Bela Lugosi lives… in the funny pages. READ MORE

I can still recall the first time that I saw Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong (1933). I was just a teenager flipping channels one lazy afternoon and suddenly the opening credits appeared on my television. I noticed Colin Clive’s name so I paused. I was familiar with the actor thanks to his role as Doctor Frankenstein in James Whale’s Frankenstein films and I was a big fan. The wonderfully eerie opening theme composed by Roy Webb (Cat People; 1942, I Walked with A Zombie; 1943, The Seventh Victim; 1943, The Spiral Staircase; 1945, The Body Snatcher; 1945, Mighty Joe Young; 1949, etc.) for Christopher Strong was rather ominous and I immediately thought I was going to be seeing another horror film or thriller starring Colin Clive but I soon discovered that I was wrong. Christopher Strong isn’t a horror film. It’s a romantic melodrama with some unexpected action featuring a spectacular star performance from the wonderful Katharine Hepburn. The movie captivated me and surprised me. It also made me a lifelong Hepburn fan.

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The Big Trail (top, 1930) & The Tall Men (btm, 1955)

Raoul Walsh was nothing if not adaptable. As a teenager, he tagged along with his uncle on a trading mission to Cuba and Mexico. The schooner was damaged in a storm and had a long layover in Vera Cruz. It was there, Walsh claimed, that he learned roping from a man he only knew as Ramirez, whom he paid in Cuban rum. He stayed ashore when the ship returned to NYC, and was soon hired as a cowboy to drive cattle into Texas. His accidentally gained expertise landed him a horse riding gig on Broadway (in a version of THE CLANSMAN, later filmed by D.W. Griffith as THE BIRTH OF A NATION, in which Walsh played John Wilkes Booth), and later got him hired at the Pathe Film Studios, who also needed a horseman. Once he was primed to break out as a leading man in IN OLD ARIZONA, a jackrabbit flew through his windshield, and the glass shards gouged out an eye (he was replaced by Warner Baxter). Hence his eyepatch, and his practically-minded move behind the camera.

Dave Kehr commented on on his blog, relating to his NY Times piece on the Errol Flynn Adventures box set that TCM released with Warner Bros., that “for me Walsh belongs with Ford and Hawks as one of the Big Three American directors, but there has been surprisingly little of substance written about him in English or in French.”  I felt I should be as practical as the director and take this as a sign to dig further into Walsh’s work. There was further discussion of how little he’s esteemed in the under-30 crowd, of which I’m a member for the next few months. And it’s undeniably true. I’ve never had a conversation about Walsh with anyone of my own age group.  So until I hit that magic number in February, I’ll be assessing and re-assessing his work, to find my way through Walsh’s massive filmography and hopefully spark further discussion about this major figure in film history.

Kehr’s erudite readers also took up the challenge, especially Blake Lucas, who wrote an essay-long breakdown of Walsh’s career. Spring 2011 promises a flood of material, with an essay on Walsh in Kehr’s eagerly awaited collection When Movies Mattered, and a forthcoming biography, Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director (University Press of Kentucky), by Marilyn Ann Moss. I’m adding my rather undigested thoughts here, and will contribute more in the coming weeks the more I see. I watched The Big Trail  (1930), The Strawberry Blonde (1941), Battle Cry (1955), and The Tall Men (1955) in quick succession with comment below, and my bits on Me and My Gal (1932) and Colorado Territory (1949) are here and here.

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Like his peer John Sayles, director Victor Nunez is a veteran independent filmmaker of three decades. Even before the Hollywood studios closed their doors to auteurs and turned their backs on audiences who appreciate complex dramas and original styles, filmmakers like Nunez and Sayles realized the need for a production model that existed completely outside the Hollywood industry. Nunez helped found the Independent Feature Project (IFP) in 1979, which provides money and means for indie directors, and he serves on the boards of the IFP and the Sundance Film Institute. Nunez also produces and directs films, in addition to teaching filmmaking in his native Florida.

Nunez’s latest film, Spoken Word, recently played at Facets Multi-Media, where I work as a writer, researcher, and jack of all trades. I am a major fan of Nunez’s films, and I was pleased that our intrepid programmer, Charles Coleman, landed a film from a director of his standing, but I was also a bit surprised. Given Nunez’s reputation and track record, I pondered why the film was not playing at a larger venue. But, I didn’t have to think too long before I realized that it has to do with the same issues that have plagued the film industry over the past few years: Hollywood studios have sacrificed good storytelling and creativity to waste money and effort courting teen audiences with noisy, badly made blockbusters and dull animated features, and it’s at the expense of older, mature audiences. This leaves independent filmmakers to pick up the slack by offering well-acted dramas starring actors with experience and credibility. But, the indie market is flooded with good films that most distributors market badly, making exhibitors leery of taking chances on them. Currently, directors like Victor Nunez find it difficult to get their films distributed and exhibited.

