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Missing in Action: William Klein’s Quirky Portrait of Little Richard
Richard Wayne Pennimanaka Little Richardcirca 1950s Those who follow the contemporary art scene and are well versed in art history know William Klein as one of the most influential American...
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Cult of the Arachnids
By the mid-1980s the Italian film industry was in a state of major decline. The glory years of the fifties and sixties were now fondly remembered footnotes in the history of world cinema and even the...
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The Corporate Ladder and How to Climb It
Despite a long and prolific career, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is more famous for being the son of the silent era superstar Douglas Fairbanks Sr., his Hollywood social connections (including ex-wife Joan...
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A Paranormal Puberty
Yasmine Dahm plays Sophie, a young girl who sets off a chain of poltergeist activity in Au Rendez-Vous de la Mort Joyeuse (1973, aka Expulsion of the Devil). Although Luis Bunuel never made a straight...
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Preston Sturges’ Off-Season Yuletide Homage
For many people the Christmas holidays wouldn’t be complete without a viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street or some version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol whether it...
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In Conversation with Peter Bogdanovich
Writer/Director/Producer Peter Bogdanovich The following conversation with Peter Bogdanovich was conducted in April 2010 just prior to the first official TCM Classic Film Festival in which the director...
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A Tale from the Slums of Rome
In its own way, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1961 directorial debut Accattone could be seen as the last gasp of the Italian neo-realism movement. It is also a remarkably self-assured first film that blends...
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The Forgotten Rock Opera
Now here is a curiosity that I plucked from a pile of discarded DVDs at a television station. I knew absolutely nothing about The Butterfly Ball (1977) except for the fact that I had seen it listed as...
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Gabriel Axel’s The Red Mantle
The name Gabriel Axel might not be familiar to most American moviegoers but many are familiar with his 1987 film Babette’s Feast which became a surprise art house hit and won the Oscar for Best Foreign...
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The Sound That Kills
Movies about people who murder with weapons or their bare hands are nothing out of the ordinary but what about a film where a man can kill with his voice? It might seem preposterous but The Shout...
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Tracy, Bogart and Ford
One of the great pleasures of watching Hollywood films from the early thirties is seeing a future screen icon at the dawn of his career such as Spencer Tracy in the low-budget prison comedy Up the...
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James Bond’s Lesser Known Sibling
The James Bond film craze of the 1960s was responsible for launching a secret agent/spy movie sub-genre that thrived for more than a decade. Some of the imitators like Our Man Flint (1966) and The...
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Voyage of Doom
A former actor from Austria turned film director, Georg Tressler is not a name familiar to most American movie fans but for German filmgoers of the fifties he created a sensation with this 1956 feature...
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Frank Capra’s Big Top Adventure
One of the amazing circus stunts featured in Frank Capra’s Rain or Shine (1930), based on the Broadway play. 1934 was the year that Frank Capra became a household name in America with his box-office...
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Eco Warriors of the Tama Hills
The wondrous animated films of Hayao Miyazaki were unknown to most American moviegoers until the 1999 U.S. release of Princess Mononoke, which was released in Japan in 1997. Since then Miyazaki has...
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High Rise Invaders
Long before Michael Haneke arrived on the scene with his original 1997 version of Funny Games (1997), a highly influential and deeply disturbing home invasion thriller, there were many precursors in...
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The Unforeseen Journey from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1 AM to D.A. Pennebaker’s 1 PM
With more than 100 feature films, shorts, video and TV work to his credit, Jean-Luc Godard is surely the most audacious, groundbreaking and prolific filmmaker from his generation. Even longtime...
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Elio Petri’s Portrait of the Artist as Mental Patient
Italian director Elio Petri is probably best known for Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), which won the Oscar for Best Screenplay (by Petri and Ugo Pirro) in 1972. Yet, most of his...
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Melancholy in Salt Lake City
There was a time during the late seventies/early eighties when John Heard seemed destined to become a major leading man on the level of William Hurt or Jeff Bridges or some other Oscar-winning actor of...
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Dusan Makavejev for Beginners
How to describe this blast of creative anarchy from 1965? Fascinating and engaging on so many levels, Man is Not a Bird (aka Covek nije tica, 1965) could be seen as a political parable or a social...
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