The Screengrab : orson welles

Set Your DVR!: May 27, 2009 - the foreseeable future

Hayden Childs — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This is the last time I’ll write one of these columns (unless, of course, someone wants to hire me to do so), but I just wanted to mention how much fun it has been. I know that I haven’t been doing these as frequently as I should. My real job has been taking precedence, and now that I actually will have some time, there ain’t gonna be no Screengrab no more. So, since we are near the end, I wanted to write a super-deluxe column. Luckily, cable tv has made that easy by scheduling a ridiculous number of great movies in the near future!

Wednesday, May 27
On Wednesday, the best bet is Errol Morris's documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, which is playing on IFC at 12:15 pm central/1:15 pm eastern (and sorry for the late notice!). Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is an impressive attempt to impose order into the chaos of the interviews, which is reflected in the subjects' chosen careers. Overnight, TCM is showing It Happened One Night at 1:30 am central/2:30 am eastern.

Thursday, May 28
Thursday has John Sayles's Lone Star on TCM at 9 pm central/10 pm eastern. That's one of the best Sayles movie, but I don't really need to tell you this, do I, dear Screengrab reader?

Friday, May 29
Starting at 5:30 am central/6:30 am eastern, Friday has six, count 'em, six, flicks worth a watch. First up is Amarcord, Fellini's last great movie, on IFC at the aforementioned time and again at 11:35 am central/12:35 pm eastern. Then TCM has The Blue Dahlia, the only movie based on a screenplay by Raymond Chandler, at 7:45 am central/8:45 am eastern. It's not the best film noir, but The Blue Dahlia has quite a lot going for it. In the afternoon, TCM is running Orson Welles's The Lady From Shanghai at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. That's a great movie despite the ludicrous accent Welles sports throughout. In the evening, Ovation is running The Triplets of Belleville at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern and again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern. Ovation keeps the aspect ratio of the films it runs, but it does cut for commercials frequently and sometimes bleeps adult language in racier movies. There's no adult language in The Triplets of Belleville, though. If something darker is more your style, IFC is showing Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden at 7:15 pm central/8:15 pm eastern and again overnight at 12:30 am central/1:30 am eastern. Also overnight is the Jamaican crime flick that made Jimmy Cliff an international star, The Harder They Come, on TCM at 1:15 am central/2:15 am eastern.

Saturday, May 30
Saturday is always a good day for cable movies. The first one I want to mention is New World Order, as discussed by my esteemed colleague Mr. Scott Von Doviak, which is playing on IFC at 9 am central/10 am eastern. That's awfully early for conspiracy theories! I guess they have to get moving early on Saturday before the Military-Industrial-Fast Food-Big Oil-Computertronic-Cell Phone-Google-Movie Critic Complex gets its coffee. Unfortunately, IFC is also showing it at 3 pm central/4 pm eastern, which is all part of their plan, man! I also want to mention The Searchers on AMC at 11:30 am central/12:30 pm eastern. Don't watch good movies on AMC. They cut 'em down to 4:3 aspect, and then pan-&-scan them. It should be a crime to show The Searchers in anything other than widescreen. So skip it on AMC and get the DVD instead. Saturday afternoon is more promising. Ovation is showing Waking Life at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. Not everyone loves or likes that movie, but I thought it was striving mightily towards something, and it deserves points for that. TCM is showing (in the correct widescreen aspect and uncut) The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly at 4 pm central/5 pm eastern. If you missed The Triplets of Belleville on Friday, Ovation is showing it again at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern and Waking Life again at 11 pm central/midnight eastern.

Sunday, May 31
Peter Weir's The Last Wave is one of those movies that I have a hard time rating. On one hand, it has a spooky ambience and haunting conceit that it doggedly maintains throughout. It features the only performance by Richard Chamberlain that could conceivably be called "acting" that anyone ever caught on film. On the other hand, the ending is profoundly silly, especially after all the dread leading up to it. With that caveat, I recommend that you take in a viewing if you haven't seen it. It's on IFC at 7 am central/8 am eastern and again at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern. Ovation is running The Triplets of Belleville again at 1 pm central/2 pm eastern and Waking Life again at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern. Ovation is also running Crumb at 9 pm central/10 pm eastern. Also recommended: since Sunday, May 31 is the ostensible last day of the Screengrab, spend your day perusing our archives!

Monday, June 1
There's funny and there's John Ford. The funny is Duck Soup on TCM at 1:30 pm central/2:30 pm eastern, then The Awful Truth on TCM at 5:15 pm central/6:15 pm eastern, and finally Young Frankenstein on Fox Movie Channel at 8:30 pm central/9:30 pm eastern. But TCM is running a John Ford film festival overnight starting at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern with Directed By John Ford, a documentary about the man as narrated by Orson Welles. Then there's Stagecoach (9 pm central/10 pm eastern), which is the movie Orson Welles watched to learn how to make movies, then The Horse Soldiers (10:45 pm central/11:45 pm eastern), The Quiet Man (1 am central/2 am eastern), and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (3:15 am central/4:15 am eastern). That's a lot of horse opera (with an Irish interlude), but it's well worth it. Be sure to keep an eye on TCM this month, because they're running blocks of movies by great directors through all of June, sometimes two a day.

Tuesday, June 2
Ovation has the neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief (aka Bicycle Thieves) at 2 pm central/3 pm eastern and again at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern and overnight at 1 am central/2 am eastern. Thrill to the despair of a family man clinging to existence in post-war Rome! At 7 pm central/8 pm eastern, TCM is showing It Happened One Night, the first in a Frank Capra film festival running overnight. At the same time, Fox Movie Channel has Vanishing Point. But I recommend that you catch Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey on Ovation at that time (although it's playing again at 10 pm central/11 pm eastern). It's a fairly obscure documentary about the electronic musical instrument and its inventor that packs a surprising story and an emotional punch.

Wednesday, June 3
Nothing today, sorry (if he's your thing, TCM has a King Vidor film festival this evening, so check it out). Perhaps you could spend your day weeping for the lost Screengrab and cursing the cruel economy?

Thursday, June 4
TCM is running an Ingmar Bergman film fest starting at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern with an appearance by the director on the Dick Cavett Show from 1971. Then there's The Seventh Seal (8 pm central/9 pm eastern), Wild Strawberries (9:45 pm central/10:45 pm eastern), Persona (11:30 pm central/12:30 am eastern), Hour Of The Wolf (1 am central/2 am eastern), and The Passion of Anna (2:45 am central/3:45 am eastern). The first three in particular are necessary viewing for film geeks.

Friday, June 5
IFC has Before Sunrise at 4:15 pm central/5:15 pm eastern, but TCM is running Carol Reed movies all day and Steven Spielberg movies all night. Check out the schedule. Of course, I especially recommend The Third Man at 5 pm central/6 pm eastern.

And this is as far out as I'm going with specific recommendations. But watch TCM for Fritz Lang Day on June 8, Preston Sturges Night on June 10, John Huston and Akira Kurosawa on June 11, Jacques Tourneur on June 12, and... I should really cut this off here. It's been fun! Thanks for reading!

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Albert Finney in BIG FISH (2003)

How powerful is Albert Finney’s death scene in Tim Burton’s tall tale of a man with larger-than-life recollections of his own personal history? Well, let’s put it this way: according to New York magazine, “The last his family saw of [monologist Spalding Gray] was Saturday, January 10, [2004] when he took the kids to see Big Fish, the story of a dying father’s relationship with his son, at the Loews Village on Third Avenue and 11th Street. After the movie, Gray wept.” And then, 24 hours later, he tossed himself off the Staten Island ferry into the East River. Perhaps the special power of the movie for Gray (and creative types in general, myself included) is best captured in the final line, after Finney (as Edward Bloom, a character played in flashbacks by Ewan McGregor) inspires his son (Billy Crudup) to mitigate the tragedy of death through art and fantasy: “A man tells a story over and over so many times he becomes the story. In that way, he is immortal.” And, frankly, isn’t reimagining the world and hoping for some existence beyond it (in Heaven and/or in films, novels, scientific discoveries, progeny, blog entries, etc.) more or less the heart of human existence? For me, the greatest terror is thinking my consciousness and memories (not to mention the existence of my friends, relatives...even acquaintances and pets) will be erased forever at death. In particular, I dread the eventual demise of my parents and cling to hopes and fantasies that somehow there’s more than an empty void at the end of our road after all the fun and struggle of life...and so Burton’s film (about a father’s death transformed by flights of fancy) hit me like a 2x4, unleashing an unexpected, uncontrollable torrent of emotion unlike anything I’ve ever experienced at the movies (or maybe it was just the cameo by Miley Cyrus, in her feature film debut, back when she was known as “Destiny"). (AO)

Rutger Hauer in BLADE RUNNER (1982)

Hauer’s Roy Batty is one of the screen’s most nuanced villains; while he’s a ruthless killer who’s not above playing with his victims the way a cat does a gutted rat, he’s also got a higher purpose. Roy is a replicant – an artificial life-form programmed to live only a short time so his intellect and emotions won’t develop to a human level – but in his case, it’s too late: he reaches a near-total self-awareness before his time is up. At the end of this science-fiction masterpiece, Roy toys with Detective Rick Deckard, who has wiped out most of his friends; he brutalizes him while taunting his own moral superiority: “Aren’t you the good man?” But nothing can be done; Roy knows he’s on the way out, and his last act isn’t to kill, but to save Deckard’s life. As he fades out into nonexistence, he drives home the film’s central question of what it means to be human, reminding Deckard that when he dies, his unique mind and irreplaceable memories will be gone forever, “like tears in the rain.” It’s a philosophically deep and emotionally powerful ending in a genre that rarely sees the two combined. (LP)

Duane Jones in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

The zombie movie has reached its oversaturation point and is now just kind of annoying, but the movie that started it all, George Romero’s low-budget classic Night of the Living Dead, still holds the power to chill, and its final scene – extremely massive spoiler alert, for those of you who have somehow missed out on seeing this over the last forty years – is a real gut-punch. Level-headed, competent Ben (played by Duane Jones in what was at the time a controversial casting decision, placing an African-American actor in the lead against a group of whites) has managed to fend off seemingly endless onslaughts of flesh-hungry zombies, conquering threats from without and within, over the course of a nightmarish day when his life was constantly in danger. Finally securing a measure of peace, he beds down in the abandoned farmhouse for the night, plotting how he will make his escape the following morning; when he awakens, without foreshadowing and without fanfare, he is fatally shot by a passing sheriff’s posse who mistake him for one of the living dead he’s spent the entire rest of the movie fighting. It’s an inspired, if exceptionally cruel, ending, and it gives us the first glimpse of the nasty social commentary that would feature in Romero’s later work. (LP)

Faye Dunaway & Warren Beatty in BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)

The demise of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker at the end of Arthur Penn’s paradigm-busting gangster epic shouldn’t have come as any kind of surprise; after all, anyone who knew the history of the two criminals knew how they met their end, and had probably seen the photos of their car, pierced with hundreds of bullet holes. What Penn’s unforgettable death scene accomplishes, then, isn’t shock because of what happens, but rather how it’s depicted; refusing to take the easy way out, Penn forces us to watch Bonnie and Clyde (with whom we’ve spend the entire movie being forced into a bizarre sympathy) die the way they likely did in real life: in a horrible, convulsing, twitching, gory, pitiful mass of blood and gore. Different people took the ending in different ways, from the straights who saw it as a long-overdue comeuppance to the heads who felt it was another example of rebel heroes dying at the hands of the Man; but no one who saw it forgot it easily, and it substantially upped the ante for violence in Hollywood. From then on, no death would be simple and bloodless and abstracted; over the next two decades, the town would be drowned in gore from movies that picked up the gauntlet that Bonnie and Clyde threw down. (LP)

Orson Welles in CITIZEN KANE (1941)

Orson Welles was already a restless, experimental genius at the astonishingly young age of 26 when he brought Citizen Kane to the screen. It’s widely considered one of the greatest films of all time for good reasons, many of which stem from Welles’ desire to rewrite the rules of filmmaking and start fresh from the ground up; and he doesn’t waste any time, putting the central character’s dramatic death scene at the beginning of the movie and working back from there to solve the mystery. At the top of the film, we see Charles Foster Kane as a bedridden old man, and before we even know who this man surrounded by opulent treasures is, he expires, letting a snow globe crash to the floor, and with his last breath, hissing the word ‘Rosebud’ – the key to the rest of the story. Welles later expressed dissatisfaction with this scene, saying he never quite felt right about it and writing off ‘Rosebud’ as a cheap Freudian gimmick, but its power has remained: it’s still counted as one of the most remembered death scenes in cinema, ‘Rosebud’ is at the top of the list of cinematic famous last words, and the whole sequence has been parodied thousands of times in dozens of media. (LP)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight & Nine

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Phil Nugent's Top Ten(-ish) Best Movies Ever!

7. THE LADY EVE (1941)

Veronica Geng: "The American filmmaker Preston Sturges had a supreme gift for making people laugh without representing the world as better or worse than it is... In [his films], politics is rigged, poverty is immune to charity, bosses are petty dictators and workers live on dreams of jackpots, romantic love is either a luxury of the rich or a fabrication of the con artist, and small-town America's morality is the kind that ostracizes an unwed pregnant girl while embracing a bogus war hero. Yet these movies sent waves of euphoria rolling through the audience." That's one way of putting it. Here's another: Once upon a time, in a place called Hollywood, there lived a great man who one day decided that, if he had anything to say about it, the world would never forget William Demarest.

8. Double feature: JULES AND JIM (1962) & BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964)

The intellectual wild men of the French New Wave, in revolt against their country's "tradition of quality" and taking sustenance from the grungier products of the Hollywood dream factory, took their cameras to the streets and proved that, so long as they were left alone to get their movies made as best they could, the improvisational high spirits and smarts and humor and excitement and heady romance of their finest work would remain ever fresh. Then, after a few masterpieces, one of these directors settled down and practically turned into a one-man Tradition of Quality, while the other dependably went him own way, albeit with a destination pass that was frequently stamped "CRAZYTOWN." The fact that it all somehow resulted in an American movie culture where a movie starring John Travolta and Bruce Willis made for eight and a half million dollars could count as a triumph for independent filmmaking is actually one of pop culture history's better jokes.

9. FIRES ON THE PLAIN (1959)

Apocalypse now, and then some.

10. STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. (1928)

By the time Buster Keaton hit Hollywood, he had been performing in vaudeville since he was three, the son of comics who incorporated him into their act. No man has, by his very example, provided a more stirring argument against the child labor laws. Keaton was a simple sort of man for a great artist: he just happened to be someone who, by the time he grew to adulthood, had mastered every skill that might be helpful to the creation of physical comedy and then, having taught himself the mechanics of filmmaking, turned out to have as strong an eye as anyone who's ever lived at staging physical comedy for maximum effectiveness on camera. It is dizzying to imagine what he might have achieved--on top of what he did achieve, which make no mistake about it, was a titanic body of work--if there had been no studio to get in his way.

11. Double feature: CITIZEN KANE (1941) & CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1967)

People call Citizen Kane, the debut film that Orson Welles directed when he was 25, a young man's movie, and it is, though in a way that not everybody may fully appreciate. It is an exercise in high-spirited flamboyance, but it is also, crucially, a movie made by a man who doesn't care about burning his bridges behind him, a self-styled "man of the theater" who, as a lark and a fund-raising expedition, decided to take a movie studio up on its offer of "creative control" and make one of those talking picture dealies, figuring that the worst that could happen would be that he'd generate a lot of publicity and a wad of cash that he could then plow into the stage career that he did care about. It is a movie made by a man who thought he'd be spending his life and doing his real work elsewhere, and so whose attitude towards the faded press baron whose face he was dunking in mud, and the scaredy-cat old studio heads who so dreaded what the press baron might still be able to do to them that they tried to pool their resources to buy and burn the film, was: Bring it on. Chimes at Midnight, made a little more than 25 years and many, many lifetimes later, is a movie made by a man who, in the course of burning those bridges, fell so completely in love with the medium that he would do anything to make another one, patching a film together with whatever spindly resources he could pull together. Strange as it may be that the cocky young bastard and the inspired old wizard were the same guy, we were lucky to have ever had either one.

