You know Tay Garnett? You probably haven’t heard of Tay Garnett. The fact of the matter is, Tay Garnett really isn’t a terribly important film director, though there are those among us who perk up at checking out what promises to be yet another ’30s or ’40s programmer, and unexpectedly find his name attached. I […]
It’s hard to tell which seems quainter: that there was once a time when the very idea of a mad scientist creating human-animal hybrids was so offensive to common standards of decency that it could get a film more or less banned, or that there was more recently a time when the title The Island […]
It has for some time been my custom to celebrate Easter by diving into a zombie movie or four; the problem is that there are precious few important zombie franchises and I’ve already reviewed most of them; also that once you get past the tip-top of the A-list of the subgenre, a disquieting and dispiriting […]
When Dracula became a huge hit for Universal in the winter of 1931, this much at least was clear: Universal would be spending a lot more time making horror movies. Not that they hadn’t dabbled in the genre before, of course – some of the most important American horror pictures of the 1920s came out […]
The 1931 adaptation of Dracula is a classic if ever a film has deserved that name: an incalculably important film, just about every single horror picture made in the last 78 years – and certainly, every vampire picture – owes it some debt, if only a small one. Its influence has extended far beyond even […]
Complaining “this film suffers from too much ambition” isn’t something you get to do very often, but it’s still a fairly easy and facile criticism. But occasionally, it just fits perfectly, and if ever I’ve seen a film that seems, objectively, to be the poster child for movies that are being pressed to do too […]
Isn’t it romantic, Music in the night, a dream that can be heard? The first “talkie” – the first sync sound motion picture with spoken dialogue – was also the first musical, Warner’s The Jazz Singer from 1927. And in the first years that followed the release of that landmark, the history of sound cinema […]
Sometimes a movie just comes right along and punches a hole in your gut, and for me, Vampyr was just such a movie. Like any halfway decent connoisseur of paranormal horror and inordinately artsy European films, I’ve known about Carl Theodor Dreyer’s first sound film for ages, but somehow I’d managed to go without seeing […]
We turn today to one of the great forgotten filmmakers of France: Raymond Bernard, who along with Rene Clair was primarily responsible for bringing sound to the national cinema, and along with Clair was almost completely forgotten once the Cahiers du Cinéma/Nouvelle vague kids came along to disparage anything in their country’s cinematic history that […]
