offer the following backspin on the noxious get rich bromides our culture has burped out in recent years and ground floor entry into the oldest get poor pyramid scheme in the world. The following list is presented not in the spirit of comprehensiveness but merely as a glimpse into (or, if you share any of these dodgy traits, your own reflection in) the funhouse mirror of cinemania.  READ MORE

Alfred Hitchcock’s name seems to be everywhere these days. The British Film Institute is currently celebrating the iconic director’s career with The Genius of Hitchcock, summer-long festival of Hitchcock films being shown in London. There’s a new film about Hitchcock and the making of PSYCHO (1960) in the works starring Anthony Hopkins and many of my fellow film bloggers are preparing to take part in the annual Love of Film Blogathon, which generates funds for film preservation. This year they hope to help restore the newly discovered Hitchcock film, THE WHITE SHADOW (1924). 

I was also recently contacted by one of my favorite film bloggers, Klara Tavakoli Goesche who runs Retro Active Critiques, about a video she was working on that takes viewers on a mini-tour of the San Francisco locations seen in VERTIGO. I enjoyed the video so much that I asked her if I could premiere it here at The Movie Morlocks and thankfully Klara agreed. I also took the opportunity to ask KLara some questions about her interests and video work. I hope you’ll enjoy our exchange as well the premiere of her video, which you can find at the bottom of this post.

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This past weekend on Facebook, I put up a picture of James Dean from Giant.  A brief conversation ensued between myself, Matt Zoller Sietz, fellow Morlock Richard Harland Smith and Pax Romano (sorry, no middle name, pen or otherwise) about actors dying young and the roles they may have had.   Matt said he often thought about an older James Dean competing for roles with Marlon Brando and Paul Newman and I agreed.  Had Dean lived and enjoyed a decades long career in Hollywood, I think he would have been one of the prominent actors of cinema for years to come.  But there are more, many more than just Dean for whom the life on the silver screen was tragically cut short.

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This is Part 2 of 3 in my series on direct-to-video action movies.

In last week’s post, direct-to-video action expert Outlaw Vern modestly proclaimed that, “for the time being I think Stone Cold Steve Austin is the most prolific star with a good track record [in DTV].” In Part 2 of my industry shaking series on DTV fight films, I exhaustively investigate this claim. Steve Austin (born Steve Anderson) was the biggest star in professional wrestling for most of the past 15 years, perfecting the persona of a blue-collar hellraiser with a rabid anti-authoritarian streak. A series of injuries to his neck and back forced him to retire from the ring, and he’s been churning out DTV bare-knuckle brawlers  since 2009, after his one big bid for the theatrical market, The Condemned (2007), failed at the box office. While he hasn’t matched the insanely successful screen career of frequent WWE foe Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Austin is forging a worthy one of his own, albeit on the fringes of the movie business.

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