12. Double feature: ERASERHEAD (1977) & BLUE VELVET (1986)

David Lynch arrived just as the American moviemaking renaissance of the 1970s was winding down, with a $20,000 movie that he'd been working on, off and on, over the course of some five years and that looked as if he'd been quietly reinventing moviemaking, starting with the period of silent experimental film and moving on from there, in blissful innocence of anything else going on in the world. Almost a decade later, everybody's favorite homegrown Surrealist achieved his apotheosis with a movie that was released at a time when indie filmmakers were asking to be congratulated on keeping things safely small and lo-fi and film geeks were catching up on what had come before through the miracle of VCRs hooked to small screens, and served notice that some dreams demand to be appreciated on the biggest screens available, with Dennis Hopper's heavy breathing tickling your ear in Dolby while the lushest nightmare on record unfolded before your eyes. Nowadays, David checks in from time to time via his website, and has responded to the digital information age with Inland Empire, which loses nothing when viewed as a YouTube video, and in fact practically demands to be seen that way. Time for somebody else to step up.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Phil Nugent

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

7. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)

I could go into (a little bit of) detail about how Leone simultaneously anticipates the "demythologized" Westerns of the 1970s and beyond and blows them all out of the water, but to do so would be pigeonholing the film's achievement. This film isn't just the greatest Western of all time -- it's one of the all-time great experiences one can have in a movie theatre. Sergio Leone's command of iconography is second to none, and his juxtaposition of pore-baring closeups and expansive landscapes is justifiably legendary. Many have called this film "operatic," and for good reason; this is an epic story told on a grand scale, with wonderfully archetypal characters who linger on and on in the mind. Much credit is due to the great Ennio Morricone, whose score defines the film's characters by their respective musical themes (love the way Henry Fonda's acid-guitar theme and Charles Bronson's guitar noodling mesh, suggesting their shared fate). One of the greatest pleasures for a filmgoer is finding a timeless scene -- a "Moment Out of Time," as it were. Once Upon a Time in the West is so assured and startling that it contains one Moment Out of Time after another, adding up to a peerless entertainment -- tense, moving, funny, artful, exciting as all hell, and above all the very cinematic definition of "iconic." (PC)

6. CITIZEN KANE (1941)

Yes, I know that including Citizen Kane on a “best movies ever” list is something of a cliché. But I’m not including it out of obligation -- I’m including it because it’s awesome. And while much of that has to do with the storytelling innovations of Orson Welles and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, the movie would feel like a cinematic bran muffin if not for the showman’s flair with which Welles infused every frame. Newly arrived in Hollywood after a stint as the wunderkind of stage and radio, Welles made the most of his shot at the big time, flush with the brashness of youth -- twenty-five years old, folks! -- while perhaps realizing he might never get a gig this sweet again (he didn’t, of course). So rather than playing it cool and keeping an eye on his long-term career, Welles poured every bit of inspiration he had into Kane, using every trick in the cinema’s arsenal, including some that were still in their infancy. But it’s Welles’ gusto -- and not incidentally, his genius -- that comes through most clearly, and even though his ideas have been co-opted and warmed over by thousands of films since, almost none has mustered up the same magic. (PC)

5. THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

Here’s the criteria I tried to abide by while picking the top ten best movies of all time: I wouldn’t list my ten favorite films, because I have a personal connection to some movies that I can’t possibly justify as all-time greats. And I didn’t want to go the "I've been told a thousand times that Grand Illusion is the best movie ever, so I better include it or I'll look like a schmuck" route, either. So I asked myself, “Self, gun to your head, no time to think, what is the greatest movie of all time?” The “gun to your head” part made it an easy choice – The Godfather, Part II. A bajillion gallons of ink have already been spilled praising its complex, large canvas storytelling, timeless themes, masterfully executed set pieces and brilliant performances, so I won’t pretend I have anything new to add. I’ll just mention a few images that come to mind: Robert De Niro running across a Depression-era New York rooftop, breaking a gun down into pieces and disposing of them as the sounds of a street festival waft up from below; Lee Strasberg dismissively passing a solid gold telephone around a table; Francis Coppola’s camera tracking through the Corleone compound as autumn leaves swirl around the yard. And if every masterpiece must have a flaw, well, we’ll always have Diane Keaton screaming “It was an ABORTION!” (Oh, and that first Godfather movie? That one’s pretty good, too.) (SVD)

4. THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939) & LA GRANDE ILLUSION (1937)

Two masterpieces in two years (with La Bête Humaine, a near masterpiece, in between). La Grande Illusion was the rarest of war movies, a film that never showed a battle but focused on the aftermath, a film that argued that war is inhuman in every sense of the word, which could devolve into a bumper sticker (such as the ubiquitous "war is bad for children and other living beings") but miraculously doesn't. Jean Renoir's humanism can never be underestimated. All of his characters are three-dimensional, and all -- even the sad, flawed German Captain von Rauffenstein (played by Erich Von Stroheim) -- are deserving of your sympathy. La Règle du jeu has the same commitment to the saving grace of underlying humanity, even as it explodes the Edwardian upstairs-downstairs upper-crust comedy of manners. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributors: Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs

Great Beginnings: Screengrab's Favorite Opening Scenes Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Yesterday marked the 100th day of the Obama presidency, which means I’m cautiously starting to believe that Bush is maybe really, actually gone and won’t suddenly pop up again for one last attack like Freddy Krueger at the end of Nightmare On Elm Street.

Cheney and Rove and the rest of the neo-conservative gang are still with us, of course, and the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of the world certainly didn’t need the full 100 days to determine they were right all along about Obama’s anarchist-fascist-abstract-impressionist agenda.

Most of the rest of America (and the world), meanwhile, thinks the new administration is actually off to a pretty good start -- and while great beginnings don’t always lead to happy endings, they at least give us some...what’s that word again? Oh yeah, HOPE...

...much like the opening sequences in the following movies, which hooked us right from the get-go and made us completely forget about sneaking out of the theater to see what was playing on the next screen over and/or changing channels.

Of course, your pals here at the Screengrab fully appreciate the irony of running this list in light of recent events here in our little corner of the cyber-verse...but, considering that every ending brings with it the possibility of a new beginning, what better time, really, to salute OUR FAVORITE OPENING SCENES OF ALL TIME!!!!!

TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)

The mother of all tracking shots opens with a bomb being set -- telling us right away that it will explode in three minutes -- and hidden in the trunk of a ludicrously long and garish vehicle. Then begins the long dance through the streets of Tijuana. The camera pulling ahead of the car, but the car always catching up or passing, always staying in frame. The sound (on the reconstructed version, at least) is disorienting, as passing through the streets of a busy nightlife district can be, with different noises blaring for attention. As soon as they appear, the camera is focused on Janet Leigh and Charlton Heston, paced by the car with the bomb, crossing the numerous obstacles in their path. As they arrive at the border crossing, the film reveals that they are just married, and he is a Mexican policeman (yes, yes, ha ha) known for taking down a drug ring. He laughs it off and, just as the car passes them, moves in to kiss his wife. BOOM! In the next couple of minutes, we'll meet Hank Quinlan, as much a power-mad racist as The Searchers' Ethan Edwards, but far more monstrous and strangely vulnerable. But the rest of the movie belongs to him. Here, at the beginning, the movie belongs to that single unbroken shot that defied the millions of things that could go wrong and introduced most of the major themes, all without breaking a sweat. Astonishing, even now. (HC)

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)

Three killers are waiting for a train. One of them, his craggy, weather-beaten face a dead ringer for the desert landscape that surrounds them, is distracted by an annoying fly. Water drips onto the hat of another, until enough has accumulated for him to tip the hat to his lips and take a cool drink. The buzzing of the fly and the dripping of the water and the creaky whine of a windmill are the only sounds we hear, until that whine fades into the whistle of the approaching train. Their intended victim has arrived. He plays a harmonica and looks like Charles Bronson. Extreme close-ups give way to the widest of widescreen vistas, the whole of the wild west in one deep focus shot of impending violence. This is how you build suspense, Sergio Leone style. (SVD)

RAISING ARIZONA (1987)

Even exposition can be thrilling when the Coen Brothers are operating at the peak of their powers. Accompanied by the spirited whistling and banjo-plucking of Carter Burwell, Nicolas Cage’s sleepy drawl narrates the tale of an unusual courtship. Recidivist H.I. McDunnough is such a regular at the mug shot station, he becomes smitten with the photographer, a spunky officer named Ed. (Short for Edwina.) Hilarious bite-size vignettes of small-time crime (“I tried to stand up and fly straight, but it wasn’t easy with that sumbitch Reagan in the White House”), prison life (“When there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand”), parole hearings (“These doors gonna swing wide”) and pitching woo (“I’m walkin’ in here on my knees, Ed”) sketch the unfolding romance, which gives way to trailer park life, the daily grind and the yearning for a critter as the banjo plunges joyfully into Beethoven’s Ninth. Endlessly quotable, relentlessly rewatchable, kinetic as a Bugs Bunny cartoon, this opening sets the stage for one of the zippiest romps in the Coen catalogue. (SVD)

THE PLAYER (1992)

Robert Altman’s cutting Hollywood critique self-consciously strives for Wellesian grandeur in its impressive 8-minute single take opening shot, which makes its homage upfront by having a character overtly reference the Touch of Evil sequence (as well as Bernardo Bertolucci’s sustained tracking shot in The Sheltering Sky) upon which it’s based. Altman uses this bravura scene to firmly establish his major studio milieu and the various, cretinous industry clowns who populate it, mocking the agents, pitch-men and execs who manufacture the country’s celluloid dreams. The shot’s inquisitive, labyrinthine movements subtly suggest the probing survey to come. And Altman’s opening proves a hilariously caustic encapsulation of his story’s modus operandi – to scathingly ridicule the Hollywood machine via the type of dazzling, daring filmmaking that, as evidenced by comments made by the scene’s various dunderheaded players, has little place in a studio system where market-focused creativity-by-committee is the rule. (NS)

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager

"Sopranos" Creator David Chase to Tell the Story of the Movies

Phil Nugent — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:30:00 GMT

David Chase, the creator of the landmark HBO series The Sopranos, has cut a deal to return to the cab;e network with a series about the history of the American film industry. The show, Ribbon of Dreams--the title comes from a line of Orson Welles's, who once used it as a definition of what a movie is--will begin in 1913 and, borrowing a gimmick from the HBO series Rome, chart history as seen through the eyes of a pair of fictitious characters, "one a cowboy with some violence in his past, the other a mechanical engineer", and their own offspring. The characters will be introduced as working for pioneering director D. W. Griffith; as the series progresses through the course of the twentieth century and up to the present day, there are plans to work in such figures as John Wayne, John Ford, Bette Davis, and Raoul Walsh. Brad Grey, who served as executive producer of The Sopranos and is now CEO of Paramount Pictures, will executive produce Ribbon of Dreams as well.

"It gives me pleasure to think of working, together with Brad, with HBO again," Chase says. "These are all people who, obviously, occupy a special place in my heart." HBO could say the same thing; The Sopranos, which was praised by TV critics (and not just TV critics) as the kind of thing that took television to a new creative level, was instrumental in making HBO an essential part of the zeitgeist and making people feel that they had to subscribe to the channel to be plugged into what was going on. Despite this, Chase, an old-school TV writer with credits on such cult series as The Rockford Files, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Almost Grown, and I'll Fly Away (as well as the occasional episode of The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo--even geniuses have to eat), was known to tell interviewers that, in his mind, movies were still the big time and to muse about making a Sopranos movie. A TV series about the movies is probably a more promising bet, especially since HBO is likely to give Chase considerable leeway on his first project for them since The Sopranos wrapped two years ago. "We couldn’t be more excited," HBO's co-president Richard Pleper says, "to be back in business with the master."

SXSW Review: "Pontypool"

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:15:00 GMT

Canadian director Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo) has been insisting in interviews that his new film Pontypool is not really a zombie movie, and as someone who has burnt out on zombie movies of late, I have to agree with him. It's a difficult film to categorize at all - sort of like Orson Welles' War of the Worlds in reverse, or a George Romero adaptation of Talk Radio, although neither of those descriptions quite gets at how peculiar Pontypool really is.

Set almost entirely inside a radio station and unfolding in something close to real time, McDonald's film concerns the efforts of morning DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie, most recently the original Nite Owl in Watchmen) and his producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) to understand and properly react to a mounting crisis in the small town of Pontypool, Ontario - a crisis that begins as a riot and escalates into an epidemic.

Isolated from the outside world, privy only to information from callers, a traffic reporter on the scene and a BBC newsman who has somehow gotten wind of the situation, Mazzy and Sydney attempt to piece together what exactly is happening. They figure out that the townspeople are indeed being transformed into..well, creatures that behave a lot like zombies. The means of the infection is one of the oddball, ingenious twists that shouldn't be revealed here, but suffice it to say that this is the only zombie movie I can think of that climaxes with a very important game of word association.

Adapted from the novel Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess (who also wrote the screenplay), McDonald's film marries the claustrophobic tension of Night of the Living Dead with a more cerebral approach. Gore is used sparingly, albeit to startling effect, and the grand finale is more of a semiotics discussion than the sort of bloodbath that gorehounds might be hoping for. It's not simply an intellectual exercise, however, and McHattie in particular keeps the movie grounded with his lived-in, world-weary performance as the increasingly frazzled DJ Mazzy. Pontypool isn't for everyone, but it just might be the zombie movie for everyone who thinks they're sick of zombie movies.

Related:
SXSW Review: American Prince
SXSW Review: Beeswax

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

MIRANDA AND STEVE, SEX & THE CITY (2008)

So, you know that whole thing about how men and women are different? Well, here’s a good example: for women, last year’s big-screen adaptation of the beloved HBO estrogen-fest was a feel-good romantic comedy, while for many straight guys, it was nothing short of torture-porn. And no, I’m not talking about Kim Cattrall’s sex-positive female drag queen Samantha, who got all the best lines and looked pretty damn hot wearing nothing but sushi. And I’m certainly not talking about the sweet pairing of Kristin Davis’ ray-of-sunshine Charlotte and her frog-prince fellah, Harry (the closest thing in the Sex-iverse to a normal, healthy relationship...albeit one padded by Davis’ relentlessly cheery demeanor, perfect cheekbones and boundless Upper East Side gelt). I’m not even talking about SJP’s Carrie and Chris Noth’s Mr. Big, two gigantic pains in the butt who truly deserve each other. No, the couple that curdles my gonads even worse than Norman Bates and his mama in Psycho or Kathy Bates and James Caan in Misery is, yes, Steve and Miranda, that terrifying nightmare combo of pussy man and man-eating pussy. David Eigenberg’s Steve is every spineless masochist convinced that low self-esteem = sensitivity, while Cynthia Nixon’s endlessly miserable harridan Miranda is the sort of castrating, ball-busting career woman stereotype that men get branded as chauvinists for perpetuating and women (at least Sex & The City fans) somehow find empowering. After months of celibacy and endless abuse, Steve finally cheats on Miranda, who subsequently withholds even more sex and unleashes even more abuse in retaliation, until she finally deigns to forgive Steve at a meeting in the middle of the usually romantic Brooklyn Bridge. But my only thought as I watched Steve (through my fingers) approaching his awful, awful wife was, “NO, STEVE! NO!!! RUN AWAY!!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!!” But Steve didn’t listen. Characters in horror movies never do.

HARRY LIME & ANNA SCHMIDT, THE THIRD MAN (1949)

Technically, as poisonous as it is, this shouldn’t be listed as one of the most toxic romantic duos in screen history; it really needs to be considered as a romantic triangle. In brief: Holly Martins is Harry Lime’s best friend, and Anna Schmidt is Harry Lime’s best girl. Holly Martins begins to suspect that Harry Lime is not such a swell fellow after all – as, not coincidentally, he begins to suspect that Anna Schmidt would be better off with him, anyway. Holly learns that Harry is a heel, but Anna not only doesn’t rush into the tender and loving arms of the upstanding Holly – she doesn’t give him the least bit of play, and goes on loving Harry even after it becomes clear to everyone that Harry didn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. There’s so much more to this amazing, groundbreaking noir film than that, but the impossibly frustrating relationship between the three people forever remains at the center of it: Harry’ selfish, caddish treatment of the people he claims to love; Anna’s impossible devotion to a man who loves her but never as much as he does himself; and Holly’s shock at the betrayal of his friend – and even greater shock at how Anna doesn’t react in the same way as he does to that betrayal. The Third Man is filled with moving, telling moments that portray both the depth and the damage of the relationship, from Harry doodling love notes to Anna in the window of a Ferris wheel to Anna’s heartbreaking long walk at the end. What makes it even more astonishing is that the movie accomplishes all this while never even showing us Harry and Anna in the same room together.

SID & NANCY, SID & NANCY (1986)

He was the immature, unstable bassist for chaotic punk pioneers The Sex Pistols. She was a shrill American obsessed with the band. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen’s love affair was one for the anarchic ages, a relationship forged by heroin and defined by violence and pathetic need. Ending in 1978 when Sid stabbed Nancy to death in New York City’s famed Chelsea hotel, followed a year later by his own fatal overdose while awaiting trial for her murder, their amour was of a blisteringly dysfunctional sort, and depicted by director Alex Cox with squalid, impassioned romanticism in 1986’s Sid & Nancy. Electrified by dual lead performances from Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb that reek of grungy, rancid desperation, Cox’s love story is a magnetic spectacle of sordid self-immolation, a tale of love’s consuming, destructive potential which the director – capturing both the intoxicating fervor of Sid and Nancy’s mutual infatuation and the foulness of their junkie downfall – depicts with equal parts disgust, pity and compassion.

AOYAMA & ASAMI, AUDITION (1999)

A lonely widower with a young son, TV producer Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is convinced by a friend to stage phony auditions in the hopes of finding a new spouse. That process leads him to Asami (Eihi Shiina), a prim, dainty, mysterious beauty to whom he grows dreamily attached over the course of a few dates. As implied by a scene in which she waits patiently by the phone for Aoyama’s call, Asami isn’t exactly what she seems. And neither, it turns out, is Takeshi Miike’s film, commencing like a patient, thoughtful Yasujiro Ozu-inflected domestic-drama meditation on marriage, responsibility and social pressures, and then shifting gears to become something far more unnerving. None of the director’s subtle hints at forthcoming horrors quite prepare one for the stunningly disturbing finale, which not only involves the immediate end of Aoyama and Asami’s relationship, but – viciously building upon their romance’s unequal economic, social and gender dynamics – reveals the film to be a proto-feminist nightmare custom-engineered to scar the male psyche.

