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Richard Lester’s Feature Film Debut with the Mad Jazz Beat
While producer Sam Katzman was busy exploiting the youth culture in the U.S. with quickie productions like Twist Around the Clock (1961) and Don’t Knock the Twist (1962), his contemporary Milton...
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Mining for B-Movie Gold
Senta Berger is in charge in Jean-Pierre Desagnat’s Les Etrangers (1969) It’s a rare thing when a crime thriller departs from the usual formulaic expectations and rewards the viewer with a much more...
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There’s No Business like Zombie Business……
In 1941, the unexpected success of Buck Privates – a whopping $10 million dollar B-movie blockbuster – officially launched the comedy team of Abbott and Costello who became Universal Studios’ most...
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Fishing with Dynamite
Gillo Pontecorvo began as a documentarian and his interest in social and political issues was already evident in early works like Giovanni (1955), which follows a textile laborer and her female...
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The Devil Made Me Do It
Looking for a Halloween film to creep you out? How about The Blood on Satan’s Claw? Something evil is plowed up in the field in The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) While plowing his fields, a farmer...
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Fade to White
Charles Denner retreats from the world in Life Upside Down (1964), directed by Alain Jessua Films that explore mental illness, especially Hollywood productions such as The Snake Pit, The Three Faces of...
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The Original Odd Couple
Robert J. Flaherty (left) and W.S. Van Dyke collaborated on White Shadows in the South Seas (1928). Either by accident or design, MGM came up with the most unlikely partnership in the history of motion...
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A Walking Plague Called Sheila
Think of the teeming hub of humanity that is New York City and then imagine a person with a highly contagious and deadly disease wandering among the masses, spreading death and panic. Based on an...
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Confessions of a Girl Watcher
Barry Evans is at the center of things in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967) Among the many films to emerge from the “Swinging London” film phenomenon of the sixties, Here We Go Round the...
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Every Man for Himself
Often overlooked in the Spaghetti Western hall of fame, The Ruthless Four (1968) is a riveting, well-crafted tale of a ill-fated search for hidden gold that bears some thematic similarities to The...
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Kay Francis as the Notorious ‘Spot White’
Kay Francis has that come-hither look in Mandalay (1934), an often overlooked Pre-Code drama Today her place in film history rates little more than a footnote in the ascendancy of Warner Bros. as a...
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Polyurethane Companion
Michel Piccoli and his polyurethane companion in Luis Garcia Berlanga’s Life Size (Grandeur Nature, 1974) The topic of men preferring lifelike dolls or mannequins to real women is nothing new in cinema...
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Ten Feet High and Rising
Most moviegoers know Howard Keel as the brawny, baritone singing star of such MGM musicals as Show Boat (1951), Kiss Me Kate (1953) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) but occasionally the actor...
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Lost in The Yabba
Gary Bond stars in the 1971 cult classic Wake in Fright aka Outback, directed by Ted Kotcheff Retitled and released as Outback in the U.S. and Great Britain in 1971, Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright was...
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Leonard Cohen’s 1972 Concert Tour
“If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” – Leonard Cohen Missing in action since it was first filmed by Tony Palmer in 1972, Bird on a Wire, a documentary account of Leonard Cohen’s...
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Dreamer Schemer
Vittorio Gassman as the overly ambitious Guido in Il Successo (1963) “The worst poverty is not wanting to be rich!” Something is gnawing at Guido. It’s the feeling that life is passing him by and he...
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The Strange Mating Rites of Venusians
A Venusian woman (Lorena Velazquez, right) contemplates the breeding potential of an alien suitor in La Nave de los Monstruos (1960) Curvaceous, scantily clad female aliens from Venus. Monstrous beings...
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The Phobophobic Housewife
Margit Carstensen tries to relax by listening to music in Fear of Fear (1975) but it doesn’t stop her increasing bouts of anxiety and depression. Films about housewives losing their identity in a...
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Robert Altman and the Cult of James Dean
A young Robert Altman ponders a camera set-up. While it is rarely shown in retrospectives of his work, Robert Altman’s The James Dean Story (1957) is easily one of the more offbeat and poetic examples...
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Defiantly Abnormal
(from left to right) Paul L. Smith, David Carradine, unidentified child actor, Brad Dourif) in Sonny Boy Occasionally a movie comes along that is so unclassifiable and non-mainstream that you have to...
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