Search Results

• Home

  Film Noir  and Poetic Realism  are well represented currently, as is Golden era Hollywood, Classic Brit cinema, Nouvelle Vague  and American Renaissance . More Neo-Realism,  Japanese, Swedish and modern French to come! Also you'll find many films relating to the notorious Hollywood Blacklist, for interesting and salutary reading.SPOILER ALERT! - Consider also the essays are very detailed and contain plot information necessary for a full analysis, so keep that in mind! DIRECTORS SUITE w...

  Read more about "Home"...
• Bryan Forbes

   “Everything should be subordinate to the performance, that’s why I’m not highly regarded in the more esoteric cinema magazines.”~ Bryan ForbesBryan Forbes had somewhat fallen between the cracks of critical regard in the aftermath of the much-vaunted British New Wave of the 1960’s. In some ways, he was the Brit equivalent of Louis Malle in France, at once seen as part of a contemporary movement but also separate too. This may have been because he was a middle-class lad who had grafted...

  Read more about "Class middle-class act"...
• The Southerner

  Jean Renoir, probably the greatest film director who has ever lived, was thrilled to be able to make movies in America, the land of his cinematic dreams, the home of Griffith, DeMille, Chaplin the giants of silent cinema who inspired him to want to join their ranks. Thanks to the Nazi’s Renoir joined the exodus of Europe’s intellectual elite and found himself washed up on the shore of the Hollywood Dream Factory in the middle of 1940. The pity of it all was that America had no idea what to d...

  Read more about "Jean Goes to Hollywood"...
• My Darling Clementine

  One of John Ford’s most lyrical and iconic westerns and one of Henry Fonda’s finest roles makes this a must see slice of Americana. Curiously for a guy who ended up re-inventing a whole genre this is Ford’s first western after ‘Stagecoach’ (1939). For the next 20 years of his productivity westerns would make up roughly half of his output and cement his name as the pre-eminent director in the field. Again, for someone who was deeply involved in sourcing material post-war it was not Ford...

  Read more about "Ford prints the legend"...
• Alien

  After the artistic success of his debut feature ‘The Duellists’ Ridley Scott was unexpectedly asked to turn his gaze to the heavens and beyond with ‘Alien’. Star Wars opened the way for space films to do well commercially and with a keen eye for a buck Scott embraced the chance to do a ‘ten little Indians’ kind of haunted-house-in-space film that had B movie written all over it. How he elevated the material to absolute first class art and entertainment resulting in a success d’esti...

  Read more about "The difficult second film"...
• Stagecoach

  60 years before reality TV shows were throwing disparate types together and filming the resulting conflicts and interaction, Dudley Nichols and John Ford conducted their own social experiment, on wheels and at speed to boot. Coming in the middle of a Ford golden patch, it redefined an entire genre almost overnight, in a way few films (except maybe Kubrick's 2001) get to do. The film is a masterpiece of self containment, it could almost have been a stage-play, at one level internal and claustroph...

  Read more about "Wayne's West-world"...
• La Règle du Jeu

  Rules Of The Game’ was the French film that for me unlocked the door to the philosophical way the French see things. After being force fed the artificiality of Carne’s ‘Les Enfants Du Paradis’, and being underwhelmed with ‘Breathless’, both of which I was too young to appreciate (but eventually did), it was easy to succumb to the humanist charm of a Renoir fable. The fatalistic element of pre-war French cinema which came to be the dominant tone of ‘Poetic Realism’ reaches it’s...

  Read more about "Everyone has their reasons?"...
• Films
  Read more about "Films"...
• The Third Man

  "I shot most of the film with a wide-angle lens that distorted the buildings and emphasised the wet cobblestone streets. But the angle of vision was to suggest that something crooked was going on." ~ Carol Reed on The Third ManCarol Reed followed the remarkable The Fallen idol by Graeme Greene in 1948 by collaborating with the writer again on this drama set in post-war Vienna, a city divided up by the 4 occupying powers. The central figure of this film is part man, but mostly myth, the idea of H...

  Read more about ""This means nothing to me"..."...
• Casablanca

  "I made so many films which were more important, but the only one people ever want to talk about is that one with Bogart."~ Ingrid BergmanOf all the film essays in all the sites in all the world…. 70 years on and still Casablanca sits atop the ziggurat of classic film as a model of studio manufactured perfection. Like a classic album that one can put on and listen to at any time and be transported this film repays the repeat viewer tenfold. It’s surely a symphony of joy, where all the player...

  Read more about "Here's lookin' at you kid"...