WALTER NEFF & PHYLLIS DIETRICHSON, DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)

In noir, love and sexual desire are equally deadly, driving men (noble or corrupt) to throw caution to the wind and take risks that invariably spell their doom. A prototypical example of that recklessness is the case of Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), an insurance salesman whose routine life is plunged into deadly disarray by Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), a platinum blonde beauty whose body goes vroom-vroom-vroom and whose eyes promise an early grave. When Phyllis asks Walter how she might take out a policy on her husband’s life without actually informing him about it, the agent balks, but such initial protestations are as sturdy as wisps of smoke, and it’s not long before the smitten Walter is knee-deep in a scheme to knock off Phyllis’ spouse and run away with her and the substantial insurance payout. As is customary in the doom-laden genre, however, all that awaits the couple is tragedy, Neff’s ignominious end a result of fate’s cruel hand and, just as fundamentally, a foolhardy romantic fantasy unattainable in a cold, indifferent world.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager

Patrick McGoohan, 1928 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Patrick McGoohan, who died this past week at the age of 80, was cooler than the ice in your lemonade. Born in Astoria, New York but raised in Ireland and England, the young McGoohan worked a string of odd jobs before landing at Sheffield Repertory Theatre as stage manager, where he found his true vocation when he was pressed into service to fill in on-stage for an ailing actor. With his striking presence, rounded diction and rapid-fire delivery, he quickly established a name for himself on the English stage, especially after Orson Welles cast him as Starbuck in Welles's celebrated London production based on Moby Dick. (That and a few of McGoohan's other stage performances, including his acclaimed turn in the title role of Ibsen's Brand, were later recorded for TV.) McGoohan was something of a dabbler in movies, where his pleased-pussycat manner and what the critic Peter Rainer once called "perhaps the most villainous enunciation in the history of acting" made him a natural choice for sinister roles. His most notable movie credits included Ice Station Zebra (1968), The Moonshine War (1970), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Scanners (1980), and Silver Streak (1976), where he established his villainous bona fides by calling Richard Pryor a "nigger", in response to which Pryor slapped the taste out of his mouth. After a long absence from the big screen, he had a brief comeback in the mid-90s when Mel Gibson case him in Braveheart (1995) as the vile English king who made no effort to conceal the fact that he did not love his dead gay son. McGoohan followed that up with appearances in The Phantom (1996), as Billy Zane's dad, and the John Grisham potboiler A Time to Kill (1996), where he played a Southern judge with the unreassuring name of Omar Noose. His last movie credit was in 2002, when he did a voice for the animated feature Treasure Planet.

That's the movie stuff covered, because this is a movie site. Of course, it was in television that McGoohan really achieved pop culture immortality. He took his first baby steps towards that goal in 1960 with the first season of the half-hour spy series Danger Man. McGoohan's performance as the quietly dashing international agent John Drake made him a star in Europe, though the series didn't take off when it was first shown in the U.S. However, after the James Bond films struck gold, CBS commissioned a new round of hour-long episodes, which were shown in America under the title Secret Agent, to match the ripping Johnny Rivers theme song that was now attached. (Legend has it that McGoohan had been offered the role of James Bond and turned it down because the murderous, compulsively womanizing 007 struck him as something of a ponce.) By all reports, McGoohan exerted a strong degree of creative control over the John Drake character from the start, insisting that he use violence only as a last resort and keep his mind on his work even when beautiful women were swanning around. (The character was also fallible, capable of entering a situation he'd misjudged and getting himself into real trouble, which then gave McGoohan the chance to dazzle the viewer with Drake's improvisational skills as he proceeded to get himself out of the corner into which he'd painted himself.) McGoohan even gave Drake a slight hint of working-class impudence, in contrast to 007's upper-class snootiness. (In one early episode, a twittery Englishwoman tells him how nice it is to meet a fellow countryman; McGoohan, with his sweetest sneer, replies, "Actually, I'm Irish.") He would have even more of a say about the direction of the series as his fame and power increased. But he wouldn't become one of TV's first auteurs until Danger Man/ Secret Agent ended and McGoohan launched a new series, this time as both star, co-creator/executive producer, and occasionally writer and director, a show that would take a line from that Johnny Rivers song--"They've given you a number/ And taken away your name"--and really go to town with it.

That series was, of course, The Prisoner. Launched in 1967, the seventeen-episode series was a full-blown pop allegory--anyone who called it "science fiction" in front of McGoohan reportedly got to see how high the star could jump and how purple his face could get--which grew out of Danger Man; McGoohan would tell interviewers that he started dreaming about the series while filming the first episodes of that series at the Welsh resort Hotel Portmeirion. ("I thought it was an extraordinary place," he once said, "architecturally and atmosphere-wise, and should be used for something." That "something" began to come into focus when George Markstein, a Danger Man script editor who would become The Prisoner's co-creator, told McGoohan that he'd heard about people being held prisoner in resort-like settings during the second World War. Most episodes of The Prisoner begin with a masterful, thunderously over-the-top prologue, shot and edited with a megalomaniacal brio that makes Gotterdammerung look like Clerks 3, in which McGoohan's character, a nameless government agent, resigns his commission, only to be gassed and wake up in "the village," where people who "know too much" to be allowed to run around loose unsupervised are rechristianed with numbers--our hero is Number Six--and permitted to live out their lives as vacuously as possible in what looks like a seaside Victorian theme park where the rides suck.

The narrative constants of the show, which offered mass-market surrealism and brightly colored Pop Art for the small screen more than twenty years before Twin Peaks, were Number Six's lust to escape the place and the efforts of a constantly reshifting chorus line of "Number Two"s who were hell bent on cracking the "mystery" of why he'd resigned in the first place. Among the show's most memorable visual tropes are the "rovers", white spheres that patrol the shores and engulf those trying to escape by water. In a Village Voice review of the show when it was revived on public television stations in the 1970s, James Wolcott reached back to McGoohan's stage work with Orson Welles and wrote that the rovers looked "like Moby Ovary." (Like John Drake, McGoohan turned out to be quite the improviser; he reportedly came up with the idea of using weather balloons to play the rovers after a more ambitious, mechanical-robot concept proved unusable at the last minute.) Everything about the show, from its slam-bang opening to its proudly incomprehensible finale (written, in the heat of the last moment, by McGoohan himself), was built to attract a cult, and boy, did it get one. (One of the favoite topics of discussion among cultists is, inevitably, whether Number Six was in fact John Drake. McGoohan always maintained that he wasn't, which just may have been his way of showing irritation at the idea that he didn't have it in him to play two entirely different characters.) It also inspired tributes, homages, and parodies too numerous to name, including an episode of The Simpsons in which McGoohan reprised the role of Number Six, or at least his voice.

McGoohan had a few other notable successes on TV, including his starring role as a masked avenger in the three-part 1963 Wonderful World of Disney series The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, A. K. A. Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarcrow. That show may deserve re-examining, though it'll have to be done by someone other than myself, because I saw it when it was re-broadcast many years later when I was five or six, and I am not sure that I want to find out if I would still have the same pants-wetting reaction to seeing McGoohan being menacing in his Scarecrow disguise. (Cillian Murphy, eat your heart out.) In 1977, McGoohan starred in the British medical drama Rafferty. And he became something of a fixture on the set of his friend Peter Falk's series Columbo, playing the special guest murderer in four episodes and directing five, two of which he also wrote and produced. In 1991, he was exceptionally well cast as George Bernard Shaw in the TV film The Best of Friends with John Gielgud and Wendy Hiller. He directed one feature film, Catch My Soul (1974), a rock-musical version of Othello starring Richie Havens, Season Hubley, and Tony Joe White. (Early in his movie career, McGoohan himself had played the Iago figure in the 1961 British curiosity All Night Long, a contemporary retelling of Othello set in the jazz world, with Charles Mingus and Dave Brubeck milling in the background.) He is survived by his wife of 57 years, Joan Drummond, an actress he met in his rep theater days; they married between a rehearsal and an evening performance of The Taming of the Shrew. They had three daughters.

Screengrab Presents: The Worst Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:30:00 GMT

EVITA (1996)

The Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice pop-rock opera tells the story of a breathtakingly ambitious woman who sleeps her way to the top, then demands to be taken seriously (to the point of deification), yet no amount of money, power or adulation can ever satisfy her ravenous ego. For some reason, Madonna thought she’d be perfect for the part, and even learned to sing (fifteen years into her career as a singer) to hit the high notes of theater geek staples like “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” Unfortunately, the Material Girl’s participation in the project didn’t end with acting: while the Broadway production was about a flawed despot’s wife who embodies style-over-substance “truthiness" (imagining herself as a savior of the common people while really serving no one but herself), Madonna apparently insisted on scrubbing away her character’s flaws, transforming the story into a historically dissonant La Isla Bonita version of A Star Is Born, featuring a scrappy, sexy gal who uses her moxie to make it big (and wear a lot of swanky ‘40s fashion), robbing the musical of most of its thematic purpose and resonance and rendering Antonio Banderas’ role as Evita’s antagonist essentially pointless.

HAMLET (1969)

The movie versions of John Osborne's "angry young man" plays Look Back in Anger (starring Richard Burton) and The Entertainer (starring Laurence Olivier) -- plays that Richardson himself had staged in the theater -- are marred by clumsy film technique and the deadness one associates with inept efforts to "open out" stage plays, but they remain valuable records of great performances by legendary actors working with material that changed the face of theater. But Richardson's Hamlet, which wears its staginess on its sleeve and stars Nicol Williamson in the title role, is an embarrassing relic of its moment: a disastrous attempt to make Shakespeare relevant to the 1960s by pimping it out with sexual overtones (some of them supplied by Marianne Faithfull, who plays Ophelia, and who comes across as sweet, hard-working, and very confused) while emphasizing the generation gap angle (despite the casting, as Hamlet's stepfather and mother, of performers, Anthony Hopkins and Judy Parfitt, who were younger than Williamson). Williamson's performance itself is some kind of landmark in bad Shakespearean acting: too self-contained to connect with the other performers and wearing a fresh layer of varnish on his popping eyeballs, he gives a demonstration of how it's possible to use the lines to show off the speed of one's word rate and the showiness of one's delivery without using the words to express a thing. From several years' perspective, the whole thing may be best seen as an inside joke done in preparation for Williamson's performance, two decades later, as John Barrymore in Paul Rudnick's I Hate Hamlet. Which had its own problems.

KING LEAR (1971)

Peter Brooks' controversial, celebrated 1960s production was reportedly modeled on Samuel Beckett, with a resigned attitude towards the horrors that befall Lear and the other characters, and with the star, Paul Scofield, employing what Susan Sontag described as "arbitrary vocal mannerisms that deadened the full emotional power of his lines." "Deadened" is an accurate term for the production as it comes across in this black-and-white movie version, which seems to be an attempt to "modernize" the text by making it as far from moving as possible.

MACBETH (1948)

In his greatest Shakespeare movies, Chimes at Midnight and Othello, Orson Welles managed to draw inspiration for striking and powerful images from the desperation caused by his lack of funds, but he came a cropper here, working on too tight a budget and shooting schedule for Republic Pictures. In his cutting and reshaping of the text, Welles sometimes made dramatic logic subservient to his requisite Big Idea, that the witches and their cat's-paw, Macbeth, represented a barbaric, Druidic religion at war with the coming of Christianity. (He didn't do himself or the ears of his audience any favors with his other big idea, that the actors should attempt Scottish accents.) Other problems were beyond his control, such as the cheapo costumes that Republic supplied him with: the movie may be most notorious for its headgear, especially the sight of Welles in a "crown" that looks like a square box with three triangular points glued to the side, which Welles himself acknowledged made him look like he was playing the Statue of Liberty. It must be said that, as befits a play with a curse on it, Macbeth has probably inspired more rotten movie adaptations than any other great play, the most recent being a 2006 Australian movie, directed by Geofrey Wright, which was set among modern drug dealers in Melbourne, with leads who might have stepped out of a photo spread in Maxim; it plays like Miami Vice spoken in verse, with an Aussie accent. And that's not even taking into account all the movies that dump the bard's dialogue while, with a wink to the audience, using his plot. (These include the 1990 gangster movie Men of Respect, starring John Turturro and his wife Katherine Borowitz, and the godawful Scotland, Pa., in which James Le Gros and Maura Tierney attempt to rise in the fast-food industry by feeding their boss, Duncan, into the deep-fat fryer.)

LOVES LABOUR'S LOST (2000)

When Kenneth Branagh's Henry V opened months after the death of Laurence Olivier, critics rushed to embrace its young director-star as Olivier's heir apparent. But though Branagh has certainly had his moments since then, his directing career has been heavier on the Princess and the Showgirls than on the Hamlets. Bad as his attempts to experiment outside his Shakespeare roots (such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Peter's Friends) have been, he really found the worst of both worlds with the first-ever movie version of this Shakespeare comedy, staged as a musical and crammed with actors who lacked experience in both classical theater and singing and dancing. Miramax Studios took one look at the results and flushed its three-picture deal with Branagh down the toilet, thus establishing once and for all that Harvey Weinstein is a Friend of the Theater.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (1971)

Norman Jewison is a lousy director, and his thoroughly inept Fiddler On The Roof (source material I don't really care about one way or the other) did me a great service when I was a teenager by demonstrating (years before I'd seen Kevin Smith movies) exactly what inept mise-en-scene looks like. Early on, Topol is dancing in the barn. The frame is widescreen, and Jewison has so little idea of how to fill it that one half of the screen is Topol; the other half is a cow's ass. This is one of the crowning insults in the long history of rejected visual innovations on-screen. Why, if only I could find an amateur video of a Japanese stage production, even that would be an improvement. Oh wait, there it is!

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Vadim Rizov

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In the summertime, studios roll out their big budget cinematic adaptations of the hottest comic books, video games and Pez dispensers, but as the kids trudge off to the hallowed halls of academe (and then later return home for the holidays with their heads full o’ book learnin’), Hollywood gets all classy for a second and does its best to lure us away from actual theaters and libraries with big screen versions of all the hot Broadway plays we couldn’t get tickets for and all the literary classics we never quite got around to reading.

The Screengrab Book Club is already loading up on barbiturates in preparation for our field trip to the Titanic road show version of novelist Richard Yates' dour de force Revolutionary Road, but THIS week the play’s the thing as Doubt and Frost/Nixon open wide, dangling their multiple Tony awards and nominations like so much Oscar bait.

Yet, while it’s true that some of filmdom's greatest movies have greasepaint in their DNA (like Casablanca which, according to resident dramaturg, Paul Clark, was based on a play that never quite made it to opening night), there’s an equally long list of productions that somehow went rotten like Denmark in the tricky transition from footlights to klieg lights...

...prompting your internet pals down here in the cheap seats to put aside our Playbills for a moment and pay tribute to THE BEST (AND WORST) STAGE-TO-SCREEN ADAPTATIONS OF ALL TIME!

HAIR (1979)

Oh, sure, I know what you’re thinking: everybody hates hippies. But me, I was only a baby when the REAL flower children walked the Earth, dropping brown acid, failing to bathe and tripping out to six hour Grateful Dead guitar solos. And sure, by the time I was old enough to mythologize Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, most of the Woodstock Generation had either overdosed or transformed into hateful Regan Democrats or politically correct fascists. So in a way, Hair has always been my Camelot: an idealistic, romanticized fictionalization of an era that sounds good in theory but was kind of a drag to actually live through. I was a prepubescent tot when my parents took me to a fantastic, anarchic live production of the show with a cast that stripped right down to their bushy pubes at the end of the first act and brought the audience up on stage to dance around with them at the end of the second: easily one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in a theater (or anywhere else, for that matter). And, yes, live rock combined with real live nudes is a pretty tough hand to beat...yet Milos Forman did an admirable job translating the experience to celluloid a few years later with an adaptation that combined the energy and catchy pop-rock score of the stage show with a relatively coherent storyline, a bunch of loose-limbed Twyla Tharp choreography and some big budget frills no theatrical production could ever hope to match, like a cast-of-thousands production number on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and a memorable money shot of Beverly D’Angelo’s naked boobies. The Age of Aquarius RULES!!!!

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)

Pay attention to me now because you wanna what? You wanna make a real fuckin' movie out of Glengarry Glen Ross, a movie with brass balls, not some pussified Masterpiece Theater bullshit. What does it take to make that movie? It takes ABFAM to make that movie! A for Al, as in Pacino, as in his only performance in the past 20 years that's worth a shit, where he isn't just yelling all the time like he lost his fuckin' hearing aid. B is for Baldwin, as in one of the great five-minute performances in movie history. You're in, you're out, bada bing. F is for fuck, which we say a lot, but also for Foley, as in director James Foley, who doesn't try to "open the play up" with some flashback about how Ricky Roma's dad was mean to him or any of that Hollywood shit. A little moody lighting, a jazzy James Newton Howard score, and a fistful of talented actors, that's all you need. That brings us to another A, and that's for Alan Arkin, not to mention A-listers Ed Harris and Kevin Spacey before he went all gooey on us. Now that's a hell of a cast, and I'll even let you get away with Jack Lemmon if he lays off the heart-tugging crap once in a while. Finally you got M for Mamet in his prime – a maestro composing a profane symphony from the bitter grievances of loser salesmen and the greasy machismo of the winners – and not some half-assed parody like you're reading right now.

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)

In truth, I never hear of the two Philip Barry plays George Cukor filmed (1938's Holiday and this) being revived in the theater much, and there's good reason for that. It's hard to top Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, for one thing; more pertinently, if cruelly, the plays simply aren't that good. Holiday is all downhill after the first hour, and Philadelphia similarly tends to collapse into sogginess whenever Hepburn has a nervous breakdown; humanism becomes bad melodrama. But there's much greatness here, almost enough to justify the film's high reputation: the social tete-a-tetes, of course, Grant's opening assault on Hepburn, and the rare, to-be-savored interaction of Grant and Jimmy Stewart. In the clip above, a drunken Stewart trades banter with (and somehow almost holds his own against) a sober Grant; filming good theater, Cukor doesn't push the pacing much, allowing much time for "business" just for its own delightful sake.

ORDET (1955)

If you watch the opening titles of Carl Th. Dreyer's Ordet, you will see only one person credited -- not Dreyer or any of the cast members, but Kaj Munk, who penned the passion play on which the film is based. This deference Dreyer shows to Munk here is important, since few adaptations of plays respect their source material more than Ordet does. In bringing the drama to the screen, Dreyer employs next to none of the traditional devices that are generally used to "open up" a play -- most of the action takes place inside of two neighboring houses, few extras are seen, and characters can sometimes be seen looking at offscreen action, much like they would on the stage, without a cutaway to what they're seeing. Yet at the same time, Ordet is always completely cinematic, using the resources of film less to enlarge the film's world than to observe it in keen, precise detail. If Ordet is deliberately paced, that's because Dreyer takes the time to burrow deeply into his characters' lives and the community in which they live. In the hands of a less capable director, Kaj Munk's play would come off as shameless and more than a little preachy, especially considering how the story ends. But with Dreyer's serenely confident direction, Ordet creates a hushed atmosphere that infuriates most audiences but which will enthrall more patient viewers. And it's this hush that's key to the movie's greatness, creating a world with plenty of empty spiritual space just waiting to be filled. It's only because Dreyer's direction has created a world in which the possibility of grace is very real that the film's final scene has the impact it has.

