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Roger Moore Shows His Dark Side: The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)
To view The Man Who Haunted Himself click here. A couple of weeks back I took a look at a neglected but stunning early entry in the career of Basil Dearden, Frieda(1947), and now it’s time to go all...
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Question Authority: The Ruling Class (1972)
To view The Ruling Class click here. If you want a lesson in how awards are inadequate indicators of talent look no further than the case of the late, great Peter O’Toole. Before his death in 2013,...
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History and the Movies: Michael Collins (1996)
To view Michael Collins click here. “If the price of freedom, if the price of peace, is the blackening of my name, I will gladly pay it.” Those are the words of Michael Collins as spoken by Liam...
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Explosive Terror in The Wages Of Fear (1953)
To view The Wages of Fear click here. In The Wages of Fear (1953), based on Georges Arnaud’s novel The Salary of Fear, director Henri-George Clouzot takes an incredibly simple premise and somehow...
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Murderous Morality Play: 21 Days (1940)
To view 21 Days click here. What would you do if you killed a man, quite by accident, and then had the great fortune of someone else being arrested for it? On top of that, the person arrested for it...
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A Forgotten Film to Remember: Green for Danger (1947)
To view Green for Danger click here. One of the advantages of streaming is having an entire catalogue of films at your fingertips to explore titles that would otherwise go unnoticed. This summer I...
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The World’s a Stage: The Golden Coach (1953)
To view The Golden Coach click here. The Golden Coach (1953) begins with a red curtain raising on a stage, the camera pushing in until the edges of the theater disappear and the story proper begins....
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Went the Day Well? (1942): A Special Kind of War Film
To view Went the Day Well? click here. It always warms my heart to see how many Ealing Studios films we have stacked around here at FilmStruck. Rivaled perhaps only by Hammer Film Productions, it’s...
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Moorland Suspense: A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929)
To view A Cottage on Dartmoor click here. “The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one’s soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its...
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The Politics of Singing: Une Chambre en Ville (1982)
To view Une Chambre en Ville click here. Jacques Demy’s reputation has long suffered from an inferiority complex among the French New Wave filmmakers. Fans and critics find movies like The 400 Blows...
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Filling in for History: Gary Cooper and The Pride of the Yankees (’42)
To view The Pride of the Yankees click here. Lou, what else can I say, except that it was a sad day in the life of everybody who knew you when you came into my hotel room that day in Detroit and told...
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Eraserhead (1977)
To view Eraserhead click here. What do John Waters, Stanley Kubrick, H.R. Giger, and The Pixies all have in common? For starters, they all share a very high regard for a feature film whose script was...
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Double Noir: Laura (1944) and Fallen Angel (1945)
To view Laura click here. To view Fallen Angel click here. In retrospect, Otto Preminger has never been included in the pantheon of iconic Golden Age directors—Ford, Hitchcock, Welles, Hawks, Wilder,...
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New Weird America: Something Wild (1986)
To view Something Wild click here. Something Wild (1986) is a road movie with a penchant for detours, keeping its eyes on the side roads and rest stops instead of the highway in front of it. A...
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Bathe Your Eyes in Forever Amber (1947)
To view Forever Amber click here. Now here’s a film with three of my favorite things from 1940s movies: Linda Darnell, Otto Preminger and blazing Technicolor. Seen today it’s hard to believe Forever...
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Die Laughing: Carry On Screaming! (1966)
To view Carry On Screaming! click here. “The usual charge to make against the Carry On films is to say that they could be much better done. This is true enough. They look dreadful, they seem to be...
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History and the Movies: The Last Emperor (1987)
To view The Last Emperor click here. In 1987, Bernardo Bertolucci directed The Last Emperor, a movie about the life of Puyi, sometimes spelled as Pu Yi, who was the last emperor of China before it...
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More Than a Two-Word Review: This is Spinal Tap (’84)
To view This is Spinal Tap click here. I can’t quite remember exactly when I first saw This is Spinal Tap (1984), but I do know it was sometime in the late 80’s. It was in fairly heavy rotation on...
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Random Thoughts on The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933)
To view The Testament of Dr. Mabuse click here. Watching The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) again recently, I was struck by many things. So many, in fact, that coming up with just one angle from which...
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Otto’s Life in the Sausage Factory
To view FilmStruck’s “Early Otto” theme, click here. The Golden Age of Hollywood seems so all-American, so homogeneous in its style and so uniform in its production practices. Yet, many of its...
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