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Experiment in Terror, Exercise in Style
Following the gargantuan success of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Blake Edwards acquired the freedom to develop his own projects. Typecast as a director of light comedies, he was eager to explore the...
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The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse
2013 marks the 75th anniversary of Anatole Litvak’s The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, starring Edward G. Robinson, Claire Trevor and Humphrey Bogart. Since no one else will celebrate it, I will. Why?...
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Telefilm Time Machine: Daughter of the Mind (1969)
Ray Milland and Gene Tierney in DAUGHTER OF THE MIND (1969) Ray Milland sees dead people. Or to be more precise, Ray Milland begins seeing the ghost of his dead daughter in the made-for-TV movie...
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So, you want me to watch a new movie, eh?
I saw a headline the other day that read “2013 Oscar Contenders!” Not even three months into the year and already that madness is starting. I failed to see any of this year’s Academy Award nominees or...
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Who’s sorry now
The Marx Brothers’ A Night in Casablanca (airs on TCM this Tuesday night) is nobody’s idea of a masterpiece. But as longtime readers of mine know, I don’t believe that movies have to be masterpieces...
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Double Trouble: TABU ’31/’12
F.W. Murnau was a German director with some 20 titles to to his credit who moved to the U.S. in 1926 and is known to most cinephiles for Nosferatu (1922), The Last Laugh (1924), Faust (1926), Sunrise...
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Ahoy, Har Be Some Thoughts About Ye Pirates, Shiver Me Timbers!
The more I learn, the more I realize that what you know is connected in ways that are surprising and stimulating to think about. This thought occurred to me recently when I learned something new about...
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Flop of 1933: Laughter in Hell
For the past month, Film Forum in New York City has been screening a dazzling variety of Hollywood movies from eighty years ago. 1933 was the final flowering of the anything goes pre-code period,...
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Are We the Archivists of Film History?
I watched the documentary Side by Side over the weekend and enjoyed it very much (it was mentioned here at the Morlocks about three months ago when Morlock Keelsetter did a post, The Year in...
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Clarence Sinclair Bull & His Magic Camera
Ava Gardner with photographer Clarence Sinclair Bull (1945) Photographer Clarence Sinclair Bull is probably best remembered today as “The Man Who Shot Garbo.” And while it’s true that his publicity...
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Weasels Ripped My Flesh! reviewed!
Don’t get me wrong — cinemania will always be my favorite mania… but I do understand and appreciate other kinds of madness and passion. The compulsion to collect vinyl, for example (records, I mean,...
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Remaking the Marx Brothers
Last week I talked about a low-grade Marx Brothers outing, A Night in Casablanca, and collectively we found more than a little love for the thing. This week I approach a quite impressive Marx Brothers...
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Sci-Fi Fun, Sci-Fi Disturbing
Like most genres of film, Science Fiction has many sub-genres within a one all-inclusive umbrella but there’s the odd, subtextual mix of the fun and the disturbing in almost all of it. No matter how...
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Stuntmen Revisited: The Derring-Do of Daring Doubles
Recently, I wrote about legendary stuntman Hal Needham on the occasion of his life-achievement Oscar. In researching Needham’s career, I began to fully appreciate the stunt profession and its unique...
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The Horror Blus: TerrorVision and The Monster Squad
27 years after its theatrical release, TerrorVision (1986) was released on DVD and Blu-Ray for the first time by Shout! Factory last month. An outrageously garish horror-satire of 1980s consumer...
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Watching Them Become Stars
I never saw the transformation Judy Garland, Roddy McDowall or Elizabeth Taylor made from child actor to adult star. Or Mickey Rooney. Or Dean Stockwell. Or any child actor who successfully moved...
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Tracing My Irish Roots Through the Movies
John Wayne & Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man (1942) When I was a child my family regularly celebrated Saint Patrick’s Day on March 17th. My parents and grandparents encouraged me to wear green and...
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Toast and coffee
There’s a moment from Arnold Laven’s THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD (1957) that has stayed with me since I first saw it some 35-40 years ago, in revival at my local drive-in, showcased with the...
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Which dreamed it?
Alice was a real person. Her name was Alice Lidell, and the Alice in Wonderland stories are littered with genuine biographical details. Lewis Carroll, however, was not a real person—that was just a...
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Budget-minded misadventures: 2013 SXSW FILM FEST
My attempt to do the SXSW film festival last year on a small budget was a remarkable fiasco. The round-trip drive had me spending 40 hours on the road, aided in part by a GPS device that would set...
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