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (AKA FALSTAFF) (1965)

As far as adaptations go, Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight is an interesting case. All the dialogue comes right out of Shakespeare, but the structure of the film comes from Welles' production "Five Kings." No matter -- Chimes is a great Shakespeare movie, the dramatic saga of the portly knight that the Bard never got around to writing. Aside from the comic romp The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff was largely a supporting player, yet he became one of Shakespeare's most enduring and beloved characters, and Chimes at Midnight perfectly encapsulates why. A far cry from the noble rulers in whose orbit he circled, Falstaff was a knight gone to seed -- fat, dissolute, always in debt, with a weakness for women and the drink. But then, this was what makes him so relatable to the groundlings -- after all, it's difficult to empathize with the troubles of ruling a sovereign nation, but easy to identify with being low on cash. In addition, the more expansive nature of the cinematic medium allowed Welles to mount a battle scene, all the better to show Falstaff packed into a suit of armor, wandering aimlessly at the rear of the battle, the polar opposite of the valiant knights of legend. But while Falstaff sometimes came off as a figure of fun in Shakespeare, Welles' choice to shift the focus from the kings to Falstaff himself works to give the character nobility in his own right. Welles' performance helps immeasurably -- he's such a life force that you can understand why those in his life love him and forgive him his trespasses. The shift in focus pays off most profoundly in the end once his old companion Prince Hal, now Henry V, has assumed the throne. In the original, this scene marks the new king's putting aside his old, innocuous ways. But by seeing the action through Falstaff's eyes, Henry's cold proclamation, "I know thee not, old man," becomes heartbreaking. It's easy to understand why Henry snubs his old friend, but still -- Falstaff really deserved better.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Vadim Rizov, Paul Clark

OST: "The Man with the Golden Arm"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:15:00 GMT

By the 1950s, jazz was undergoing one of its most memorable revolutions. Swing was long dead, and bop had evolved into post-bop, with its moody blues tones balanced by often-jarring tonal shifts and improvisations that hinged on chords and scales rather than melodies. There was something about the most inventive post-bop that seemed perfectly suited to the era's urban vibe; just as hip-hop would form the soundtrack to the big-city crime dramas of the 1980s and 1990s, a certain style of post-bop, characterized by loud brassy stings and sizzling, sub-surface rhythms made up the "crime jazz" that characterized some of the greatest <i>noir</i> films of the fifties. Rarely did the studios entrust the writing of this style of music to actual jazz musicians, however, who in addition to being on the wrong side of the color line were considered unreliable, moody and temperamental. Though there were a few notable exceptions -- such as the appearance of Chico Hamilton's quintet in The Sweet Smell of Success -- generally, the work fell on classically trained white studio pros the producers felt could conjure up the proper mood.

Some of the most memorable scores of the period followed this model: Henry Mancini's impossibly tense, Latin-jazz-influenced score to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, David Raskin's haunting, echoing, almost atonal work in The Big Combo, and legitimate jazz legend Duke Ellington's jarring, ringing, near-perfect score to Anatomy of a Murder should be counted with Hamilton's work in Sweet Smell as high points of the day. But Elmer Bernstein? Long a controversial figure amongst devotees of Hollywood soundtracks, his work neatly divides opinion between those who think he's a hard-working, underrated genius and those who think he's a hack whose reputation for greatness rests on nothing more than having stuck around so long. Bernstein was, likewise, no jazzman; his stuff generally had a formalist rigor that came from his classical training, and he possessed none of the soaring genius or improvisational acumen of his unrelated namesake Leonard. Bernstein had started out in Hollywood doing low-budget Poverty Row pictures (like the infamous Robot Monster) and graduated to fame and fortune writing material that was memorable for a particularly strong, solid hook: the martial drumming and soaring horns of The Great Escape and the rolling, triumphal stings of The Ten Commandments. He was a student of Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, and the music he wrote was meant to uplift the spirit and stir the soul, not to accompany the mournful, half-crazy ruminations of a heroin junkie. Who could possibly have known that putting him in charge of the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm would be precisely the thing to do?

Frank Sinatra, for one. Sinatra knew Elmer Bernstein well from his early sojourns in Hollywood, and once he was cast to play the lead in Otto Preminger's adaptation of a harrowing Nelson Algren novel about a recovering junkie, he approached the director -- not known for his stylistic daring -- and tried to convince him that Bernstein could swing. Preminger decided to take a chance, and as a result, two careers were charged with new vigor: Sinatra won widespread praise for his performance, and convinced skeptical critics that he was capable of being a great actor. As for the composer, he turned in, to the surprise of everyone but Francis Albert Sinatra, one of the most compelling -- and compulsively re-listenable -- crypto-jazz scores of the 1950s. When combined with one of Saul Bass' most stunning title sequences, it all adds up to an absolutely riveting blend of music and visual. Anyone teaching a class about the particular spirit of that period of urban drama needs nothing more for their audiovisual centerpiece than the first five minutes of The Man with the Golden Arm.

BEST TRACKS: The finest tracks on the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm are those where Bernstein collaborated with an actual jazzman -- conducter, arranger, trumpeter and former Woody Herman sideman Shorty Rogers. Rogers' bold, accusatory horn is a big part of what makes the movie's opening theme -- better known as "Frankie Machine", after the name of Sinatra's character -- so unforgettable, and his deft arrangement and understanding of Elmer Bernstein's distinct sense of melody, combined with his own rhythmic sensibility, also makes a success of the wonderfully chaotic "Audition". Other great tracks include the manic "Breakup: Flight/Louie's/Burlesque" medley and the mournful "Finale". Overall, it works thematically, but is still strong enough to stand on its own as a skillful period jazz record.

Related Posts:

OST: The Pink Panther

OST: Blue Velvet

Set Your DVR!: November 17 - 24, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

My infant daughter has been sick this weekend, and I'm not feeling too great myself. So this may be the most slapdashed, pithy-free column yet. Keep those expectations low! Adam Christ asked last week about setting up an online movie discussion based on one of the flicks I mention in this column. I don't have an answer for him, but I promise to figure it out soon. Anyway, here's what I like this week. As always, be sure to mention any glaring omissions in the comments thread and I'll edit the column to add your recommendation.

Mon, Nov 17:

6/7 pm: Restoration on IFC.

8:30/9:30 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) on TCM. This is the Charles Laughton version.

10:15/11:15 pm: The New World on IFC (repeat on 11/18 at 2:45/3:45 am). By god, what a great movie.

Tues, Nov 18:

3:30/4:30 am: The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit on AMC. Quite a contrast from Mad Men, but it should provide a little something to help tide us over.

5:05/6:05 am: Incident at Loch Ness on IFC (repeat at 10:15/11:15 am and 3:25/4:25 pm). This is not a great or even good movie. But it is rather fun to watch Werner Herzog parody himself.

5:15/6:15 pm: Ride The High Country on TCM. One of my all-time favorite films, this is the first movie Sam Peckinpah directed that's really a Peckinpah movie. Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, two actors a little past their sell-by date, are perfectly cast as Old West gunfighters in a similar autumnal period of their lives. There's a fascinating shift in tone about halfway into the movie. I don't mean to detract from the first half when I say that it has that slight remove from reality that's not too unfamiliar to fans of earlier Westerns, especially those of John Ford and Anthony Mann. The cowboys may be tough, but they're pretty clean and well-spoken. At the halfway point, the action moves to a rough mining camp, which shepherds a more realistic look at the past: grimy, ugly, amoral. Westerns would never be the same.

7/8 pm: To Have And Have Not on TCM. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone loves Bogey & Bacall.

10:30/11:30 pm: Top Hat on TCM. Astaire. Rogers. You know the score.

Wed, Nov 19:

5/6 am Burden of Dreams on IFC (repeat at 12:35/1:35 pm). Brilliant documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo.

9:15/10:15 am: Picnic at Hanging Rock on IFC (repeat at 3:45/4:45 pm).

5:35/6:35 pm: Ride With The Devil on IFC (repeat 11/20 at 4/5 am).

10:05/11:05 pm: The Last Wave on IFC (repeat on 11/20 at 2:05/3:05 am).

Thurs, Nov 20:

12:45/1:45 am: Sunrise on TCM. One of the greatest film of the silent era. I was fortunate enough a few weeks ago to catch a showing of this in a friend's film class with a bunch of people in their late teens/early 20s. I was a little worried that some of the kookier silent movie tropes would lose the audience, but I was dead wrong. They loved it. It's a loveable movie.

8/9 am: Duel on CHILLER (repeat on 11/21 at 2/3 am). Spielberg's first film.

9:45/10:45 am: The Cars That Ate Paris (repeat at 2:35/3:35 pm). An oddball film from early in Peter Weir's career about a town that bolsters its income by causing horrendous car accidents.

8:45/9:45 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) on TCM. This is the Lon Chaney version.

Fri, Nov 21:

1/2 am: Citizen Kane on TCM. I don't know if you've ever heard of this film, but it apparently has some sort of reputation.

3:15/4:15 am: The Stranger on TCM. Orson Welles' most conventionally-directed movie.

8:45/9:45 am: High and Low on IFC (repeat at 3/4 pm). Kurosawa and Mifune do crime drama. Their best movie that doesn't involve samurais.

11 am/12 pm: Vanishing Point on FMC.

Sat, Nov 22:

3:45/4:45 am: Die, Monster, Die! on TCM. In Germany, this is The Monster, The!

7/8 am: The Sword of Doom on IFC. One of the finest samurai movies that wasn't directed by Akira Kurosawa.

4:45/5:45 pm: Vertigo on TCM. I'm breaking my no-Hitchcock rule again. But no matter however long it's been since you last saw this, it's been too long.

Sun, Nov 23:

5/6 am: Bend of the River on AMC. Mann/Stewart Western.

5/6 am: A Night In Casablanca on TCM. Marx Brothers.

1/2 pm: The Thomas Crown Affair on TCM. Steve McQueen!

Mon, Nov 24:

8/9 pm: The Proposition on IFC (repeat 11/25 at 12/1 am). John Hillcoat's Aussie Western.

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

5. CASINO ROYALE (1967)

By 1967, the James Bond franchise was so fully entrenched as an iconic series that it was begging for a smart, funny satire to deflate its growing gasbaggery. Unfortunately, Casino Royale wasn’t it. The best Bond spoof of the era was on television, in the form of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s terrific Get Smart series, while Casino Royale – a one-off production of dubious legal status – proved to be a sprawling, unfunny mess. It’s too bad, too; it wasted one of the best 007 novels (the first, in fact), with a great villain and some excellent set-pieces, and worse than that, it wasted a fantastic cast including Peter Sellers, David Niven, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, William Holden, Deborah Kerr and John Huston. What’s the problem? The direction is a total mess which tries to cram far too much plot (and far too many jokes that don’t work) into far too small a space. The script, likewise, just isn’t funny enough – the rapid pace of the gags can’t conceal the fact that they mostly don’t work, and none of the great actors are given much of a role to chew on. It’s fortunate that the Daniel Craig era of 007 did so much to rehabilitate the Casino Royale name; for nearly forty years, it had been associated with one of the crummiest Bond films ever made.

4. GOLDENEYE (1985)

Here was a (pardon the pun) golden opportunity to re-invent the James Bond series: a new leading man (Pierce Brosnan, succeeding the poorly received Timothy Dalton) and a new era (following the collapse of the Soviet Union) should have added up to a new 007 ready to take on the 21st century. It was not to be. GoldenEye is about as rote as the series gets, plodding joylessly through all the usual Stations of the Cross. If not for the presence of Famke Janssen at maximum hottitude as femme fatale Xenia Onatopp, it would easily be the dullest of all Bonds. Certainly Sean Bean, as a fellow MI6 agent turned traitor, is the most boring Bond villain ever. The only real innovation is the casting of Judi Dench as M, but aside from one throwaway line about Bond being a misogynist and a Cold War relic, the potential sparks never fly. The movie's highlight is the obligatory Q scene, which plays like a Get Smart outtake. Not a good sign.

3. LIVE & LET DIE (1974)

In a series that has spanned more than three decades, a big part of the trick of keeping the Bond franchise alive has been finding the right balance between stubbornly maintaining its own identity and incorporating enough elements from a changing world to keep Bond from seeming like an anachronism. Never did the series lose its footing more disastrously than in the first installment starring Roger Moore. For a start, it was the first Bond movie to feature a theme song by an out-and-out rock band instead of a jazz singer or lounge crooner -- and make no mistake, if the song itself is no great highlight of Paul McCartney's career, better him than Duran Duran or A-Ha. But at a deeper level, it's the "blacksploitation" Bond movie, a real historical artifact and a pretty embarrassing one. First-time viewers who had barely begun to start adjusting to the new, male-mannequin Bond of the Roger Moore era were subjected to the sight of this smarmy British cracker sauntering into a Harlem restaurant called "Fillet of Soul" and mixing it up with the confused-looking brothers inside, who might have thought they were waiting for John Shaft. Yaphet Kotto, as great an actor as ever got assigned the job of trying to think up an amusing death for 007, got stuck with the lamest super-villain role in the series to date: his name ("Mr. Big"), his mission (to dominate...not the world, but the heroin trade), and his death scene, which is reminiscent of the time that the Pink Panther balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade ran amok, all are pitifully unworthy of him. The movie, which is set in a world where every black person in North America (including Gloria Hendry as the first black Bond girl) seems to be in on Mr. Big's conspiracy to blanket the cities with horse, and in which these wretched lost souls are kept in line by their primitive susceptibility to voodoo, tries to balance things out by including a stereotypical big-bellied Loozianna sheriff (Clifton James) who co-stars in an endless back country car chase that would have been beneath the dignity of Hal Needham.

2. MOONRAKER (1979)

This post-Star Wars meld of Bond with sci-fi space opera finds the series sunk deep in its decadent phase. The film cost a reported $34 million, twenty million more than its predecessor, The Spy Who Loved Me, and while the investment paid off at the box office, the strain shows. No other Bond film surpasses it in terms of the number of exotic locations, huge sets, and beautiful women for Bond to beat off, but it's short on energy and wit, which were once the defining qualities of the series -- and which the producers, and maybe audiences hooked on the formula, now judged to be superfluous. Most of the cast, including Moore, Lois Chiles as the heroine, and Michel Lonsdale as the supervillain Drax, look ready to join a crowd scene in a George Romero zombie movie; the movie's only charm comes from Richard Kiel, reprising his role as a lovesick Jaws before being consigned to join Sheriff J. W. Pepper in Recurring Character Limbo.

1. A VIEW TO A KILL (1985)

Considering how easy it is to get fans to start arguing about most aspects of the Bond series, the general consensus that this is without a doubt the sorriest Bond movie of all time is so solidly formed that it's almost uncanny. Aside from the fact that, at 57, Roger Moore looked readier than ever to be put out to pasture, it didn't necessarily look doomed on paper. The title theme by Duran Duran is so howlingly, garishly wrong that it's kind of right, it was sweet of them to give John Steed, i.e. Patrick McNee, a role as one of Bond's doomed helpmates, and whose ears didn't perk up at the suggestion of Christopher Walken as a Bond villain? Walken, his hair artificially lemon-flavored, plays a psychopathic ex-KGB agent who was created by a Nazi mad scientist; now rich as the owner of a microchip-manufacturing company, he is meant to be such a cool killer as to be devoid of human emotions -- which turns out to be not such a hot idea, because when Walken applies all his considerable Method intensity to being devoid of emotion, he's da void, all right. Also not helping out are Grace Jones, who packs surprisingly little personality inside her outre exterior but whose bedroom clinches with either Moore or Walken can still give you nightmares, and, as the heroine, Tanya Roberts, who actually does less for this movie than she did for her starring gig the year before as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Set Your DVR!: October 27 - November 3, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Halloween week means more vintage horror! TCM in particular is even exceeding their own high standards this week, shoehorning in a night of Billy Wilder on Tuesday (nothing is recommended because everything is fairly well-known) and a few film noir classics on Wednesday before cranking up the scary on Thursday. As always, let me know in comments if you see something I shouldn’t have missed!

Mon, Oct 27:

11 am/12 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. As I said last week, it’s not a great movie, but it has a few iconic scenes.

Tues, Oct 28:

5/6 am: The Invisible Man on AMC. Based on Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of race in America... whoops, that’s not right. No one’s ever made that movie. This is James Whale’s classic horror film starring Claude Rains.

6:45/7:45 am: Bride of Frankenstein on AMC. And this is James Whale’s frankenlady movie.

7/8 am: The Desperate Hours on TCM. Neat little thriller about convicts on the lam starring Humphrey Bogart.

11 pm/12 am: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat.

Wed, Oct 29:

1/2 pm: An American Werewolf in London on AMC. Repeat. Last time I’m going to mention it, in fact.

7/8 pm: Murder, My Sweet on TCM. Killer adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.

10:45/11:45 pm: Out of the Past on TCM. Film noir classic with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, who also made three of the Val Lewton-produced no-budget horror films we’re recommending this week.

Thurs, Oct 30:

12:30/1:30 am: They Live By Night on TCM. Earlier movie based on the same source material as Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us, which is one of his most underappreciated movies.

3/4 am: House of Wax on CHILLER. Vincent Price’s classic. Note: You will not see Paris Hilton in this movie.

3:45/4:45 am: The Thing From Another World on TCM. Howard Hawks directing an early sci-fi/horror movie. The John Carpenter movie The Thing was a remake.

6:30/7:30 am: The Beast with Five Fingers on TCM. FIVE WHOLE FINGERS! YAAAAAARGH!

7:30/8:30 am: 8 Women on LOGO. Francois Ozon assembles every major French actress of our time for a half-musical/half-murder mystery.

8/9 am: I Walked With A Zombie on TCM. Jacques Tourneur doing horror on a Val Lewton production.

9:15/10:15 am: Curse of the Demon on TCM. Recut version of the horror film Night of the Demon. Directed by Jacques Tourneur applying what he has learned from doing horror on Val Lewton productions.

