8 years ago
Looking Back (10 posts found)
Looking Back (Into Darkness): Abraham Polonsky’s “Force of Evil”
When sniffing for evidence of "subversion" in Abraham Polonsky's work, surely the House Un-American Activities Committee didn't have to look much further than the opening of his 1948 directorial debut, Force of Evil. The camera tilts down from the New York sky...
Read more →
Looking Back: “Keeper of the Flame”
Think of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn together, and battle-of-the-sexes comic snap promptly springs to mind. Cherished by cinephiles for the warm and tart badinage of Woman of the Year, Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, their onscreen collaboration endured a...
Read more →
Looking Back: “Alice or the Last Escapade”
“To the memory of Fritz Lang.” So reads the dedication at the opening credits of Claude Chabrol’s remarkable 1977 film Alice or the Last Escapade. Long known as “the French Hitchcock” for his suspenseful dissections of the bourgeoisie, Chabrol deeply admired L...
Read more →
Looking Back: “In This Our Life”
Suggested sub-subgenre: Female Melodramas by Macho Auteurs. In Autumn Leaves, Robert Aldrich bulldozed through weepie tropes with so much furious glee that the resulting Joan Crawford vehicle seemed to be unfolding in one of James Whale’s monster houses rather...
Read more →
Looking Back: “The Hanging Tree”
How rich was the Western during the 1950s? So rich that even masterpieces like John Ford’s The Searchers and Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo barely scratch the surface, so rich that more than half a century later we’re still mining for beauty. There’s the terse parabl...
Read more →
Looking Back: “Le Silence de la Mer”
Irritated at how often the term "Bressonian" was used by critics to describe his films, French director Jean-Pierre Melville once declared that "it’s Bresson who’s always been Melvillian." While not technically true (Les Anges du Péché, released five years bef...
Read more →
Looking Back: “So Dark the Night”
Like Edgar G. Ulmer or Roger Corman, Joseph H. Lewis is the kind of director devoted cinephiles like to discover. Routinely saddled with shoestring budgets and week-long schedules, these Poverty Row auteurs dealt with their slapdash screenplays and inept casts...
Read more →
Looking Back: “The Round-Up”
A contemporary of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, the late, prolific Hungarian auteur Miklós Jancsó (1921-2014) could (at his best) match those art-house doyens in rigorous technique and modernist inquiry. In a career that spanned six decades and en...
Read more →
Looking Back: ‘Welcome to the Dollhouse’
Being an outcast pre-teen has never been depicted so bleakly, depressingly, and hilariously as in Todd Solondz’s debut film Welcome to the Dollhouse. Reaching cult classic status, I only stumbled upon this film fairly recently; and though it was released back ...
Read more →
