The Screengrab : deborah kerr

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This may be the scariest Halloween in recent memory.

Whatever happens in the election, it's going to be a nightmare for tens of millions of Americans. But until then, we’ve got a few days to dress like Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, drink pumpkin-flavored beer and relax with ghosts, vampires and zombies instead of all those scary talking heads on TV.

There was some debate here in the Screengrab Crypt regarding whether this was a list of the BEST horror films of all time or the SCARIEST (or if there’s a difference)...which naturally got us thinking about just what makes a film scary in the first place.

When my mother-in-law was a wee little French-Canadian, she went to a screening of Murders in the Rue Morgue where a theater employee in a gorilla suit popped out when the lights came up, sending the audience screaming into the streets of Nashua, New Hampshire...now THAT’S scary.

On the other hand, there are some horror movies that skip the gotcha! moments in favor of sheer dread, a creeping mood of hopeless, helpless paranoia that haunts your nights long after the adrenalin rush from the guy in the gorilla suit has faded. I remember squirming my way through all the maggots and vomited intestines of Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell as a teenager, but what scared me the most was the Italian film’s pervasive sense of inescapable doom...

...not that I have especially fond memories of the film. Just because it scared me didn’t mean I liked it, in the same way I’d rather read a 700-page grad school dissertation on the cultural significance of the torture porn craze than sit through Saw V.

Like comedy, it’s hard to nail down the secret of great horror, but we know it when it lurches up...RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!!!!

Just kidding. Enjoy the list, and Happy Halloween from your pals here at The Screengrab!

25. RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

What is it with zombies? Why do we love them so? We’ve got at least a half dozen killer corpse movies on this list...but personally, I’ve always had a special place in my braaaaiiiiiinnnssss for Dan O’Bannon’s punk-rock tribute to the genre, starring the venerable, indispensable B-movie staple Clu Gulager as the boss of two medical warehouse employees who accidentally unleash a zombie apocalypse. According to the film’s clever, way-better-than-it-has-to-be script (also by O’Bannon), Night of the Living Dead was a true story, but the government covered the whole thing up...and they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for a mishap involving a missing barrel of deadly zombie toxin and the aforementioned bumbling warehouse employees: Freddy (whose friends are rockin’ out to the Damned and the Flesh Eaters -- and, for some reason, getting naked -- in a nearby graveyard) and Frank, whose eventual fate is actually kinda touching thanks to a horror movie hall-of-fame performance by character actor James Karen. One of my all-time favorites in the “disappearing characters” genre, Return is frightening, funny and exciting by turns, and pioneered “fast zombie” technology long before Danny Boyle hogged all the credit in 28 Days Later. Plus, the soundtrack totally kicks ass...and, of course, BRAAAAIIIINNNSSSS!!!!!

24. THE INNOCENTS (1961)

One of the most effective ghost story movies ever made is also perhaps the finest of all the attempts to adapt Henry James to the screen. (John Mortimer and a pre-In Cold Blood Truman Capote worked on the screenplay, which is based on a theatrical adaptation of James' The Turn of the Screw.) Deborah Kerr is a fascinating jangle of authoritative command and nervous anxiety as the new governess who thinks she's seen the apparitions of her predecessor and that woman's lover, the valet Quint, who both came to mysterious ends. Ten years later, Michael Winner's The Nightcomers would offer a speculative version of what happened before, with Marlon Brando as Quint. That movie is best remembered as a cautionary tale involving how it came to be distributed in this country: Universal agreed to pick it up as part of a deal to cancel its contract with Brando, who they assumed would never have another hit in his life. Of course, his next picture was The Godfather. Hollywood: it's a scary place.