10:45/11:45 am: Gerry on IFC (repeat at 4/5 pm and on 11/31 at 4:10/5:10 am). I just keep recommending it!

5:30/6:30 pm: House of Usher on TCM. Roger Corman! Vincent Price! Edgar Allan Poe! You might be surprised to learn that this is a tender romantic comedy.

7/8 pm: Dead of Night on TCM. Creepy little horror anthology from Ealing Studios. And no Sir Alec Guinness to be found!

Fri, Oct 31:

A quick note: TCM owns Halloween programming. You can’t go wrong with anything they’re showing all day.

1/2 am: Kwaidan on TCM. A beloved Japanese horror anthology.

3:45/4:45: Spirits of the Dead on TCM. A triptych of short films from Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini (which of these names is not like the others?). I’ve never seen it, but the cast of Jane Fonda, Brigitte Bardot, Terence Stamp, and Alain Delon sounds promising.

6:30/7:30 am: Cat People on TCM. More Lewton & Tourneur!

7/8 am: The Honeymoon Killers on IFC. Still brilliant, still vile.

8/9 am: Freaks on TCM.

8:30/9:30 am: Halloween on AMC. Halloween? Hasn’t everyone seen this? I suspect that some people have forgotten how effective it is with almost no budget and no special effects.

9:15/10:15 am: The Devil Doll on TCM. How many ways can I say “creepy”? This one’s directed by the creator of Freaks, Tod Browning.

2:30/3:30 pm: The Body Snatcher on TCM. More Val Lewton! With Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi!

4/5 pm: Bedlam on TCM. And even more Val Lewton! This one’s with just Karloff.

7/8 pm: The Host on G4. Korean horror movie with great special effects and a cruel sense of humor.

Sat, Nov 1:

1/2 am: The Host on G4 (repeats at 11/12 am).

1:30/2:30 am: Blood Feast on TCM. Things start getting ugly overnight at TCM. This is a challenger to Plan 9 From Outer Space for the coveted Worst Movie Ever award. Highly recommended! Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, whom you can read more about in our very own Scott Von Doviak’s excellent book Hick Flicks, which is a perfect stocking-stuffer for the film geek in your family.

2:45/3:45 am: 2,000 Maniacs on TCM. A follow-up to Blood Feast. I understand that the name is misleading, as Lewis only had to budget for 1,986 maniacs.

3/4 am: The Blob on CHILLER (Repeat at 6:00 am/7:00 am). Steve McQueen in the no-budget flick that might just be a parable about the insidious effects of CREEPING COMMUNISM! BOOGA BOOGA! Starring Barack Obama’s tax policies as The Blob and Sarah Palin as the small-town mayor who knows how to stop it. If only the people will listen!

5:15/6:15 am: Forbidden Planet on TCM. Ah, the horror is starting to subside. What better way to recover than a movie that puts Shakespeare’s The Tempest in space?

7/8 am: My Darling Clementine on AMC. One of the finest classic Westerns of all time. Starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford.

7/8 am: Sanshiro Sugata on IFC. Akira Kurosawa’s first film, this is a standard issue wuxia film in terms of plot and progression, but with Kurosawa’s unerring eye behind the lens, there’s moments of stunning beauty to be found. Unreleased on DVD, and a must for Kurosawa fanatics.

9:30/10:30 am: The Last Wave on IFC (repeat at 2:45/3:45 pm). Richard Chamberlain’s most shocking role (in which discernible acting can be detected!) about apocalyptic aboriginal weirdness in Australia. Directed by Peter Weir.

Sun, Nov 2:

Happy birthday to my mom and my brother-in-law Jeff!

7/8 am: Solaris on IFC. This is the Tarkovsky original, not the Soderbergh remake. A deeply sad, meditative movie about love and self and Otherness. I’m being purposely vague, but this review is only two sentences, and this movie deserves much more than that.

8:30/9:30 am: Macbeth on TCM. Orson Welles’s Macbeth with the bad accents and great filmmaking.

5:35/6:35 pm: The New World on IFC. Terrence Malick’s film about how struggle defines all human relationships, despite the transcendental indifference of nature. Did I just write that? This is easily one of the best films of the last decade, so just watch it.

8/9 pm: The Proposition on IFC (repeat on 11/3 at 1:15/2:15 am). John Hillcoat’s Aussie Western written by Nick Cave. It wants to be a Peckinpah movie, but it’s not even a Boetticher. That’s not to say it’s worthless, but it bites off more than it can chew. Hillcoat’s the director of the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I hope is better than this.

9:45/10:45 pm: The Year of Living Dangerously on TCM. Remember when Mel Gibson could act? Good times. Oh, ok. This is most definitely not a good time. Directed by Peter Weir.

11 pm/12 am (11/3): True Stories on VH1CL (repeat on 11/3 at 7/8 pm). It’s not a good movie, but it’s fun. This is David Byrne’s labor of love, a deliberately quirky look at America from one of its deliberately quirky pop culture figures. The Talking Heads songs aren’t their best, but they’re pretty good, and pretty good looks good from here.

Mon, Nov 3:

3/4 am: Isle of the Dead on CHILLER. Another Val Lewton production! Why is it on after Halloween? Apparently CHILLER has started the Halloween 2009 season early.

5:05/6:05 am: Tom Dowd & the Language of Music on IFC (repeat at 12:30/1:30 pm). Delightful documentary about the man with the golden ear who flawlessly recorded some of the greats of 20th century music.

10:05/11:05 am: The New World on IFC. Repeat.

10:30/11:30 am: The Man From Laramie on TCM. Anthony Mann Western with James Stewart. Not the best Mann Western, but it’ll do.

8/9 pm: Me and You and Everyone We Know on IFC (repeat 11/4 at 12/1 am). Miranda July is cute and a little alienating. John Hawkes learned from Deadwood the fine art of saying everything he has to say with his eyebrows. Somehow, despite the nearly lethal levels of quirk, July has made a movie with an enormous amount of heart.

In Other Blogs: Evil “Touch”?

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

You might think everyone would be happy now that the latest DVD release of Touch of Evil contains both the originally released theatrical cut and the version restored to the dictates of the famous Orson Welles memo a decade ago. But no! Apparently there are some aspect ratio issues to contend with. At his eponymous blog, Dave Kehr writes, “the sentiment of the group seems to be that we all want to vent about the Touch of Evil 50th anniversary edition, with its highly controversial 1.85 aspect ratio. There’s clearly no cut and dried answer here, in the absence of any documentary evidence, but my eye tells me that it’s too tight. The shot above shows some obvious trimming at the upper frame line, but for the most part the 1.85 version that Universal has released seems to give preference to head room while cutting out the less conspicuous compositional elements at the bottom of the frame. It all feels a bit tenuous and unstable to me, like a chord that hasn’t quite been allowed to resolve itself.”

At Parallax View, Sean Axmaker isn’t so sure about that. “I respect Kehr’s eye as I do his insight, but watching the revised cut in 1.85 for the first time was a revelation to me. Compositions became more dramatic, framed more tightly around Welles’ groupings. The long-takes in Sanchez’s apartment feel more claustrophobic, without so much of the expanse of the blank ceiling open above their heads.” Adding to the confusion is the fact that the two versions included on the DVD aren’t the only ones out there. “Today, no less than four cuts of the picture exist: the original 93-minute release version, the 108-minute preview version rediscovered in the Universal vaults in 1975 (and which had since supplanted the release version in all theatrical showings), a kind of unholy marriage created for video that cuts footage exclusive to the short version into the preview version, and the 1998 ‘revision’ of the film. This latter project, produced by Rick Schmidlin and edited by Walter Murch with Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum serving as advisor, is being branded as a ‘restored version,’ but that’s a studio marketing move. As the project participants understand, it’s really an unprecedented and still unique attempt to retroactively honor a director by following his directions in repairing an artwork taken out of his hands. For the sake of accuracy, I will be referring the 1998 cut as the ‘revised version’ or the ‘1998 revision.’”

Another lavish new DVD release gets the business at Beyond the Multiplex. “What remains profoundly upsetting and unsettling about Salò after 33 years is that the pornographic and scatological and violent images it depicts — if you want a list of the specific outrages, find it somewhere else — emerge in a context of such rigorous formal beauty. With lavish production design by Dante Ferretti (later a collaborator with Fellini and Scorsese), costumes by Danilo Donati, music by Ennio Morricone, settings in spectacularly decaying Italian villas and the most austere, gorgeous camerawork of Pasolini’s career, Salò captures the Italian film industry at its postwar aesthetic height.”

At Hulu Blog, guest blogger Kevin Smith reminisces about the first time he saw Slacker (which you can now view there for free). “After overpaying for both parking and popcorn, we settled into what seats we could find together in the packed theater of a midnight screening. And once the trailer for Hal Hartley's Trust concluded, the Orion Classics logo lit up the screen and introduced me to my future. For the next 100 minutes or so, I was agog. My jaw literally hung open as this shaggy paean to those who follow the road not taken unspooled, offering me a glimpse into a free-associative world of ideas instead of plot, people instead of characters, and Nowheresville, Texas, instead of the usual California or New York settings most movies elected to feature (that ‘Nowheresville’ was really Austin speaks volumes on how culturally bereft I was at the time). That night, director Richard Linklater and his film not only captured my imagination, he (and it) captured my heart -- not to mention kick-started my ambition.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Spoutblog takes a look at 10 Underrated Bill Murray Roles. For instance, “The Writer” in The Lost City. “Another movie that’s not very good and that not a lot of people have seen is Andy Garcia’s labor of love set in Havana during the Cuban revolution. And like most movies featuring a minor appearance from Murray, The Lost City is at least worth watching just for him. In fact, you could easily just fast-forward to each of his scenes and not miss anything since his role and performance is so out of place anyway.”

Set Your DVR!: October 6 - October 12, 2008

Hayden Childs — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Hi, Screengrab readers! For my first post, I thought I’d kick off a series in which I suggest various movies worth recording off of cable TV in the upcoming week. See, I know that since you read the Screengrab, you have a fairly solid grasp on the movies and movie history, but there’s always some that slip through the cracks. The movies I’ll mention here will give you a chance to catch up on those that you might have overlooked. If I miss something, please post it in the comments!

Here’s the skinny: I’m assuming, of course, that you’ve gone to the trouble of getting a DVR (or have a VCR you know how to set, at the very least) to go along with the cable you pay for month after month, but you don’t always keep an eye on upcoming movies. Since you’re reading the Screengrab, I’m not going to recommend movies that everyone recommends, such as Singin’ In The Rain (which, incidentally, I record just about every time it’s on, because I always have time to watch one of the dance numbers). I’m not going to be too esoteric, either. I’ll use an in-law test: I’ll stick with movies that I doubt my mother-in-law has seen, and that way will try to catch some of the great movies that are more likely to slip through the cracks. One more thing: no premium channels, mainly because I can’t afford them.

Mon, Oct. 6:
Nothing here. Good thing, too, since I’m not posting this until Tuesday Morning

Tues, Oct. 7:
9:00 am: Ace In The Hole on TCM. I don’t think this is a very good movie. But plenty of reviewers disagree with me, so I’m going to mention it. Actually, by the time this goes live, it'll probably be too late.

8:00 pm: Don’t Look Back on VH1CL (repeating at 11:30 pm). Maybe you’ve seen this, and maybe not. But it’s one of the great rock documentaries and, if you watch it, you’ll enjoy I’m Not There that much more.

Wed, Oct. 8:
11:45 pm: The Gay Divorcee on TCM. I mentioned I like dancing, right? This is Fred and Ginger at their best.

Th, Oct. 9:
1:45 am: Top Hat on TCM. I take those last comments back. This one is Fred and Ginger at their best.

7:00 pm: Four Jacques Tati films (Jour de Fete, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle, and Play Time) on TCM. Ah, the whimsy! Can you stand it? Honestly, I’ve only seen the last of these, and I wasn’t much taken with it at the time. But attitudes change. I intend to record ‘em all.

Fri, Oct. 10:
12:15 am: Play Time on TCM. Already mentioned this.

2:30 am: The General on TCM. Yeah, yeah, I know. Everyone should have seen this by now. But not everyone has, so I hereby recommend that you record and watch it if you fall into that camp.

3:45 am: The Navigator on TCM. Same deal as above.

5:00 am: Macbeth on TCM. This is Orson Welles’ 1948 version where everyone affects a crappy Scottish accent, even the actual Scots in the film. Welles’ accent in particular is so horrid and depressing that it may cause you to think less of Citizen Kane. However! This is one of those movies that has enough greatness and interest elsewhere - in this case, in the visual language of the film and the minor plot changes - that it’s worth a viewing despite its deficiencies.

7:00 am: Gerry on IFC. I love the hell out of Van Sant’s death trilogy (is that a spoiler? I’m not sure). Some viewers find them long and pointless, but I think all three have a transcendent beauty to them that gives meaning to the pointless death in each and begs the question: what’s the point of anyone’s death? In this one, two guys get lost in the desert. There’s a ten-minute tracking shot near the end where they walk from the dark into the morning sun without changing their positions to each other that I think is one of the prettiest scenes in all cinema. It’s almost Abstract Expressionism. Don’t watch it if you don’t like Rothko, but if you do, snap this one up.

8:00 pm: Dick on Oxygen (again at 10:00 pm). This movie looked stupid and fluffy in the previews, and I didn’t watch it until a friend forced it on me. It’s hilarious. Best as the second half of a double feature with All The President’s Men.

Sat, Oct. 11:
6:30 am: Journey Into Fear on TCM. Entertaining little spy thriller with Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten.

7:00 am: Samurai 2 on IFC. The second part of the epic trilogy. Even if you haven’t seen the first part, the plot is fairly self-explanatory and thoroughly enjoyable.

10:15 am: Primer on IFC (repeat at 3:00 pm). Smart, smart no-budget sci-fi thriller. I had to watch it a couple of times (and finally consult a website) to untangle the central mystery, but that’s part of the fun.

11:00 am: After The Thin Man on TCM. The second Thin Man movie. That’s all I need to say, right?

3:00 pm: The Haunting on TCM. This is the 1963 Robert Wise movie, not the awful remake. I recommended it to a friend last Halloween, and she told me it was the worst movie she’d ever seen. I think she’s very, very wrong. It still creeps me the hell out.

Sun, Oct. 12:
5:00 am: 24 hours of Paul Newman movies (The Rack, Until They Sail, Torn Curtain, Exodus, Sweet Bird Of Youth, Hud, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Cool Hand Luke, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Rachel, Rachel, and The Outrage) on TCM. Have you seen all of these? I haven’t. Go on, catch up on the guy’s work.

7:00 am: Cleo From 5 to 7 on IFC. Many classics of the French New Wave spend so much time and effort trying to unlock the mysterious, riddle-like conundrum of the enigmatic, baffling desires of oh-so-fickle womanhood that no one will forget they were made by men. This one was actually made by a women, and you can tell.

6:45 pm: Last Days on IFC (showing again Monday at 3:35 am). The third in Van Sant’s death trilogy. I suspect it plays much better if you don’t really care about Kurt Cobain. I don’t, and I loved it.

7:00 pm: Dave Chappelle’s Block Party on MTV2 (repeat on Monday at 5:00 pm). Aw yeah! Somehow Michel Gondry and Dave Chappelle combined forces to make a concert film that is good-natured, loose-limbed, and funny in ways that most concert films could not even conceive.

Mon, Oct. 13:
In case I’m late getting the next installment up on Monday, I just want to mention the following:

11:00 am: George Washington on IFC (repeat at 4:15 pm). Slow and thoughtful take on African-American youths in a go-nowhere Southern town directed by the guy who made Pineapple Express. Obvious influences: Terrence Malick and Charles Burnett.

2:00 pm: Vanishing Point on FMC. The lesser of the two great existential car movies of 1971 (Two-Lane Blacktop is the other). This one’s still a pop culture point-of-reference, especially for Tarantino movies. Definitely worth a viewing.

DVD Digest for October 7, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It’s a massive week for classic films, and a surprisingly good one for new releases too, once you get past the big Hollywood titles…

DVD of the Week: There was no small amount of competition for this spot, not merely because of the jaw-dropping number of classic titles being release but also due to one of TV’s best sitcoms seeing its most recent season bow on DVD store shelves. But with all the great stuff that’s hitting stores this week, to my eyes there was only one logical choice- Universal’s Touch of Evil 50th Anniversary Edition. It would be one thing if this DVD was simply a cash-in, a new pressing of the previously released 1998 cut of the film. But joining the “restored” version of the film are both the original theatrical cut and an additional “preview version”, both of which are being released on DVD for the first time. In addition, there are plenty of extras both old and new, including commentary tracks to correspond with each of the three available versions of the movie. What more could a Touch of Evil fan ask for? How about a reproduction of the legendary Orson Welles memo that led to the 1998 restoration? Yep, that’s in here too. I don’t normally double-dip my DVDs, but I’m definitely going to make the upgrade this time.

But wait, there’s more! Disney is releasing a 2-disc “Platinum Edition” of their 1959 classic Sleeping Beauty, packed with plenty of extras for both family audiences and animation buffs. Criterion is releasing two more films from the French master of crime dramas, Jean-Pierre Melville- Le Doulos (starring Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Le Deuxieme Souffle (with Lino Ventura). There are new 2-disc special editions of three of Hitchcock’s most iconic classics- Psycho, Rear Window, and Vertigo (all Universal). And Ray Harryhausen is representin’ here too, with a new DVD of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad 50th Anniversary Edition (Sony, also Blu-Ray), plus the Ray Harryhausen Giftset (Sony, also Blu-Ray), which includes previously-released editions of 20 Million Miles to Earth, It Came From Beneath the Sea, and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, plus collectible Ymir figurine.

