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 […]
Every Sunday 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. This week: eight years after making pirates the toast of pop-culture once more, Johnny Depp and friends are back to try […]
After White Zombie made a splash in 1932, introducing the very idea of “zombies” to American filmgoers, it would seem like the next logical step would be for a small explosion in zombie pictures. This was the ’30s, after all, when Hollywood was in arguably the most knock-off friendly period in its history. And yet, […]
Every Sunday 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. This week: not the first nor the last movie to beat Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood to the punch, but almost certainly […]
And who among us doesn’t love squirrelly old romantic melodramas altogether? he asked tentatively, well knowing that in fact many people do not love them, that many people find this kind of overdetermined, overworked combination of unlikely stories and garish emotional displays to be exactly the proof that old movies from 70 years ago are […]
“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 […]
Frank Capra is a hard director for me to get a bead on. Once upon a time, he was one of the most successful working filmmakers in Hollywood, only to have his reputation start to tarnish in later years as he was increasingly regarded as an auteur of banal, feel-good corniness. Then, sometime around 15 […]
The great mogul David O. Selznick had one of the finest-tuned senses for what people liked to watch of just about any producer in Hollywood in the 1930s, and in 1939 he decided that what the audience wanted were torrid melodramas about impossible love. The most famous of the three films he produced that year […]
There’s a long way to go over the next 45 days and 72 years of movie history; and I hope you’ll forgive me if I start it off with a bit of scene-setting before the review itself, even though the story I’m about to tell is extremely well-known. Walter Elias Disney had a perfectly American […]
One of the immediate effects of the takeover of Universal in 1936 was that the horror films which had become such an important part of the studio’s brand name were very abruptly cut off (no doubt, the cost and middling performance of Dracula’s Daughter aided in this decision somewhat). This bold executive decision lasted for […]
It was, of course, a fait accompli that the great success of Bride of Frankenstein, Universal’s first horror sequel, was going to quickly lead to a follow-up to Dracula. It is perhaps nothing more than a lazy quirk of history that this film would even follow the same route of adding female relative to the […]
The massive success of 1931’s twin gods, Dracula and Frankenstein, left no doubt that Universal Pictures was Hollywood’s home for terror and the paranormal, and the studio flung itself into the burgeoning new genre with glee, whatever lingering moral qualms Carl Laemmle, Sr. might still have nursed. The next two years bore witness to the […]
