With a complete lack of both sentimentality and judgment, this touching, deeply moving drama pursues the hard-edged truths about the physical and emotional dispersion of the modern American family and the way in which differentContinue reading
Category: Classical Hollywood Cinema
The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943)
The first of five collaborations between producer Val Lewton and editor-turned-director Mark Robson, this atmospheric horror-noir is probably too low key and talky for many viewers to appreciate, especially once its coven of Greenwich VillageContinue reading
I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
The second of the three low-budget, but extremely clever and literate horror films directed by Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton for RKO, this one certainly has the most sensationalistic title, but quickly proves toContinue reading
Man Hunt (Fritz Lang, 1941)
The first of Lang’s anti-Nazi wartime films, this taut thriller flaunted Hollywood’s then neutrality regarding the Third Reich and also allowed Lang to get back to both his German expressionist roots and the spy genre,Continue reading
The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953)
Had it not been the first film shot in CinemaScope, very few people would be talking much about this film, except for possibly its role as one of the first of the biblically themed sword-and-sandalContinue reading
Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954)
In remaking John M. Stahl’s take on Lloyd C. Douglas’s 1929 novel, Sirk brazenly rejects the earlier version’s restraint in favor of a florid, Technicolor approach that better matches the story’s inherent narrative lunacy andContinue reading
Magnificent Obsession (John M. Stahl, 1935)
Stahl’s adaptation of Lloyd C. Douglas’s New Age-y sermon-cum-three-hankie romantic novel is a bit stiff, which is a liability because the story is so ludicrous that it virtually demands a corresponding sense of aesthetic flamboyance.Continue reading
The Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis, 1963)
Lewis’s most well-known film is also one of his most intriguing (and downright weird), with its Jekyll-and-Hyde story of a goofy, constantly put-upon college chemistry prof creating a chemical cocktail that turns him into anContinue reading
Gabriel Over the White House (Gregory La Cava, 1933)
Surely one of the weirdest and most fascinating major-studio productions of the 1930s, this political fantasy suggests a newly elected president who, inspired/possessed by the archangel Gabriel (I think), has a post-coma change of heartContinue reading
The Furies (Anthony Mann, 1950)
The Electra complex goes West! Part western and part domestic melodrama, The Furies is a Freudian-addled portrait of a power struggle between an entrenched and foolish ranch baron and his devoted but cunning daughter (theContinue reading