Also, like musicals? Then pick up Fox’s The Alice Faye Collection Volume 2, which contains Hollywood Cavalcade, The Great American Broadcast, Four Jills in a Jeep, Rose of Washington Square, and Hello, Frisco, Hello (also available separately). And with the winter months coming sooner than you’d think, you can start traveling in the comfort of your own home with The Michael Palin Collection (Warner), which collects the amiable Python’s adventures Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Hemingway Adventure, Great Railways Journeys, Sahara and Himalaya into one handy box set. Finally, Warner is releasing two very different classic titles, The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Watership Down Deluxe Edition. So yeah, something for everyone.

But wait, there’s more! Two of my favorite films from the first half of 2008 are hitting the streets today- Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (Genius Productions) and Stuart Gordon’s Stuck (Image Entertainment). And two other acclaimed indies are getting released as well, The Visitor (Anchor Bay, also Blu-Ray) starring Screengrab fave Richard Jenkins, and Boy A (Genius Productions). And, oh yeah… The Happening (Fox, also Blu-Ray) and You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Although I’m not sure I want to know anybody who’d buy these instead of any of the aforementioned classics.

This week’s TV on DVD release is 30 Rock Season 2 (Universal), which finds Liz, Jack, Tracy, Kenneth the Page, and the rest of the TGS gang taking a trip to MILF Island, among other misadventures. Also this week: Brotherhood Season 2 (Paramount), How I Met Your Mother Season 3 (Fox), and The Simpsons Season 11 (Fox).

Finally, this week’s Halloween-heavy Blu-Ray only releases include: The Amityville Horror (MGM), Beetlejuice 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner), Body Heat (Warner), Young Frankenstein (Fox), Carrie (MGM), and Otis (Warner). No word on whether Carré Otis is somehow involved.

Screengrab Salutes: The Paul Newman Top Ten (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Notable individuals die all the time, and we react with varying degrees of sadness or indifference when their names appear in the weekly obituary sections of magazines like, say, Entertainment Weekly or Time.

But every now and then, a celebrity death truly shocks us, because we really, truly thought the individual in question had already died sometime in the late ‘80s.

Occasionally, though, we react to celebrity death with the heartfelt regret usually reserved for people we actually knew. I moped around for days after heart failure claimed Glenn “Divine” Milstead in 1988, and the 2006 loss of Robert Altman felt like the passing of a beloved, crotchety grandfather.

Paul Newman outlived them both, surviving to the ripe old age of 83. In fact, by a strange coincidence, Wikipedia just informed me that Newman and Altman were both somehow born in 1925, which simply doesn’t compute in my perceptual reckoning of things. How could Newman be older than Robert Altman, or my father, or...or Robert Redford, ferchrissakes? Intellectually, of course, I knew he was old: his film career started way back in 1954 with The Silver Chalice, though I always (erroneously) associated him more with the Baby Boomer class of Nicholson and Beatty, thanks to ‘60s and ‘70s classics like The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Yet, even as Newman aged before our eyes into one of cinema’s grumpy old men in films like Twilight and Road to Perdition, it somehow never registered that he was actually old old. I mean, the man drove freakin’ race cars! How can he be gone while Cheney continues relentlessly on?

Alas...and yet, my Screengrab colleague Phil Nugent has already written a fine memorial tribute to this impressive humanitarian, salad dressing mogul and celebrated paragon of “the Hollywood Elite,” and so we come not to bury Paul Newman but to praise him, and the Top Ten films we’ll always remember him by.

10. THE LONG HOT SUMMER (1958)

This Dixie-fried melodrama, directed by Martin Ritt (who later re-teamed with Newman for Hud), is supposed to be based on the writings of William Faulkner. As a treatment of a great American author it's a soap opera, but as a soap opera it's one hell of an overripe Southern-Gothic sudser, with Newman (modeling the latest in sweat-stained wifebeaters) and a cast that includes Orson Welles, Angela Lansbury, Lee Remick, and Anthony Franciosa making with the wild-eyed ravings in cracker accents that might have been delivered to the set in ten-gallon drums. In addition to its shameless entertainment value, it has a special sentimental place in Newman's oeuvre for marking the on-screen meeting of our hero and his offscreen heroine, Joanne Woodward. The plot revolves around a deal that Newman's hungry drifter, Ben Quick, makes with Welles' bloated paterfamilias, Will Varner, to win the hand of Varner's daughter, played by Woodward, who Will fears will otherwise marry poorly to a girly man played by Richard Anderson, AKA TV's Oscar Goldman. In the movie, Woodward remains stoically resistant to Newman's hard-bodied charms. In real life, not so much, and the two of them, who had met two years earlier while understudying the leads in Picnic (at a time when Newman was still inconveniently married to his first wife) reportedly spent much of the shoot making up for lost time. They would work together another dozen or so times, in co-starring gigs and in movies where Newman directed Woodward, but this is the movie that preserves the priceless and unforgettable sight of two very hot people first fully celebrating how hot they were for each other.

9. THE HUDSUCKER PROXY

One of the most amazing things about Paul Newman’s career was how long he was able to get away with working as a leading man. Well into his sixties and seventies, when most actors -- even A-list stars -- tend to be cast in father or mentor roles to nursemaid younger talent, Newman was still flashing those famous cobalt blues, attracting the women, and carrying movies on his ever-capable shoulders. Best of all, he made it work. Yet in his last two decades, Newman also took on several interesting supporting roles. He received an Oscar nomination for his work in Road to Perdition, and in his final theatrical film, he voiced Doc Hudson, the gruff paterfamilias of the town of Radiator Springs, in Pixar’s Cars (let’s forget Message in a Bottle, shall we?). But best of all was his work in the Coen brothers’ sadly under-appreciated The Hudsucker Proxy. In this Art Deco take on a Preston Sturges-style comedy, Newman might seem an ill fit for the role of Hudsucker Industries vice-president Sidney J. Mussburger, the sort of corporate fat cat that might once have been played by Akim Tamiroff. But damn if Newman isn’t a treat to watch. Having built a fruitful career on his ability to make acting look easy, here he takes the opposite tack, giving a performance as stylized as any he’s ever given. In lesser hands, it might have felt like overacting -- look no further than Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance in the same film for proof. But Newman pulls it off magnificently by somehow under-playing the role, never turning the character into an excuse to twist his (invisible) mustache. Instead, he simply turns the patented Newman charm back on itself, showing it used to an entirely different end. Who could ever forget the way he punctuates seemingly half his lines with a grunted “sure-sure”? In The Hudsucker Proxy, Newman gives us a tantalizing hint of what an irresistible character actor he might’ve been even if he hadn’t been so genetically blessed.

8. SLAP SHOT (1977)

It was asking way too much of Slap Shot for lightning to strike a third time. Hell, it was asking too much of The Sting for lightning to strike twice – and yet the second pairing of Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and director George Roy Hill, following the hugely successful Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid proved to be a giant hit as well, satisfying critics and audiences alike. But Hill’s third go-round with Newman in the lead role didn’t have a William Goldman writing the screenplay, and Robert Redford probably wouldn’t have played particularly well as one of the Hanson Brothers, so the two of them went it alone. The story of the final days of a fading, brawling, largely out-of-control minor league hockey team wasn’t as successful as the previous two films, and it certainly didn’t garner the same level of critical praise. But though some great supporting performances and a funny, filthy script by Nancy Dowd played their part, it’s undeniably a testament to Paul Newman’s undying charisma and likeability as an actor that a lot of people would name Slap Shot as their favorite of all his movies. Newman (who featured as one of his most lasting traits the appearance that he genuinely enjoyed what he did for a living) is clearly having a ball as the foul-mouthed, dysfunctional player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs (a character partly modeled on the notorious John Brophy). The role even spilled over into his real life: he complained to Time, seven years after the movie premiered, that since playing Reg Dunlop, his language had been “straight out of the locker room”.

Click Here for Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Yesterday's Hits: The Carpetbaggers (1964, Edward Dmytryk)

Paul Clark — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Carpetbaggers a hit?: Americans have long been fascinated with the lifestyles and misadventures of the filthy rich. While the wealthy and powerful may have the same urges and appetites we do, their affluence allows them to exert these on a much grander and more ambitious scale, and in more lavish settings. It was this idea that drove the lurid, sex-soaked novels of Harold Robbins, one of the most popular novelists of the 1950s and 1960s. And for The Carpetbaggers he took his inspiration from perhaps the most famous millionaire of the day, Howard Hughes. Even more than in real life, the book’s Hughes surrogate Jonas Cord Jr. collected companies by day and female conquests by night, with no regard for the damage he caused. And while few readers would want to know Cord in real life, many of them enjoyed his exploits on the page, and the book would end up being the most-read novel of Robbins’ career.

When Hollywood came calling in 1964, it was only natural that some of the book’s racier elements would have to go. But while the scenes depicting brutal murders and such then-abnormal sexual practices as fellatio ended up being cut en route to the big screen, Edward Dmytryk’s film version was still decadent by the standards of the time. After all, the story more or less begins with Cord putting the moves on his father's widow. With its combination of upper-class soap opera and Hollywood story, The Carpetbaggers proved almost as irresistible to moviegoers as it did to readers. The film (sold with the tagline, “this is adult entertainment!”) was one of the top grossers of 1964, becoming Paramount’s biggest hit in nearly a decade. To quote another famously over-the-top film, “nothing exceeds like excess.”

What happened?: In both printed and cinematic form, The Carpetbaggers was distinguished primarily by virtue of its outrageousness. Trouble is, by the end of the 1960s, the qualities that once titillated audiences of the movie seemed positively quaint. With the fall of the Production Code, it was no longer particularly exciting for a movie to imply sexuality, not when people could see explicit nudity in a number of big-budget Hollywood releases. Decades later, the formula Robbins had perfected for literary success had mostly been co-opted by television dramas like Dallas and Dynasty. Most tellingly, before the film’s 2003 DVD release, Paramount submitted The Carpetbaggers to the MPAA for a rating, and the much-ballyhooed “adult entertainment” hit of 1964 earned a family-friendly PG.

Does The Carpetbaggers still work?: Not really. Oh sure, the sets and costumes look great, but the movie’s little more than a soulless product. Part of the problem is the direction by Dmytryk, a longtime studio director long past his prime. Dmytryk’s primarily concern when making The Carpetbaggers appears to have been to utilize the ‘Scope frame to bring out every bit of possible opulence from his settings. But he did so at the expense of any possible drama in the story. It’s never a good sign when two of the film’s principal characters are sharing an important moment and your eyes are too busy looking at the beautiful paintings and ornate statues to care what’s being said.

Not helping matters is the film’s conception of Cord as a blinkered, ego-driven monster. Throughout almost the entire 2 ½ hour running time, Cord’s actions are motivated almost entirely by his desire to keep the upper hand, to maintain his advantage over the rest of the world. George Peppard’s performance is just fine- he plays the role more or less as written, and plays it pretty well. The trouble is that there’s never anything underneath. He wants his life to be lived by his rules, and damn the consequences. As he tells his wife Monica (Elizabeth Ashley), “what I need is the most freedom and the fewest responsibilities.”

Consequently, when the movie finally does try to explain what makes Cord tick in its final five minutes, it feels like a cheat. To pin Cord’s psychological issues on a single trauma from childhood is the kind of horribly reductive Freudianism that afflicted far too many films during the period. Consider what Citizen Kane would have been like had Welles meant for the audience to take Rosebud as a genuine insight into the title character and you’ll have an idea how laughable the psychological aspect of The Carpetbaggers really is. Follow this with an eye-rolling final scene, in which the sensationalism of what’s come before is countered with a reassertion of family and morality, and you’ll see the central problem with The Carpetbaggers- not only is it not nearly as outrageous as it thinks it is, but it doesn’t even have the conviction to follow through to the end.

The Carpetbaggers isn’t a worthless movie. The production values are handsome, and the Hollywood material is fairly entertaining, especially when one tries to figure out which real-life figures are being represented in the story. A handful of supporting performances also work, in particular Alan Ladd (in his final big-screen performance) as Cord’s friend/conscience Nevada Smith, and Carroll Baker, who made for such an effective stand-in for Jean Harlow that Paramount cast her as the real thing in a biopic that was made the following year. But ultimately, The Carpetbaggers just isn’t much of a movie. The history of Hollywood’s blockbusters is chock full of movies like this, that made a splash in their time, but just haven’t endured over the years. Yet they remain out there, waiting to be rediscovered by folks like me who are curious to see what moviegoers enjoyed way back when.

OST: "Psycho"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Bernard Herrmann was one of the most legendary film composers of all time. One of his first major compositions was the score to The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which he showed both his innovative approach and his playfully subversive nature by by double-tracking a violin to play a jaw-droppingly complex rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel", and then claiming the solo was the work of a teenaged violin prodigy he'd discovered. He composed a number of memorable movie scores over the years, from the towering, epic sweep of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (his very first project) to the moody, dark tension of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (his very last). But it is with Alfred Hitchcock's name that Herrmann's will be foreever linked.

Hitchcock knew he was playing with dynamite when he made Psycho. The movie that buried noir and ushered in the age of the maniacal slasher was a risky venture for him on many levels: with its shocking violence, infamous mid-film twist, and horror plot, it was a massive deviation from the big-budget hit mysteries that had made so much money for his studio bosses in the late 1950s. Fearing disaster, Hitch -- who was nothing if not determined -- tried as much as possible to make the film on the cheap, and he wasn't afraid to capitalize on personal relationships to do so. Some stories have it that he strong-armed Herrmann, who had turned in incredibly monumental work for him before on such movies as The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Vertigo; but Herrmann wasn't one to be cowed so easily. He agreed to work on the soundtrack for Psycho at less than his normal pay, but Herrmann -- a rarity amongst film composers insofar as he retained near-total creative control over the final product of his labors -- made it clear he was going to do things his way. Most famously, he ignored Hitchcock's foremost prerogative when writing the score: the director insisted that, for maximum shock value, there be total silence on the soundtrack during the murders, most especially the infamous shower scene.

Luckily for generations of moviegoers, Bernard Herrmann chose to completely disregard this directive, and, when Hitchcock raised a stink, Herrmann insisted that he view the scene with the music he'd written intact. If Hitchcock didn't agree that the music improved the scene instead of distracting from it, then he'd relent. Hitchcock agreed, and, as has been every one of the tens of millions who have seen Psycho since then, he was blown away by how perfect was the juxtaposition of music and visuals. Since then, it's become one of the true classics in the history of movie scoring; Herrmann's brilliant decision to use only the string section of his orchestra for the music, with the only low-end being provided by bass and cello, was inspired and set the standard for high-pitched, shrieking instrumentation as the default for horror films. It also spawned hosts of imitators and 'tributes' over the years (and none proved more determined than Brian De Palma, who, mirroring his own obsession with Hitchcock, used subtle variants of the music in both Carrie and Dressed to Kill). Very few soundtracks in motion picture history so reflect the personality of their creator than does Bernard Herrmann's work -- unnerving, brilliant, raw, and determined -- than does Psycho.

BEST TRACKS: It's impossible to even discuss Psycho -- the movie or the soundtrack -- without discussing the music from the notorious shower scene. (It's called "The Murder", by the way.) As other critics have mentioned, it's almost unfair to call it a piece of music; it's just the sound made by every string section in every orchestra in the world as they warm up. And yet by placing it in context, Herrmann transforms this ordinary sound into one of the most chilling pieces of music in history, and sets the tone for hundreds, maybe thousands, of future citematic murders. Not bad for a piece of music that's barely a minute long; and it's even more astonishing when you consider that, on an album of dozens of short pieces, it virtually defines the score's less-is-more aesthetic by being one of the longer pieces on the album! Still, this wouldn't be one of the greatest film scores of all time if it was simply one minute-long piece of genius; there's much more to love here, including the memorable title track ("Prelude", in which eerie swirls of strings leap and tangle with one another over the unforgettable Saul Bass title sequence), which is so well-loved that Stuart Gordon lifted it wholesale for the opening to Re-Animator. Other strong tracks include the tragic, melancholy "The Body"; the creepy, tense "Cabin 10", and the wailing, cacaphonous avant-gardeism of "The Cellar". A must-have score from a movie where almost all participants were at the tops of their games.

In Other Blogs: Manny Being Manny

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The film blogosphere paid tribute to Manny Farber this week (Phil Nugent contributed our own obit here) and if that name doesn’t ring a bell, Glenn Kenny has some good advice at Some Came Running. “If you've never read Farber, just stop here and get to it. His collected criticism, in a volume called Negative Space, is one of the touchstone texts of film writing—tough-minded, sharp-eyed, idiosyncratic, often wildly funny, and with a bedrock integrity and aesthetic acuity that even best of contemporary film critics are hard-pressed to approach, let alone match. He is most often cited for coining the phrases ‘termite art’ and ‘white-elephant art,’ two opposed categories. What I found, and find, most valuable in his criticism is his ability to apprehend the entirety of a film—he got it from every angle. He could appreciate a B war picture in the same sense that the guy on the street could, while fully comprehending its value as a work of modern/contemporary art. I'm away from my study, so I can't grab a copy of Space to quote from it willy-nilly. But I can say this: I doubt that Farber was particularly surprised by Godard's Breathless, because his criticism actively anticipated that film.”

David Edelstein has a personal remembrance at The Projectionist. “Manny could seem inscrutable yet was actually hyperprecise, which is why we kept listening, unpacking his phrases, sure that whatever came out, no matter how gnomic, contained multitudes. His writing was compacted, sometimes overly so (he would be the first to tell you that), but the words always quivered with the drive to pin down some aspect of the infinite. Once I made the mistake of saying I thought a film was ‘about’ something. ‘About…’ he said, softly, and glanced at Patricia. ‘How can we say what a film is “about”? There are so many things…’ ”

Jonathan Rosenbaum has an update of a 1993 essay on his eponymous blog. “When we met on campus, Manny—who bore a certain resemblance to Punch in Punch and Judy—hadn’t realized until then that we’d never met before. Back in 1969, when we were both still living in New York, I’d written him asking to reprint two of his articles, on Preston Sturges and Godard, in an anthology I was editing, for $50 each. After receiving no reply I phoned him and got my first taste of his crusty wrath: “Fifty bucks? Do you know how many years Willy Poster and I worked on that Sturges piece?” Weeks later, just before I was due to move to Paris, I wrote him a sincere fan letter saying that I’d just read the Sturges article for the umpteenth time and couldn’t imagine publishing the book without it—that my budget for fees was paltry but I’d double my offer to $100 for the Sturges. A few days later he phoned, quite friendly, accepting the offer.”

