We have in front of us one of the most passionate films I think I’ve ever seen, the movie that the great B-picture master Sam Fuller always regarded as his favorite out of a long career heavy with some of the best American movies that most people have never heard of. The film in question […]
For a grimy crime B-film released in 1948 to no more fanfare than any other film noir programmer, He Walked by Night has quite a remarkable family tree. Without this film and its docudrama-style boot- on-the ground approach to storytelling, which so impressed co-star Jack Webb, there would of a certainty be no Dragnet, and […]
On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, in Tombstone, AZ, Marshal Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and their friend John “Doc” Holliday engaged in a gunfight at the O.K. Corral with Ike and Billy Clanton, Frank and Tom McLaury, and Billy Claiborne, an event that quickly became one of the most legendary true […]
Confronted with a film that seems to come out of nowhere, and do things that no other film in my experience has done in quite the same way, my brain struggles mightily to come up with some comfortably familiar framework to fit that film, and here’s what I’ve come up with for Johnny Guitar: it’s […]
After the Second World War, John Ford’s relationship with 20th Century Fox was at its low ebb; the director had never been more than tersely professional with studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck, and the latter man’s interference with Ford’s 1946 My Darling Clementine led to an insoluble break between the two. Ford would only shoot […]
In 1962, John Ford, the greatest and most important director of Westerns to ever live, closed the book on his favored genre with a single, incredibly famous line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That line was spoken by a newspaper […]
As usual, Martin Scorsese put it best: “It’s been said that if you don’t like The Rolling Stones, then you don’t like rock ‘n’ roll. By the same token, I think that if you don’t like the films of Sam Fuller, then you just don’t like cinema.” Bold words, but merely accurate. And quietly suggestive, […]
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 […]
From the files of: “Hey, I’ve owned that DVD for more than a year, I should really think about watching it!” And now, the Golden Delicious apple. Come back with me to the late 1940s. World War II is over and America celebrates by inventing Suburbia, as both place and attitude. The ideal of this […]
The first thing to do is ignore the advertising that makes Hollywoodland look like the latest in a long string of Los Angeles period mysteries. To be sure, it is a period piece, and a great one at that; and one of its two protagonists is a classically cynical gumshoe who’s only interested in the […]
In 1949, a full ten years after their ninth and last film for RKO Radio Pictures, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers reunited under the aegis of MGM for their swan song, The Barkleys of Broadway. In some ways, this is really a perfect final film for the pair. It opens where most of their vehicles […]
