John Ford – renowned cinema icon, director’s director, master American mythologist, and prime destroyer of those selfsame myths. The man who created and cemented the image of John Wayne as all-around conservative hero, and who then spent most of their best-loved and best-known collaborations tweaking and twitting that image. A sentimentalist with a pronounced dislike […]
I like to imagine that Jacques Demy first thought up The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a direct response to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961 A Woman Is a Woman. That film, a splashy Technicolor Cinemascope musical, was also every inch a Godard film: amiably cynical, eager to tear itself apart and reveal all of the ways that […]
That Pinocchio was a significant commercial failure is something I can sort of get my head around, but it ultimately seems pretty hard to believe that something so beautiful and heartfelt could be so soundly ignored. I have no such difficulty believe the same thing of the other Disney feature released in 1940, of unquestionably […]
It seems like just about every prominent fairy tale was at least briefly considered to be the follow-up to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, even before it was clear that the Disney Studios would survive that film’s anticipated box office failure. Of course, when Snow White instead proved to be one of the great […]
We have in front of us one of the most passionate films I think I’ve ever seen, the movie that the great B-picture master Sam Fuller always regarded as his favorite out of a long career heavy with some of the best American movies that most people have never heard of. The film in question […]
Last week, I said of An Angel at My Table, it was “a brilliant work by a woman who was by now in full command of her powers.” Ha ha! How very young and naïve I was last week! I mean, I still think An Angel at My Table is a pretty moving, powerful motion […]
A recurring theme in our year-long review of the cinema culture of 1939 has been the awareness of filmmakers in those days of the coming war, almost like people in that year could predict the coming change in the whole structure of the western world that would result. In the English-language movies we’ve looked at […]
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is the very long title of a very long movie made in 1975 by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. The length is fully earned in both cases; this is one of the truly magnificent films that I have seen. Like all great films, there are as many ways […]
The first image we see of John Wayne, né Marion Morrison, in Stagecoach is inarguably one of the most iconic character introductions in all of cinema. You’ve probably seen it, even you haven’t seen the movie itself (and shame on you, if that’s so): some time after the titular vehicle rattles out of an unnamed […]
In 1973, the remarkably anti-prolific director released his first feature-length project, The Spirit of the Beehive, a film which was quickly hailed as being the single greatest work of cinema in Spanish history and is still frequently cited as such to this very day. Rubbish and hyperbole, I respond. Plainly, it is only the second-best […]
Sometimes, you have to wonder if the censors in the Soviet Union just plain hated art. It seems, doesn’t it, that just about every great filmmaker to come out of that country had at least one of their films stomped on by the House That Stalin Built, whether that film could be properly called “counter-revolutionary” […]
Part of the Movies About Movies blog-a-thon hosted at Goatdog The great silent comedian Buster Keaton isn’t typically thought of as a cultural commentator; I think most people would sooner point to Charles Chaplin, whose iconic Little Tramp stood in for all men and women trampled by those with money, power and influence. Certainly, Chaplin’s […]