23. THE STEPFATHER (1987)

A wholly unexpected high point for the slash/fill-in-the-blank-from-Hell genre, with an original script by the matchless crime novelist Donald Newlove which achieves just the right balance of wit and nastiness. Terry O'Quinn makes anonymity terrifying as the title character, a serial murderer of the type known as a "family annihilator" -- unable to deal with cracks in his fantasy ideal of a perfect family, he keeps wiping out one domestic unit and moving on to another. The movie was inspired by Newlove's meditating on the case of the infamously colorless John List, who butchered his family in 1971, and who was still unapprehended when the movie came out; he was arrested in 1989, after being the subject of an episode of America's Most Wanted, and died in prison last March. A TV movie about List was made in 1993. He was played by Robert Blake.

22. NEAR DARK (1987)

Kathryn Biglow's artspolitation movie about a "family" of white trash vampires traveling the back roads in a van with the windows blacked out has an unusually potent mix of striking visual beauty and cutthroat action. Bill Paxton and Lance Henrikson have never looked closer to shitkicker heaven than in the movie's bloody set piece in a roadhouse; the wonderful, and much-missed Jenny Wright is hard to resist as the teen-sister figure, who winsomely infects the country-boy hero (Adrian Pasdar) with vampirism so that she'll have someone nice to talk to between massacres. And where have you gone, Jenette Goldstein? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

21. THE MUMMY (1932)

The legendary cinematographer Karl Freund, whose credits ranged from Metropolis and The Last Laugh to 149 episodes of I Love Lucy, worked as a director of English-language films for only three years in the early-to-mid '30s. This was his Hollywood directorial debut; the last film he directed was the 1935 horror movie Mad Love, and that title would have been a neat fit for this one, too. It stars Boris Karloff as a 3,000-year-old Egyptian who was entombed alive for trying to restore his dead beloved to life; resurrected, he gets right back on the case, having identified the heroine, Zita Johann, as the woman's reincarnation. Slow and dreamily poetic, this is very different from later mummy movies -- Karloff is unbandaged for most of the picture -- and also very different from most of the other classic Universal monster movies. It's the rare film about eternal love than makes you appreciate the fact that most loves have a natural shelf life.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: The Zombie Andrew Osborne, Kill Nugent

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. CASUALTIES OF WAR (1989)

Brian De Palma directed this fact-based story about a bunch of stressed-out American soldiers in Vietnam whose sergeant (Sean Penn) snaps after one of their number is killed and hatches a plan to abduct a young girl and carry her off into the brush, where she’s killed after having been gang-raped. Too painful to have achieved much commercial success, the movie is especially notable for having broken away from most other Vietnam films that came out around the same time, which to some degree or other adopted the line (increasingly fashionable as pundits and politicians insisted on putting that war behind us) that in the chaos of guerrilla war it was forgivable if our boys all went a little insane morally. The hero, played by Michael J. Fox, is the one soldier who won't participate in the rape and who does his damndest to try to get the criminals prosecuted. The irony is that, having been the only one in his crew who refused to shuck off his humanity, he's the only one who's haunted by what happened; he can't come to terms with the fact that he saw it all happen and couldn't do anything to stop it. That makes him the stand-in for everyone who knows that pointless wars are being hatched someplace and don't buy into them, but can't do anything to stop them, either.

19. THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963)

When Truffaut delivered his famed advice about the impossibility of anti-war film, he might as well have been talking about movies like The Great Escape. Not that it’s anything even remotely like an anti-war film: though its final moments contain some of the futility and brutality of war, they’re aimed squarely at the enemy, and the movie itself is a pure, unvarnished celebration of movie-style heroism and the fighting man at his best. But when Truffaut noted that action argues only for itself, this is the sort of thing he meant: even the ultimate futility of the real-life escape attempt fictionalized by John Sturges in this WWII classic is swept away on the back of all the thrilling set pieces, cunning scenes of calculation, defiant acts of heroism, and sheer thrilling action. Even if you know what’s going to happen to the individual escapees in the end, you can’t help but get caught up in the excitement of it all again and again, borne along by Elmer Bernstein’s unforgettable score and some larger-than-life performances by the likes of Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Steve “Hey, Guys, Let’s Throw a Motorcycle Chase Scene in Here, Why Not?” McQueen. Even the poster knew what it was selling, tagging the movie as “THE GREAT ENTERTAINMENT,” putting a good-times spin on the 30-years-later words of a rapper who issued his grim tales of ghetto warfare under the telling title Your Entertainment, My Reality. The Great Escape even spawned a genre of epic war pictures that clung to its formal elements: the dangerous-secret-mission plot, the all-star cast arrayed on boxes on the poster, all given colorful nicknames, the overblown heist-movie action elements. But the lousy quality of most of its imitators shouldn’t be held against it: its ‘reality’ may have been pure fantasy, but you can’t watch despairing anti-war pictures all the time.

18. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

This awesomely well-executed slab of 1950s melodrama is based on the first novel by soldier turned writer James Jones, and it isn't actually set in wartime: it chronicles the frustrations and tensions that are building among the men killing time at a military base in Hawaii in 1941, which will explode when the Japanese attack on December 7. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr's scene on the beach deserves an automatic inclusion in any montage of legendary screen make-out scenes, and Frank Sinatra's supporting performance as the uncontainable Maggio more than justified both his career comeback and the gangsters-got-him-that-job rumors that were set in stone in the early scenes of The Godfather. (Even though, sadly, the rumors probably weren't true; it's more likely that Ava Gardner got him that job.) But the movie belongs to Montgomery Clift's beautiful performance as the doomed bugler Robert E. Lee Pruitt, who loves the army and can only say, when it's pointed out that the army is making his life miserable, "A man loves a thing, that don't mean it's gotta love him back." Which is pretty good advice no matter what you love, especially if it's the movies.

17. BEFORE THE RAIN (1994)

This Macedonian film, written and directed by Milčo Mančevski, shows how the passions that war thrives on spill over uncontainably into the lives of people who want no part of them. The Croatian actor Rade Šerbedžija plays a burned out war photographer who, after being affected by a violent ourburst in supposedly civilized London, goes home to retire in the Macedonian countryside and finds that the remote village that represents peace and tranquility to him has been split by civil war and the woman he left behind lives in fear for her daughter's life. The powerful-looking, bearded Šerbedžija does about as good a job as any actor ever has at suggesting an intelligently troubled man's desire for a peaceful life, and his feeling that no alternative could be worth living.

16. ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938)

(See #11)

Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Nobody Here but Us Chick Flicks

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There have always been "women's pictures"--or "chick flicks", to use the self-referential, lightly mocking phrase that Tom Hanks barks out in Sleepless in Seattle as he watches his own off-screen wife, Rita Wilson, tear up while relating the plot of An Affair to Remember. The ever-evolving problem of the chick flick--what Michael Cieply calls "a label that is increasingly viewed as a marketplace trap"--is how to court women without alienating potential male viewers, a big part of your audience if you're hoping to hit date-movie gold. (You also want to hit women in their soft emotional receptors without making them feel stupid about it. Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed SIS after some fifteen years as a journalistic essayist whose specialty was finding smart ways to negotiate her own relationship to the zeitgeist, was well suited by experience and temperament to pull this off. Incidentally, filmmakers pitching their work squarely at the male demographic don't have nearly as hard a time of it. Many men do appreciate it when someone like Tarantino finds a way to serve up shootouts draped with wisecracks in a way that makes us feel smart, but that doesn't mean that a lot of us won't still clomp off to see Rambo, and have no trouble going by themselves if no dates will humor them.) Now chick movies are being wrought from "chick lit" books, a relatively new development in publishing, or maybe just a standard development with a new name. This new wrinkle has yielded such hits as Bridget Jones's Diary and The Devil Wears Prada, as well as duds such as last fall's non-starter The Nanny Diaries. That last one may have revealed something about the precarious nature of chick-flick chemistry. It starred Scarlett Johansson, who, I have reason to believe, doesn't have as many female fans as she does male admirers. And while a quick scan of the box-office returns on most of Johansson's starring vehicles begs the question of just what it is the guys would pay to see her do in a movie, I'm guessing that tucking in Paul Giamatti's kids isn't it.