A promising new blog called Parallax View weighs in on the new DVD of Orson Welles’ lost film Don Quixote. “From what I know about Welles and the history of the film, Franco’s version is not even an approximation, never mind a reconstruction. There’s no story here, simply a random succession of events and images and a whole lot of narrative detours. But even as a visual record of Welles’ raw footage it’s a travesty. It’s a given that much of the existing rough cut footage is in rough condition, showing the signs of wear and tear from years of tinkering on moviolas and dragging the reels from country to country. But Franco and company have, if anything, compounded the problems with hazy, blurry copies of the master footage and video noise introduced as a result of the project’s most egregious crimes against Welles: the video manipulation of footage to layer images one on another.”

For this week’s List-o-Mania, we turn to Daily Plastic for the Top Ten Loathsome or Laudable Uses of a Zoom Lens. For example, squeezing tears from an emotional interviewee. “And it starts. Her response to the difficult question. The rising action. His heart races. Her chin puckers. His fingers tug the tiny shaft. Her eyes look left and right. She tells her sad story. He moves in closer, close enough to feed upon the tears of wounded subjects. The interviewer tilts her head to the right and nods to keep the subject talking, and then shifts her notepad to the opposite knee so that, when the time comes, she can reach forward and pat the subject's hand, a comforting attagirl for a job well-done. It's a crucial moment. But the squinting man is in charge. His choice to begin zooming now, to draw the viewer into the miserable world of the subject, will govern the edit, will define the scene. When he stops zooming, the scene is over, but not before. It's his shot to get, and his to lose. He stands astride the very earth.”

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We’ve been taking reader suggestions for our Top Tens of late, and this week’s list, suggested via “electronic mail” by F.O.S. (Friend of Screengrab) Kaegan has the added advantage of being topical, what with the ten million recent reviews of Nanette Burstein’s documentary American Teen that cleverly elucidated how the film’s high school cliques and self-aware characters were just like something from a John Hughes movie...but for real! (And without any Wang Chung on the soundtrack).

Spurred by Kaegan, we henceforth present fifteen worthy homages and/or bad imitations, depending how you look at it (and NOT including Brian De Palma’s numerous Hitchcock rip-offs, which we’re saving for an upcoming list of, well, best and worse Hitchcock rip-offs...so stay tuned)!

FREEWAY (1996), Not Directed by John Waters

I’ve written about Freeway so recently that I’ll merely direct you to that write-up for my thoughts on Matthew Bright’s deranged cult classic...but, considering the film’s white trash milieu, indomitable characters, gleeful celebration of violence and depravity and startling against-type casting, it seemed fitting to kick off the list with the greatest Baltimore-of-the-West film the Prince of Puke never directed.

MIAMI BLUES (1990), Not Directed by Jonathan Demme

In the eighties, Jonathan Demme amassed a sizable following with his films Melvin & Howard, Something Wild, and Married to the Mob. Each of these films showed a flair for offbeat comedy, as well as an affinity for marginalized characters. So when Miami Blues hit screens in 1990, the handful of people who actually paid to see it could have been forgiven for believing it was Demme’s latest directorial effort. Hell, it was produced by Demme and his usual producing team, shot by Demme’s usual cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, edited by Demme regular Craig McKay, and co-starred newly-hot leading man Alec Baldwin, who had a supporting role in Married to the Mob. But manning the director’s chair wasn’t Demme, but rather his old Roger Corman colleague George Armitage, whose most notable title up to that point had been 1971’s Private Duty Nurses. The style of Miami Blues bears definite resemblance to that of Demme’s work, but Armitage’s sense of humor is more twisted, as in the scene where Baldwin’s Fred Frenger (a Demme name if there ever was one) steals police detective Fred Ward’s gun and badge, plus his false teeth just to rub it in. But if Armitage’s brand of sick humor doesn’t exactly jive with his old pal’s more generous comedy, the two share an affection for characters who are essentially good, embodied here in the form of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Suzie, a kind-hearted prostitute who gets stuck on Fred and comes off like the slower cousin of Something Wild’s Audrey. Once it begins to dawn on Suzie that Fred is far more dangerous than she’d anticipated, her answer is both quirky and heartbreaking: "I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. He always ate everything I ever gave him and he never hit me."

THE THIRD MAN (1949), Not Directed by Orson Welles

It's easy to understand why people got the wrong idea about The Third Man. Orson Welles not only gives an electrifying performance as Harry Lime, but improvised various bits of the character's memorable dialogue, including his famous line about Swiss cuckoo clocks. (Indeed, he became so closely associated with the character that he went on to voice him in a radio show called The Lives of Harry Lime a few years later.) The film itself is infused with the kind of morally unhinged noir sensibility that Welles would later master in Touch of Evil, making it seem entirely plausible that his was the mind behind the film. Many of The Third Man's most daring shots, from the shadowy confrontations in the sewers of Vienna to the final, heartbreaking walk taken by Alida Valli, resemble Welles' visual pyrotechnics in his own films, and the overall dark tone of the movie, as well as little touches like the overlapping dialogue, the low-angled two-shots, and the interesting lighting, are all reminiscent of movies that Orson Welles really did direct. To top it all off, Welles was already a famous (or infamous) director when The Third Man opened in the U.S., while Carol Reed, though well-known in his native England, wasn't particular renowned here. But the all-too-common assumption that Orson Welles "really" directed the film does a disservice to the talented and innovative Reed, who, while not on his star's level of genius, was nonetheless a very dedicated, professional and skilled director. Indeed, in at least one way, it was Carol Reed who did Orson Welles' job and not the other way around: Harry Lime's hands reaching through the sewer grate near the movie's end belong to Reed and not Welles, who was gallivanting around Europe when the scene was filmed and hadn't even shown up on set yet.

INTERIORS (1978), Not Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Like a lot of movie fanatics who live in Manhattan, Woody Allen is obsessed with the work of Ingmar Bergman. Unlike a lot of movie fanatics who live in Manhattan, Woody Allen is actually capable of getting movies made and widely released across the country. For years, Allen – whose obsession with Bergman is arguably both wider and deeper than his understanding of Bergman – had been trying to get people to take him seriously, and with Interiors, he pulled the trigger in a big way, inspired by Bergman's stark, chilly tales of family unhappiness in everything from the photography to the poster design. Never had Diane Keaton stared so wistfully out of a poorly lit window; never had Woody Allen failed to appear in one of his own movies; and, most importantly, never had a film by America's leading comedic director been such a relentless bummer. Interiors proved to be a massive critical success, with only a few grouches wondering if someone so adept at comedy needed to be spending his time making second-rate imitations of art films by a Swedish director who was still alive and perfectly capable of making such films himself. (Indeed, Bergman managed to one-up Allen even in the casting department: Woody had wanted to use Ingrid Bergman for the role of Eve, but she was already committed to filming a movie in Europe with, you guessed it, Ingmar.) Regardless of whether or not you think of Interiors as a failed Bergman knock-off or a successful Bergman homage, one thing's for sure: it ain't funny. The "I liked your earlier, funnier work" has become a comic cliché of its own when applied to Woody Allen's movies; Interiors is the movie that set it all off.

Click here for Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Summerfest '08: "The Long Hot Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:45:00 GMT

When we started Summerfest '08 a few weeks ago, our goals were simple: identify a handful of movies with the word 'summer' in the title; figure out which ones were worth popping on to your DVD player while waiting for your watermelon to fully saturate with vodka; make a couple of snotty comments about them; and carry on with the knowledge that we have helped keep you cool for a few hours. This week's picture, though, falls rather short of that final goal. Whether you're watching it from a hammock in your backyard or a clean, sleek love seat in the basement, 1958's The Long Hot Summer won't cool you down. It'll make you hot: hot like a sweaty southern summer. Hot like a repressed debutante. Hot like Paul Newman in an undershirt before his face became synonymous with upscale salad dressings and organic Orio knockoffs. Reading (and with good reason) like a bizarre mash-up of Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, The Long Hot Summer lives up to its name like no movie before or sense, and if you weren't sweating before you started watching it, you will be afterwards. Hell, you don't even have to watch it -- although we don't know why anyone would deny themselves the pleasure of watching Joanne Woodward and Lee Remick looking like wilted hothouse flowers, all you have to do is listen to the overblown hotbox noir dialogue in this picture to positively swoon from the torridness of it all.

So mop your face with a handkerchief, push your hat back on your head, order up a tall mint julep, and get ready for The Long Hot Summer.

THE ACTION: In what is, surprisingly, not the beginning of a porn movie, a young stud named Ben Quick hitches a ride into a town called Frenchman's Bend, in rural Mississippi. Ben has a reputation for barn-burning, which is the sort of thing people did for kicks back then while waitig for a new farmgirl to seduce. Most people are none too happy to see Ben come to town -- most especially Clara and Eula Varner, played by Woodward and Remick, but town patriarch Will Varner sees a youthful reflection of himself in the sweaty hothead. He also sees a number of qualities lacking in his son Jody (Tony Franciosa), who, this being the 1950s and all, the movie is not allowed to say is a homosexual. Gaudy, sexually charged patter ensues. Eventually, everyone in town erupts in an explosion of damp clothing and meaningful looks, and the barns of Frenchman's Bend will never be the same again.

THE PLAYERS: The Long Hot Summer is directed by Martin Ritt, a longtime Hollywood pro who directed dozens of pretty decent movies without ever having developed much of a reputation for anything other than reliability. He does have to his credit the fact that, according to Hollywood legend, during filming of this movie, he became the only person to get the notoriously implacable Orson Welles to behave by driving the great man out to the middle of the Louisiana swamp and threatening to abandon him there if he didn't shape up and start making nice. While the movie is based on three short stories by William Faulkner ("Spotted Horses", "The Hamlet", and "Barn Burning"), it's written in high noir style by the husband-and-wife team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, a duo mostly noted for their work in westerns, and plays like Tennessee Willliams if he liked girls as much as he liked decadence. The entire cast, including a shockingly smokin' Angela Lansbury as Welles' mistress, absolutely swelters in the crushing heat.

SUMMER FUN: No one goes to the beach, but everyone's having fun, if you know what we mean. Volleyball is likewise in short supply, but Newman's Ben Quick seems to be having a great time trying to decide which of the two innocent flowers of southern maidenhood he's going to trample into the dust first. Orson Welles is a holy terror in this movie, overacting like there's no tomorrow and no doubt making everyone else on the set wish that Ritt had shot him a few times before dumping him in the swamp; but he seems to be having a good time despite the fact that it was so hot during filming that the big honking prosthetic nose he wore as Will Varner kept falling off of his face. The only person who isn't having any fun (at least until the movie's tacked-on happy ending) is the relentlessly abused Tony Franciosa. who everybody else yells at.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: It was once a fashion truism that the south was always ten years late on picking up any new fashions, and this was certainly true at the time; while denizens of the West Coast had been rocking jazzy Aloha shirts just after WWII, in the Louisiana of The Long Hot Summer, it was the kind of garment that only someone like Tony Franciosa would wear, if you get catch the drift. Newman, however, permanently etched himself in the libidos of America's women by parading around in nothing but a fedora, an undershirt and a few strategically placed sweat stains, and Orson Welles was kind enought to refrain from sporting a fat-guy Hawaiian until his Muppet-era films. The kind of fun being had in this movie was far too nasty and naughty to lend itself to the cheap signifier of Nylon with Polynesian patterns.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Sadly -- almost unforgivably, given that this is a movie that contains not only a young Joanne Woodward but Lee Remick as well -- there are no bilkinis to be found anywhere in The Long Hot Summer. However, that's understandable; with no cooling sea breezes on their way from the humid Gulf Coast, they probably wouldn't have been all that comfortable; and with a guy like Ben Quick (which one hopes merely describes his method of seduction and not its end result) around, bikinis would probably just get in your way. In the end, the movie is a bit overripe, far too determined to be Tennessee Williams with too little Valium, and not as deep as it should be given the Faulkner pedigree. But it's hot as hell in that partcular southern-Gothic way, it's reasonably well-acted, and it's got enough snappy dialogue to choke Orson Welles. Of whom Newman says: "I respect him. I admire his manners and I admire the speeches he makes and I admire the big house he lives in. But if you're saving it all for him honey, you've got your account in the wrong bank". Now that's hot.

In Other Blogs: Defending the New Classics

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, our own Paul Clark took a few well-deserved shots at Entertainment Weekly’s list of 100 New Classics. At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny offers up a (weak) defense. “Let's begin with a fundamental fact: lists are bullshit. Lists are such blatant bullshit that any magazine person will admit to you that they're bullshit. Some might need to have had a couple of drinks first, others might be more effectively cajoled by having you complain for the millionth time in the course of a conversation about how your own favorite cultural artifact was left off some list or another, but they'll admit it… ‘Glenn,’ I hear you asking, ‘if lists are such bullshit, why do magazines and websites do them almost all the frickin' time?’ Well, because lists are putatively ‘fun.’ People notice them, argue about them. They take them fairly seriously, pretty much regardless of what their sources are...oddly enough. For a magazine in particular, a list is a potential goldmine of publicity. It gets your product noticed. TV news, radio outlets, they LOVE lists.” As list-lovers ourselves, we can’t argue with this – our weekly top 10 (or 15 or 20) offerings are inevitably our most popular posts, and just as inevitably attract the most “Hey bozos, you forgot Ernest Scared Stupid!” type comments. Heck, that’s why we do ’em! Try as we might, though, we can’t actually find the part where Kenny defends the EW list. Maybe it’s in code.

At Scanners, Jim Emerson offers his own take on the list. “From the last quarter century, EW chose Pulp Fiction as its #1 classic, calling it ‘a time-warping, mind-bending work of movie-mad genius.... Its revolutionary structure (John Travolta dies... then lives!) opened a new universe of mainstream storytelling, but the eternal joy of Pulp Fiction is that it recast the future of movies by living, so thrillingly, in the moment." I can't really argue with that, though it doesn't take into consideration what I see as the movie's flaws (I hate all the chewy, self-consciously pop-aware dialog), its negative influences (we're still suffering the ‘Tarantinian’ fallout from wannabes far less talented than QT), and its overemphasized novelty (the structure wasn't really revolutionary -- it just didn't tell you the order in which its chapters were arranged, so you could be surprised to recounter characters in an unforseen context). But I'm not going to begrudge Pulp Fiction the top slot…No, the bizarre choices on the list for me (in addition to several of the ones cited in the third paragraph above) include Moulin Rouge (#10), Pretty Woman (#37), Gladiator (#43), Rain Man (#45), Dirty Dancing (#65), All About My Mother (#69), Thelma & Louise (#72)... but I detect my own gender bias in the selection. Some of these were hits, some of them won Oscars, some had star-making performances (Julia Roberts, Patrick Swayze, Brad Pitt)... but, even if you liked 'em at the time, do you feel like watching them anymore?”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir warns that the indie film is dying – unless it isn’t. “Even as the potential moviegoing public has become distracted by an explosion of electronic options and devices unimagined a generation ago, the marketplace has been swamped by a poisonous glut of new movies. As Gill explains, in 1993, the Sundance Film Festival received roughly 500 submissions. For 2008, that number had swollen to more than 5,000. The reasons for that are various: The cost of producing a small-budget motion picture has fallen sharply in the digital age, and the success of a handful of indies in the late '90s and early 2000s drew investors large and small to pour countless billions of dollars into filmmaking. It hasn't turned out to be a sensible investment. Gill calculates the odds of losing all your money on an independent film at 99.95 percent. Most of those 5,000 movies, in his words, are ‘pre-ordained flops,’ made by people ‘who forgot that their odds would have been better if they'd converted their money into quarters and taken the all-night party bus to Vegas’… Then there's the fact that while enthusiasm, access to technology and an eagerness to become famous may be widespread, talent and craftsmanship are not. As anybody who's ever served on a film-festival selection committee learns the hard way, most of those movies should never have been made in the first place and definitely should not be inflicted upon the public. There has indeed been an explosion of ultra-low-budget filmmaking -- just try to wade through the self-produced movies available on YouTube -- but so far it has not revealed a nation full of unheralded Orson Welleses in embryo.”

And finally, speaking of “lists are bullshit,” this week’s List-o-Mania entry comes from the MuchMusic blog: it’s allegedly the Top 10 Music Moments in Movies. I know it’s hard to argue with a list containing both Adventures in Babysitting and Napoleon Dynamite, but really – the Wayne’s World "Bohemian Rhapsody" sing-along is the greatest music moment in movie history? Not.

Related:
EW Makes Great Movies List, Screengrab Points, Laughs
EW Makes List of Vile Villains, Isn't as Cool as Screengrab Lists

When Good Directors Go Bad: Hulk (2003, Ang Lee)

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In recent years, as “sequel” and “remake” have become dirty words in the minds of moviegoers, Hollywood studios have scrambled to come up with new, less offensive alternatives. How many blockbusters based on previously-adapted properties have been tagged with descriptions like “re-invention”? Yet even by these standards, the efforts made by Universal and Marvel Studios to distance their new, more “crowd-pleasing” version of The Incredible Hulk (“You’re going to like him when he’s angry!”) from Ang Lee’s 2003 film Hulk have been particularly aggressive. And for good reason, as Lee’s take on the classic comic left most viewers disappointed or even pissed off. Does Hulk deserve its reputation? Not really. But just because it’s not that bad doesn’t mean it’s all that good either.

In the early part of his career, Ang Lee was known primarily for his modestly-budgeted films which deftly mixed domestic drama with light comedy. Titles like Eat Drink Man Woman and The Wedding Banquet helped to make the NYU grad’s reputation in the States even before he began making movies here, and Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm only served to further this reputation. But while 1999’s Ride With the Devil was widely considered Lee’s first disappointment, he quickly recovered by returning to the Far East to make Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the critically-acclaimed martial arts epic that brought Lee the best reviews of his career to date and his first Oscar, as well as record-breaking U.S. box-office for an Asian film. It was Crouching Tiger that caught the attention of Universal Studios, who were looking for a fresh voice to bring Hulk to the screen.