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I spent two weeks working round-the-clock to put together my fall film calendar and to meet my printer’s deadline last Friday. I celebrated with top-shelf beers and a 16mm screening in my backyard of The Night of the Hunter (1955). It was the great actor Charles Laughton’s only directorial excursion, using a script by Pulitzer Prize winning author James Agee, and is supposedly Robert Mitchum’s favorite role. As is my custom, I grabbed a few books for choice excerpts to read by way of introduction but, at the last-minute, I was moved by the spirits to toss the books aside and share a personal recollection instead. In retrospect, it was an anecdote that ran parallel to the highly memorable speech Robert Mitchum gives as Rev. Harry Powell when he talks about his tattooed fingers which spell out H-A-T-E and L-O-V-E.  READ MORE

This week I’m here to praise BFI Flipside, a classy underdog in the world of DVD distribution, who launched this label in 2009 with the following explanation on all of their box art: “The Flipside: rescuing weird and wonderful British films from obscurity and presenting them in new high-quality editions.” Earlier releases have included Richard Lester’s apocalyptic farce, The Bed-Sitting Room (1969), and Don Levy’s Herostratus (1967), an avant-garde curio with a surprising cameo by a young, undressed Helen Mirren, who has never been one to complain about nude scenes. My favorite release yet though is THE PARTY’S OVER, a stylish and edgy study of some bohemian Londoners during the swinging sixties with a scene-stealing performance by Oliver Reed and enough disturbing elements to make the censors froth at the mouth. In fact, their negative reactions, prevented the film, which was filmed in 1962, from receiving a theatrical release until 1965. During the interim, the film was subjected to numerous rounds of cuts and revisions before finally being slapped with a ‘X’ certificate – a rating that spelled boxoffice poison for exhibitors.       READ MORE

Returning to our ongoing discussion of raising children in a world at least partially devoted to fear and loathing is Jeff Allard, Dennis Cozzalio, Greg Ferrara, Paul Gaita and Nicholas McCarthy. READ MORE

This is the second half of David Konow’s interview with the late Tom Mankiewicz. The first part was posted earlier today.

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It was the early ’70s and Cubby Broccoli was preparing Diamonds Are Forever. He told David Picker, then the head of United Artists, “I’m lookin’ for a writer who’s young. I think we gotta stay hip. He has to be American because 75% of the picture takes place in Vegas, but he has to be able to write the British idiom because I don’t want to hire another writer to do that.” As luck would have it, Picker saw “Georgy” before it was shut down and remembered that Joe Mankiewicz’s kid wrote it. The play was all in Brit speak, but he knew the young Mank was American.

“I went up to Cubby Broccoli’s house, I met with him and the director, Guy Hamilton, and they signed me for $12,500 a week on a two-week guarantee,” Mankiewicz recalled. “They said, ‘Let’s see what you can do with the first thirty pages.’ I went home and thought, ‘Damn it, this is the kind of film when I’m sitting in the audience I’m going: I can do this better.’ I thought if I didn’t work out I was going to get really depressed. I wrote the first thirty pages and they said, ‘This is terrific, keep going.’ Suddenly I was writing a major motion picture.”

Mankiewicz continued to work on the Bond series throughout the ’70’s, writing Live and Let Die, co-writing The Man With the Golden Gun, doing an uncredited rewrite on The Spy Who Loved Me, and writing the story for Moonraker. Now Mankiewicz was the next established and wildly successful writer in the Mankiewicz clan.

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On July 31, 2010 screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz passed away at his home in Los Angeles due to complications from cancer. The Mankiewicz family is the stuff of Hollywood legend and consists of Tom Mankiewicz’s father, the Academy Award winning director and writer Joseph L. Mankiewicz, as well as celebrated screenwriters Herman J. Mankiewicz and Don Mankiewicz; and Turner Classic Movie’s very own Ben Mankiewicz. Before Tom Mankiewicz died he spent some time talking to writer David Konow (SCHLOCK-O-RAMA: The Films of Al Adamson, Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal, etc.) about his family and what it was like trying to find work as a writer in Hollywood when the shadow of your ancestors is weighing heavily on your shoulders. Below is the first half of David Konow’s insightful piece on Tom Mankiewicz. I’m sharing it here in an effort to shine a light on Mankiewicz and honor his memory. The second half will be posted later today.

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