Years of intense critical re-evaluation, from Marxist theorists, feminist theorists, queer theorists, and structuralists, have brought the career of German emigrant Douglas Sirk to a level of respectability and significance that he was not generally accorded in the 1950s, when he was regarded as one of several nobodies churning out “women’s pictures”, and producing what […]
The second major technological revolution in cinema history, the arrival of color, was neither as abrupt nor as immediately ubiquitous as the rise of talkies: there was a certain mistrust of the artistic validity of the technology that lingered for years after Technicolor introduced Process No. IV, its legendary three-strip color system that permitted for […]
In the history of the Oscars, there are few cases weirder and more impressive than Katharine Hepburn. Not only does she hold a record, unlikely to be matched and surely never to be beaten, of four competitive acting Oscars, all in the Lead category, but her first award came for her third movie role, in […]
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 […]
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 […]
The title card of Flesh and the Devil trumpets itself as a vehicle for John Gilbert, king of the romantic leading men at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (and even just a couple of years into its formal existence, the lavish MGM was not going to cut corners on its romantic leads), leaving the pair of recent Swedish imports […]
Mary Pickford, in the 1910s and ’20s, was famous on a level which it’s truly difficult to contextualise in the modern era. It’s lazy and smacks of nostalgia to talk about how they don’t make movie stars like they used, but in a ruthlessly pragmatic sense, it’s also completely accurate: the kind of culture of […]
Straight Shooting offers up a twofer for the the historically-inclined fan of director John Ford. Made in 1917, the year that the 23-year-old (years away from swapping out the name “Jack”) began making movies with The Tornado, it is the first feature-length project of his career, after five shorts. And with all of those presently […]
It is generally agreed that D.W. Griffith’s 1916 epic Intolerance: A Sun Play of the Ages (also subtitled Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages, if that’s the way you roll) was made because of the reaction to his The Birth of a Nation from the year prior, though the exact reason behind that because is a […]
There are old movies – really old movies, I mean, movies from the first 15 or 20 years of cinema, when the visual language and narrative structures were so different from any of the norms we’ve grown accustomed to in the intervening decades that it’s virtually a different art form altogether – so self-assured and […]
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 […]
