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God Stave the Queen
One of the few films to emerge from Britain’s punk rock movement of the mid-seventies that succinctly expressed the anger and anarchic spirit of the times, Jubilee (1978) is possibly director Derek...
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A Lost Version of Buster Keaton’s The Blacksmith is Discovered
Buster Keaton in the two-reeler The Blacksmith (1922) Often ranked by silent film historians as one of Buster Keaton’s lesser efforts when compared to his other two-reel shorts such as One Week (1920)...
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The Pinku-Yakuza Eiga Combo That is Something Else Entirely
Hitman Sho (Yuichi Minato) fantasizes about killing his rival Ko (Shohei Yamamoto) in Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1967, aka Dutch Wife in the Desert) Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands sounds like a...
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Truckin’ With Jean Gabin
Jean Gabin plays a world weary trunk driver in Henri Verneuil’s Des gens sans importance (1956, aka People of No Importance). One of the great stars of French cinema, Jean Gabin was also an unofficial...
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What Triggers an Obsession?
Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez and Geraldine Chaplin in Peppermint Frappe (1967), directed by Carlos Saura One of Spain’s best known and critically acclaimed filmmakers in his own country, Carlos Saura is...
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Stanley Kubrick’s 1951 Knockout Punch
If you go back and look at the very first film that Stanley Kubrick made – a twelve-minute short subject entitled Day of the Fight (1951) – it is obvious that the former photographer for Look magazine...
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Double Trouble
Sometimes a great promotional gimmick is reason enough to make a movie and this certainly proved to be a successful strategy for director William Castle who made box office hits out of low-budget...
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Any Port in a Storm
Along with his film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark (1969), Tony Richardson’s The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967) is probably the most obscure and rarely seen film from the...
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Spies “R” Us
The success of the James Bond series, beginning in 1962 with Dr. No, had an amazing impact on the international film world. For almost a decade or more, hundreds of imitations from Asia, Europe, the...
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Marriage as Tragicomedy
Aldo Ray as the groom & Judy Holliday as the bride in The Marrying Kind (1952), directed by George Cukor Often overlooked among the films George Cukor directed in the fifties, The Marrying Kind...
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Nissan Truck Lust: Hands on a Hard Body
“It’s a human drama thing.” That’s how Benny Perkins, one of the contestants in the “Hands on a Hard Body” contest, describes this unusual endurance contest in Longview, Texas which was once an annual...
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The Bollywood Elvis in Junglee (1961)
Shammi Kapoor lets it rip in Junglee (1961) The impact of rock ‘n roll music and the emerging youth culture of the late fifties on Indian cinema didn’t happen overnight but Junglee (1961) – one of the...
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The Games People Play According to Eloy de la Iglesia
Two college students, Miguel (John Moulder-Brown) and Julia (Inma de Santis), take advantage of a school holiday to run off together for parts unknown. Their plan is to shack up somewhere where their...
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Christopher Plummer: The Von Trapp Who Didn’t Want to Sing
Christopher Plummer, out of his element and comfort zone in The Sound of Music (1965) In interviews over the years Christopher Plummer would often jokingly refer to The Sound of Music as “The Sound of...
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Ilya Muromets vs. the Dragon
There is no doubt that my love of all things bizarre, unusual, and other-worldly was influenced to some degree by viewing at an early age Forbidden Planet, This Island Earth, The Wolf Man, I Married a...
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Adrift in a L.A. Haze
Anouk Aimée in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969) Los Angeles has served as the backdrop for countless Hollywood movies but in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969), the French director’s first and only...
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Spider Women vs. Holy Men in a Once-Lost Chinese Film
They look like women but don’t be fooled (a scene from The Cave of the Spider Women, 1927) Surviving films from the silent era in China are rare. Destruction from wars, government censorship, neglect,...
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Francis Ford Coppola’s 1966 Valentine to New York City
A scene from You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), filmed on location in New York City Before he broke through as one of the most dynamic and successful directors of his generation in 1972 with The Godfather,...
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Beverly Michaels: Wicked Woman
Poster created for Noir City film festival, sponsored by The Film Noir Foundation Voluptuous vixens, murderous golddiggers and greedy femme fatales were a familiar sight in B-movie melodramas of the...
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The Secret Cinema Experiment (Feb. 1980 – Dec. 1981, Athens, Ga.)
Have you ever had a fantasy about running and programming your own repertory cinema? Any self-proclaimed film buff probably has and for me it became a slowly emerging fantasy from the time I was seven...
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