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 modern American trend of remaking successful foreign language films on the grounds that “nobody likes subtitles” is insulting, but unlike so many moviegoing insults, is not a terribly new development; it is indeed as old as sound cinema itself. And frankly, the current guise of that trend – a blink-and-miss-it limited release followed after […]
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 […]
The Wizard of Oz is a film that everybody has watched, nearly everybody has loved, and perhaps as a direct consequence, it’s a film that nobody, I think has really seen. Certainly I hadn’t; it’s surely one of the five movies I’ve watched the most times,* but I’d never given all that much thought to […]
In a monstrously prolific career spanning over a hundred films across five decades, John Ford produced greater films than Young Mr. Lincoln, but perhaps not a single one that was more perfect or more Fordian: none of the others saw the same combination of the director’s fervent love of his country, his cynical humanist view […]
The story of an inspirational teacher who causes his (or very seldom, her) charges to understand something new and empowering about the world, is as hoary as any old chestnut out there, and probably for a simple reason: most people who write movies went to school at some point and very likely had a teacher […]
In 1934, the spectacularly gifted Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang became one of a great many European filmmakers to emigrate to the United States, hoping to avoid a, shall we say, politically sensitive climate growing in Germany at the time. A Catholic with Jewish heritage from his mother’s side of the family, Lang wasn’t necessarily all […]
The shamelessly tragic Bette Davis vehicle Dark Victory is a perfect example of everything that the Hollywood system at its height could achieve when everybody involved was working at the top of their game. The result may be naught but a torrid melodrama, but oh! what a humdinger of a melodrama it is! It’s films […]
The Antagony & Ecstasy John Ford Marathon continues as promised with a foray into a pair of the director’s stranger exercises. In this case, the pairing of one of Hollywood’s hottest directors, who had in March of 1936 won his first Best Director Oscar for The Informer, with the biggest star at 20th Century Fox. […]
The popular conception of Frank Capra as a director of mindless sentimentalities doesn’t hold up very well. Yes, it’s wholly impossible to regard such films as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or Mr. Deeds Goes to Town as anything but simply fables about purity overcoming corruption, but it’s not as easy at it appears to […]
Journey with me to 1935, when sound cinema had not yet ended its first decade of life, and Hollywood was still a home to experimentation and radicalism. When a 41-year-old man, famed for directing Westerns, produced one of the most unique and artistic films in the history of American moviemaking, a film that would be […]
Not nearly enough careers in the cinema end well. I suppose I’ve always known this, but it was really brought home when Robert Altman died last November: what a perfect final film he had, and how vanishingly small the number of directors, actors and writers who can say the same! Of course, 1939’s The Story […]