But while Lee was an inspired choice for a comic book movie, I really don’t think he was the right one for Hulk. Lee is a gifted filmmaker, but he’s never had a strong, easily recognizable visual style, instead preferring to let his story determine the look of his films. But although other Lee films have benefited from this versatility- the chilly, sterile images of The Ice Storm bear little resemblance to the sweeping vistas of Crouching Tiger, but both are ideal for their respective films- Lee never finds the right look for Hulk. Although it’s not for lack of trying- attempting to accentuate the story’s comic book origins, Lee subjects the audience to a barrage of split-screens and snazzy wipes. Unfortunately, instead of creating any sort of kinetic excitement, the tricked-up style is merely distracting and, in the end, tiresome.

As for the individual shots themselves, Lee’s framing is rarely dynamic enough to make the images pop the way they should. All too often, shots are murky when they should be crisp. This is especially true of the film’s night scenes, which look dank and under-lit. Even worse, Lee insisted on shooting many of the film’s big action sequences at night. But whether this was an artistic decision on Lee’s part or a trick by the effects team to cover for some occasionally dodgy CGI, these sequences are often incomprehensible. This is especially true of the final battle between Hulk and his father- in a scene that serves not only as the action climax of the film but also the resolution of the lifelong conflict between father and son, the last thing you want is for the audience to wonder what the hell is going on.

In addition to the film’s stylistic shortcomings, the storytelling in Hulk leaves something to be desired. Part of the problem is that as far as comic book heroes go, Hulk is a strange case. Rather than being a hero who uses his powers for positive ends, Hulk is unleashed aggression personified- a man who has been cursed by fate and the sins of his father to expand and beat the crap out of anything in his way whenever he gets angry. The premise plays closer to tragedy than traditional comic book action, and to his credit, Lee takes the dramatic stuff seriously, rather than treating it simply as exposition and padding between the action scenes. However, the film’s broad-strokes-only storytelling and one-dimensional characters are less than compelling. Too much time and energy are expended on unlocking the mysteries of Bruce Banner’s past, a torturous bit of “dollar-book Freud” (thank you, Orson Welles) that stops the film dead in its tracks and makes the film less tragic than dour. Not helping matters is Eric Bana’s colorless performance as Banner. Bana came to the attention of Hollywood with his live-wire performance in Chopper, but he displays none of that volatility here. Shouldn’t someone as deeply troubled as Bruce Banner show some evidence of inner life?

Hulk is a strange creature, a film that attempted to be a stylish, kickass summer movie with a solid dramatic foundation but ended up satisfying almost no one. I admire certain aspects of the movie, like the way Lee counterpoints the restrained work by his leads with the unhinged mugshot-era performance by Nick Nolte, or Lee’s occasional use of quietness (a rare quality among most comic-book movies). But at the end of the day, the movie just doesn’t work. Yet I appreciate Lee’s efforts to make an honest-to-goodness art film out of a superhero movie. Hulk isn’t a success, but it’s more thought-provoking than most of the forgettable fare that has characterized the genre for years. It’s no Spider-Man, but I’ll take it over the likes of Fantastic Four- or The Incredible Hulk, for that matter.

Rebuilding the Lost Orson Welles Movie

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Of all the broken-down Orson Welles projects scattered through the years, The Other Side of the Wind has always been the most intriguing. First there’s the semi-autobiographical storyline, which finds a Wellesian director played by John Huston trying to revive his career with a youth-market film full of trendy sex and violence. Then there’s the troubled production history, outlandish even by Welles’s standards. The film was shot catch-as-catch-can style throughout the early ‘70s, with Welles periodically announcing that it was nearing completion. One of the film’s backers was the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran, and legend has it that the completed footage was seized by the Ayatollah after the Shah was overthrown. Other rumors had the film’s negative locked away in a Paris vault while litigation over its ownership dragged on for decades.

Now it seems The Other Side of the Wind may finally see the light of a projector near you, with none other than Peter “personal friend of Orson” Bogdanovich putting the finishing touches on the film. Wellesnet (The Orson Welles Web Resource, dontcha know) recently spoke with Bogdanovich about the status of the project, the completion of which is being financed by Showtime. “I don’t want to go into details, but there were some rights we still needed, but hadn’t gotten,” says Bogdanovich. “But Showtime is still going to go forward with the project. We just have to work out of few more of the rights issues… I still haven’t seen everything, because there is so much stuff to look at. It’s the dailies and so on and it looks great.”

Bogdanovich says the work will take about a year to complete, but it sounds like there’s still quite a bit to be ironed out. For instance, that footage locked up in the Paris vault? “We’re working on that still. There’s footage in Paris that I don’t think is here, so there’s a lot of material.” And it still isn’t clear if Welles actually shot everything he needed. “I don’t think we need to shoot anything, but we still have to see all the footage, so we’re not entirely sure. But Orson said he didn’t think there was anything left that needed to be shot. We’re going to put the whole thing in the form of a documentary about the making of a film, that was a mockumentary of itself.”

So…maybe don’t get those hopes up too high. As it is, some footage from the film is available for viewing: the documentary Orson Welles: One Man Band, included on the F For Fake DVD, features a couple of edited scenes. And Wellesnet also links to some improvised material, in which a weirdly-coiffed Paul Mazursky, a Last Movie-era Dennis Hopper and the always insufferable Henry Jaglom spout off about Huston’s fictional director, Jake Hannaford. “I was supposed to think that Jake was this great director, like Orson Welles, and Jaglom was taking the line that he was a big phony,” Mazursky says, which may help you figure out what’s going on in this clip.

Charlton Heston (1924-2008)

Paul Clark — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:39:00 GMT

Charlton Heston, one of only a handful of honest-to-goodness stars remaining from Hollywood's Golden Age, has passed away at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 84 years old. He is survived by Lydia, his wife of 64 years, and his two children and three grandchildren. Details about Heston's death are still sketchy at this point, but he had suffered from symptoms similar to Alzheimer's Disease for years.

Heston began his acting career on the stage, with his first movie role coming from a filmed theatre performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, recorded when Heston was all of 17. But the film that brought him into the public eye was Cecil B. DeMille's Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth, in which he played Ben Braden, the manager of the circus and held his own opposite James Stewart and Betty Hutton, among others. In the next few years, Heston split his time between film and television, one of the few actors who managed to work steadily in both media.

However, his stardom skyrocketed when DeMille came calling again, casting Heston as Moses in his final film, 1956's The Ten Commandments. The role required a truly commanding presence, not just to be convincing as the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt, but also to hold his own against the then-awe inspiring special effects, but Heston pulled it off. From there Heston specialized in similarly larger-than-life heroes, often in period adventures such as The Big Country, El Cid, and Ben-Hur, for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor.

In the 1960s, Heston's stardom continued even as his career choices became more inconsistent- for every Major Dundee, there was a The Agony and the Ecstasy in which he was severely miscast in the role of Michelangelo (yes, that one). But he once again found his groove at the end of the decade with Planet of the Apes, now considered a science fiction classic. It was the first in a series of futuristic dramas for Heston, who went on to appear in the film's sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, before starring in The Omega Man and Soylent Green.

During the 1970s, even as young filmmakers and new actors were gaining clout in Hollywood, Heston stuck to his guns and continued playing the sorts of heroes that made him a star. His presence was right at home in square blockbusters like Earthquake and Airport '75, as well as 1976's bloated war epic Midway. Shortly thereafter, Heston began to turn again to television, starring in a number of TV movies, as well as making a guest appearance on Dynasty as Jason Colby, who was later given his own series, The Colbys.

In the 1990s, Heston's leading-man opportunities had mostly dried up, and after that he worked regularly as a dependable character actor, lending an old-Hollywood authority to films like Tombstone, In the Mouth of Madness, and Any Given Sunday, as well as putting in a cameo in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake. In addition, he also did a good amount of voiceover work, his commanding baritone gracing films as diverse as Armageddon and Disney's Hercules. He also showed a surprising ability to kid his square-jawed image. After two hosting stints on Saturday Night Live, he had arguably the best scene in the otherwise disposable Wayne's World 2, playing "The Better Actor." He also appeared in True Lies as Arnold Schwarzenegger's CIA boss, a role that allowed him to pass the torch to Arnold as Hollywood's biggest right-leaning star.

In recent years, Heston's politics have increasingly overshadowed his acting. Heston, a longtime supporter of the National Rifle Association, served as its president in 1998, a position he served in until his diagnosis with Alzheimer's. But rather than remembering Heston for his politics- or his final major big-screen appearance in Michael Moore's Bowing For Columbine- I prefer to remember the good times. Of his storied career, I treasure most two performances he gave nearly two decades apart.

The first, of course, is Touch of Evil. Hollywood legend has it that Orson Welles was only supposed to act in the film, and that Heston (who had only taken the role to be directed by Welles) was largely responsible for Welles directing the film. At first glance, Heston's brand of straightforward heroism seems at odds with Welles' morally twisty vision. However, Heston is exactly what the film needs, an uncomplicated but compelling protagonist to contrast with the rest of the proceedings, in particular Welles' corrupt, seedy Hank Quinlan. It all works perfectly, and Heston deserves much of the credit for this, despite the fact that he may just have made film history's least convincing Mexican.

At the other end of his career, in the middle of his elder-statesman period, Heston gave what may have been his best performance in Kenneth Branagh's epic production of Hamlet. Ever since his early work, Branagh has had a love for stunt casting, often to disastrous ends. But Heston's performance is no stunt. In the small but important role of The Player King, he shows a real aptitude for Shakespeare's language, as well as a sensitivity to the nuances of the material. The first time I saw his performance, I couldn't help but think that I'd underestimated Heston all these years. More than just a presence, Heston was an actor, and one who will be greatly missed.

Take Five: Wong Kar-Wai

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:45:00 GMT

With My Blueberry Nights getting a limited-release opening in major cities across the country this weekend, Hong Kong legend Wong Kar-Wai will finally make his English-language feature film debut, and, after twenty years of building his reputation as a filmmaker, get a shot at the cherished American audience that can make or break a director. The only question is, will My Blueberry Nights be his Fritz Lang moment or his John Woo moment? Early reviews indicate that it might be the latter; the movie wasn't especially well-received when it opened Cannes last year, and producer Harvey Weinstein's drastic cut is said not to have helped matters any. The jury, likewise, is still out on whether or not Norah Jones can act, but the testimony onscreen is said to be pretty damning. If it turns out that it's a stiff, it might be all to the good and he can return to the environment in which he did his greatest work; and regardless of its quality, we're all geeked about his upcoming remake of Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai. We'll have to wait and see, but even if it turns out that My Blueberry Nights is Wong Kar-Wai's first major dud, he's still one of the most innovative, fascinating and consistently talented directors in contemporary film. Here's five movies that prove it.

CHUNG KING EXPRESS (1994)

Although he'd shown flickers of brilliance before (and already begun his tradition of naming his films after pop songs with his 1988 directorial debut, As Tears Go By), Chung King Express is the movie that established Wong Kar-Wai as a director capable of legitimate greatness. The highly stylized film, about a heartbroken Hong Kong cop on the prowl who falls in with a gorgeous and mysterious young woman in a drug gang, so impressed Quentin Tarantino that he invested a chunk of his own money to get this and Wong Kar-Wai's other films released in the United States. Even now, after he's stretched substantially, this is still a stunning film, chock full of quirky moments, philosophical speculation on the mediated life, and his ability to coax stellar performances out of his actors. A Godardian triumph.

ASHES OF TIME (1994)

Years in the making, and based on a highly popular Asian epic novel, it would have been easy for Ashes of Time to be a major step back in the career of Wong Kar-Wai. (Some critics, indeed, think it was.) After having established that he was a director of skill, ambition and daring, it seemed unusual for him to take on that classic Hong Kong trope, the martial arts epic — but as it happened, there was nothing to fear. He approached it with his typical attitude, sacrificing not a whit of artistic integrity, and the result is one of the most thoughtful, surreal, philosophical action epics ever put on screen. Wong Kar-Wai takes what could be a by-the-numbers swordplay drama and turns it into something bizarre, achronal, and transcendental — a wonderful movie that's hard to follow, but impossible to forget.

HAPPY TOGETHER (1997)

Althought it wasn't quite as well received as his previous spate of films — at least partly because of the controversial nature of its subject matter in his homeland of Hong Kong — Happy Together is still a highly rewarding addition to Wong Kar-Wai's body of work, and the first movie in which he begins to seriously mine the themes of thwarted passion and self-nullifying ennui that would shape his finest work to come. Bouyed by two fantastic performances in the lead roles by Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung, Happy Together follows the unconventional relationship between two expatriates from Hong Kong as they take a typically surreal and eventful road trip through Argentina. It's a passionate, sexy, and sometimes ridiculous movie, with gorgeous cinematography by Christopher Doyle, and a taste of greatness to come.

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000)

Finally putting to bed his penchant for hip-pocket surrealism, Wong-Kar Wei finally plays it straight with this utterly beautiful, incredibly heartbreaking story of doomed romance set in the Hong Kong of the 1960s. Everything about it is pitch-perfect, from the stunning cinematography to the breathtaking costumes to the quiet, naturalistic screenplay, which makes its points with subtlety and grace rather than noise and distraction. The lead performances by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung — some of the most controlled, precise, and yet emotionally engaging screen acting in decades — help further elevate the story of two unrequited lovers who, alone in a city of millions, reenact a sort of sham shadowplay of the illicit affair their spouses are having with one another, from good to great.

2046 (2004)

It was a risky move to create a sequel to a movie as distinct and delicately perfect as In the Mood for Love. It was an even riskier move to create a sequel that returned the more avant-garde elements of Wong Kar-Wai's filmmaking style — chronological jumps, elements of surrealism, non-linear storytelling, and bits and pieces of science fiction and fantasy — to the mix. But if anyone could pull it off, he could, and he did, with a sequel that may not precisely follow the tone of the previous film, but captures its mood and spirit exactly. In 2046, we follow Tony Leung's character from In the Mood for Love after Maggie Cheung has left his life — he's a more bitter figure than before, but still filled with romantic longing, which he now attempts to sublimate into a science fiction novel he's writing. While it's not quite the instant classic that its predecessor was, it's still a very worthy film that shows how adept Wong-Kar Wei is at blending his ruling passions as a filmmaker.

The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The sad death of Heath Ledger caused speculation that the film he had been shooting, Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, might be in jeopardy. This isn't the first time that the loss of a principle cast member has threatened to shut down a movie. Witness the battle Doug Trumbull had to fight to keep Brainstorm from being written off when Natalie Wood died. Of course, there are various movies that had not been finished for one reason or another, some through accidents and others to a simple lack of interest. What follows is a list of 10 of the more promising or at least potentially interesting films that were not released in their intended form for one reason or another.

--Faisal A. Qureshi

DARK BLOOD

River Phoenix's death in October 1993 led to the complete shutdown of George Sluzier's film. Already a troubled production, with reports of tension between Judy Davis and Phoenix, the film only had 11 days of shooting left before tragedy struck. The British company Palace Pictures, which was funding the production, decided that the film couldn't be salvaged. Even though Jim Barton's script received a postive reception when it was given a read through by the Script Factory, there have been no takers for trying to re-shoot or complete the picture.

THE MAN WHO SHOT DON QUIXOTE

Terry Gilliam's first experience of getting a film written off was luckily recorded in a documentary, Lost in La Mancha, shot by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. After one week of shooting, Jean Rochefort, injured himself while getting on a horse, flew back to France and received doctor's orders to never ride again. There are rumours that Jeremy Thomas would take over the project and re-start production with Johnny Depp still attached, but until then all we have are rushes of Depp berating a fish.

I, CLAUDIUS

The 1976 BBC Adaptation of Robert Graves I, Claudius has been hailed as one of the greatest works of British TV drama. Forty years earlier, however, Alexander Korda tried producing a feature adaptation of the book starring Charles Laughton as Claudius and Merle Oberon as the nymphomaical Messalina, with Josef Von Sternberg directing. Unfortunately, Merle Oberon suffered an accident that resulted in the abandoning of filming. Luckily, the footage that had been completed survived and was later the center piece of the excellent BBC Documentary, The Epic That Never Was, which was itself released to film theaters.

ORSON WELLES'S DON QUIXOTE

Orson Welles had worked on Don Quixote for years, going through various scripts and cast changes, and shooting in Mexico and Spain. Financed out of his own pocket, Welles started shooting in 1955 just after he was kicked off the editing of Touch of Evil, and carried on until the death of his Sancho Panza, Akim Tamiroff. Strangely enough, the job of assembling the surviving footage into something coherent was given to Spanish exploitation filmmaker Jesus Franco, who had been Welles's first assistant director during some of the shooting. Reviled when it premiered in Cannes, it leaves one hoping that someday there will be another attempt to "complete" the job by someone with more artistry and closer to Welles's own wavelength than a second-rate horror hack.

SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE

Marilyn Monroe's final film, which was shelved after her death. On paper it looked great, with George Cukor directing and a cast that included Phil Silvers and Dean Martin. The story, a remake of the 1940 My Favorite Wife (which was itself derived from Tennyson's "Enoch Arden") involved a husband who has his wife declared dead after she's been missing for five years, only for her to turn up when he's getting re-married. Unfortunately Monroe's inability to come in to shoot her scenes (she was apparently off 17 days out of 30 of the duration of the production) and with Fox hemorraging money from the even more expensive, Cleopatra, decided to sack the actress and re-organise the production. Unfortunately, Monroe's death killed the project altogether, and it wasn't until 1999 that Fox allowed the release of 39 minutes of footage shot for the film to celebrate Monroe's 75th birthday. (My Favorite Wife was ultimately remade as Move Over, Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner.)

--Phil Nugent, Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 2.