A review requested by Benjamin Ross Johnson, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! The foremost skill of the great writer-director Billy Wilder, I think, is his ability to take […]
A review requested by Benjamin, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! Double Indemnity is the noir of noirs. To be sure, there are more typical examples of the strengths […]
A review requested by Rich B, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Who knows how these things happen? To an average viewer, Billy Wilder is one of the most well-known directors in pre-1967 American cinema, and James Cagney is one of the most recognisable (or at least memorably-parodied) […]
The Hollywood Century project has been primarily concerned with charting the history of the major Hollywood studios, but it has also been an attempt to track the evolution of American filmmaking over a one-hundred year period, and as we make our way through the ’50s, we have come across one of the truly seismic events […]
It is frequently proposed that Some Like It Hot is the best movie comedy ever made, and those looking for an iconoclastic opinion on this front will, I am afraid, need to look elsewhere. For it is the best movie comedy of all time, says I, and only partially because it is the funniest. Which […]
“This picture takes place in Paris in those wonderful days when a siren was a brunette and not an alarm — and if a Frenchman turned out the light it was not on account of an air raid!” If I have found one clear through-line connecting most of the films I’ve studied from the great […]
The natural human inclination is to assume that anything which is rare must also be of high quality, and this has led many of the few people who have been able to see Billy Wilder’s long-lost Ace in the Hole from 1951 (released for the first time on any home video format last week) to […]
