Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. Last week: Top Gun: Maverick presents a story about the fraught business of telling young aviators they have to go on […]
Is 1929’s The Broadway Melody, as its reputation has it, the very worst film to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture? Does it actually matter? The film is a great big piece of poo, and whether or not it is slightly smellier or wetter than other pieces of poo, it will empty out […]
The learning curve for early sound cinema was steep and fast. In the immediate wake of the enormously popular sync-sound scenes from 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the American film indsutry jumped with great enthusiasm and no planning into making some of the most awkward, unwatchable films of its entire history across the course of 1928, […]
A review requested by Not Fenimore, 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! So here we are, face-to-face with the all-time worst winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. […]
The very fine backstage melodrama What Price Hollywood? was released in 1932, and for all but the first five years of its life, it has been best known as being the unofficial-but-very-obvious basis for a different movie and its subsequent remakes. This is a goddamned shame, though it’s not terribly difficult to see what happened. […]
I could pretend I had this reason or that reason to bring 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum to your attention this day, such as the unique value that comparing it and its remake and its un-remake have in showcasing the changing preoccupations of the film cultures that produced them; or its particularly salty attitudes […]
Edgar Allan Poe’s seminal 1841 detective story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is a locked room mystery in which hobbyist detective C. August Dupin realises that an enraged orangutan jumped into an open window and, in a frenzy, slaughtered the women it found there. The first sound feature to adapt a Poe work, 1932’s […]
“If you want to send a message, use Western Union”, said somebody, famously – Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and Frank Capra are the most common sources, so it’s probably none of them – but that’s advice that was already long-abandoned before it was ever spoken. The fact is, filmmakers, particularly Hollywood filmmakers well aware […]
The five films made by the four Marx brothers at Paramount between 1929 and 1933 are the stuff of legend, and the basis for what is likely the most famous career of any comic team in history (and this despite the first of those films, The Cocoanuts, sagging under the weight of an insipid romantic […]
The most expensive movie ever made as of 1930 was an independent production. That’s a weird thing on the face of it, except that in 1930, there was a fellow named Howard Hughes running loose in the world, and for all the wonderful advances made in the post-WWII world, we don’t have madcap billionaires to […]
The popular idea of what early sound cinema is like – as pinned down and immortalised by Singin’ in the Rain, which I suspect is where most of us picked up the notion – is broadly correct. Static wide shots that show the entire cast peculiarly clustered around a conspicuous vase, into which they inexplicably […]
1927 is perhaps the single most important year to date in the development of the film medium. It is the year when first the Hollywood continuity system and subsequently the cinema of the entire world was at a turning point between two paths, that of pure image, or that of image combined with sound. The […]