Right now, two past masters of the chick flick are working on projects with roots in the genre: Ephron with Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep (as Julia Child) and Amy Adams, and Confessions of a Shopaholic, which is based on a book by Sophie Kinsella and is being directed by P. J. Hogan, the Australian filmmaker who made the Julia Roberts hit My Best Friend's Wedding. As Cieply observes, part of the fun of talking to the people whose beach houses are riding on the fate of these movies is watching them try to avoid being pigeonholed in the chick-flick ghetto. Jerry Bruckheimer, who is one of the producers working on Shopaholic, actually had the brass to liken it to "another Wedding Crashers," which, given the source material, is kind of like saying that, with enough slow-motion in the action scenes, the next Harry Potter film will be hard to tell apart from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. (As for the Julia Child movie, one of its [male] producers will only say, "We hope this will be a movie for everyone who likes eating.") In the end, writes Cieply, "Trying to pin down what, exactly, constitutes a supposed chick flick is more of a parlor game than a science. An Affair to Remember, in which Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr played star-crossed lovers, clearly makes the cut. Knocked Up, in which Ms. Heigl and Seth Rogen played a star-crossed couple of another sort, probably does not."

Peter Viertel, 1920 - 2007

Peter Smith — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

The writer Peter Viertel has died, at eighty-six, a little more than two weeks after the death of Deborah Kerr, to whom he was married for forty-seven years. A novelist, journalist, memoirist and all-around freelance word merchant and world traveler of the old school, Viertel wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's Saboteur, adapted Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea for the movies, and did on-location script doctoring on John Huston's Beat the Devil and The African Queen. (In 1992, he commemorated his experiences with Hemingway, Huston and other notables in his book Dangerous Friends.) Yet his best-known accomplishment, and the work that made him a cult figure to generations of readers and movie fans, was his 1953 novel White Hunter, Black Heart. Readily acknowledged to be have been based on the time he spent in Africa with Huston while making The African Queen, the book details the verbal jousts between screenwriter "Pete Verrill" and the flamboyant, high-living director "John Wilson", described by the narrator as "the leading exponent of the 'screw-you-all' type of personality." The book is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written about the movie business. (It was filmed in 1990, with Jeff Fahey as the writer and with the movie's director, Clint Eastwood, swaggering around talking as if the Dust Bowl had settled in his larynx, as the Huston figure.) — Phil Nugent

Deborah Kerr, 1921 - 2007

Peter Smith — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Deborah Kerr has died, after a long bout with Parkinson's, at eighty-six. The Scottish-born Kerr first made her mark in English movies with big, challenging roles in the Powell and Pressburger films The Life and Death of Major Blimp and Black Narcissus. In 1946, she made her first Hollywood film, co-starring with Clark Gable in The Hucksters, but probably her best-remembered screen pairing was with Burt Lancaster in the 1953 From Here to Eternity, where their iconic kissing scene lying on a beach set an enduring standard for thirtysomething romance. (Sixteen years later, director John Frankenheimer reunited the two of them for The Gypsy Moths, a yawner perhaps most notable for featuring the then forty-eight-year-old actress's only nude scene.)

Although she could be a charming ingenue, from the start of her career there was always something about Kerr that suggested a maturity beyond her years. If that put off some executives who liked their actresses simpering, it made for a strong presence and the ability to bring suggestions of depth and emotional complication to the right role. She triumphed in such parts as the adulterous military wife in From Here to Eternity and the loving but discontented wife of an Australian rover (Robert Mitchum) in The Sundowners, directed — like Eternity — by Fred Zinnemann. She won Oscar nominations for both those films, as she did for The King and I and Separate Tables. (She was nominated a total of six times without winning, though she was given a special honorary career Oscar in 1993.) She basically retired from movies after 1969, though she came back once to star in the small 1985 English picture The Assam Garden and sometimes turned up on TV until 1986; she also starred in the original Broadway production of Edward Albee's Seascape in 1975. Her survivors include her husband of forty-seven years, Peter Viertel, the author of the novel White Hunter, Black Heart. — Phil Nugent