The Jimmy Piersall Story
There are enough films about baseball and famous ballplayers in the American cinema to constitute its own subgenre but Fear Strikes Out (1957) is a special case that stands alone. Based on the...
View ArticleSex Trafficking in Marseilles
Human trafficking is recognized as a form of modern day slavery today but it has been around for decades. In the early 20th century the white slave trade in Europe became a major crime phenomenon in...
View ArticleThe Year of the Hare
Road trip movies in which the main character goes on a journey with his pet is not that unusual in the annuals of cinema although the pet is usually a dog (Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, 2008) or a...
View ArticleJohn Frankenheimer’s Service Comedy
I’m a big admirer of John Frankenheimer’s early work from such live TV dramas as The Comedian (1956) and Days of Wine and Roses (1957) to his peak achievements of the sixties: All Fall Down (1962),...
View ArticleMilanese Malaise
Any art house patron in the early sixties must have thought modern society was headed toward a complete collapse as witnessed by the emptiness of life and the bored, amoral behavior of characters in...
View ArticleThe Great Tube Caper
The name Wolf Rilla might sound like a pseudonym for some superstar wrestling champion but movie buffs know him for Village of the Damned (1960), a superb adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos, a classic...
View ArticleAnts in Your Pants and Worse!
There have been killer ant movies before – Them! (1954), The Naked Jungle (1954), and Empire of the Ants (1977) come to mind – but Phase IV, released in 1974, may be the first and only killer ant art...
View ArticleHomeward Bound
Films about aging and the elderly are not that prevalent in Hollywood’s yearly production schedule of new films for obvious reasons. It is not a subject that most moviegoers seeking escapism,...
View ArticleThe Sociopath’s Playbook
According to the Oxford Dictionary, a sociopath is a person who has a personality disorder which causes them to behave in an aggressive, violent or unpleasant way towards other people. The general...
View ArticleSurf’s Up!
West Coast surfers in the late fifties knew Bruce Brown as a fellow surfer who started filming his surfing exploits with his buddies before Gidget became a best-selling novel in 1957. Hollywood bought...
View ArticleGeorges Franju & Jean Cocteau: Thomas the Impostor
World War I has been the subject of some of the most powerful and prestigious films in cinema from King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) and Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) to...
View ArticleTrance State
The Polish film industry is not exactly famous for its contributions to the science fiction genre but there have been a few novel exceptions over the years. Piotr Szulkin’s O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of...
View ArticleThe Outsider and His Art
The image of the starving artist, living in poverty and misunderstood by everyone during his own lifetime, is an age-old cliché but is often based on true accounts. One of the more famous examples is...
View ArticleLittle Demons
“We Want You Sally….We Want You….Come to Us!” For those who first saw Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark at a young impressionable age when it originally aired on ABC in 1973, those maniacal, whispering...
View ArticleBeneath the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean
Jacques-Yves Cousteau was undoubtedly one of the greatest explorers of the 20th century but what he discovered was a world most people had never seen before and it was hiding in plain sight under the...
View ArticleThe Night of Counting the Years
It is not that common to encounter films from Egypt in the U.S. and only a handful have managed to enjoy theatrical distribution here in either film festival or art house screenings over the years....
View ArticleFrom Socialite to Streetwalker
There have been some terrific Pre-Code dramas that were set in the Depression and were actually playing in movie theaters at the time but, for obvious reasons, were not box office hits because...
View ArticleYou Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone: Filmhouse in Edinburgh
Friday, October 7, 2022 was a black day for film lovers in Edinburgh and for anyone who has ever visited Filmhouse, a fantastic three-screen movie venue that also hosted the annual Edinburgh...
View ArticleQueen of Karate
Most of the famous icons of Japanese action cinema of the 1970s are usually male stars but there are a few exceptions. The best known is easily Meiko Kaji, who enjoyed a double career as a popular...
View ArticleVincent Price is Matthew Hopkins
Vincent Price has always been associated with the horror genre even though he appeared in all kinds of other films during his career such as film noir (Laura), comedy (Champagne for Caesar), westerns...
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