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Aline MacMahon in Heat Lightning
Publicity portrait of Aline MacMahon in the 1930s. Most classic movie fans know Aline MacMahon as the wise-cracking Trixie in Gold Diggers of 1933, the devoted wife of Guy Kibbee in William Keighley’s...
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Czech Mates
Sylva Koscina and Dirk Bogarde star in Agent 8 3/4 (aka Hot Enough for June, 1964), directed by Ralph Thomas. Not all of the spy thrillers that followed in the wake of the James Bond craze, which began...
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Himansu Rai’s 1929 Indian Epic
At the 23rd San Francisco Silent Film Festival (May 30-June 3, 2018), the Castro Theater played host to a diverse program of silent era masterpieces accompanied by live music, performed by either solo...
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Vampire Machine
First, let me get this out of the way. The Bloodstained Lawn (Italian title: Il Prato macchiato di Rosso, 1973) is a haphazard mash-up of a genre film, but an entertaining one for Eurotrash...
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For the Boys
Between 1941 and 1945 as World War II engulfed the world most major studios in Hollywood demonstrated their patriotism by producing numerous flag-waving musicals in support of the troops and to raise...
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Commies at the Greasy Spoon Diner
The Psychotronic Video Guide calls it “One of the oddest movies of the fifties,” Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide deems it a “trash classic,” and any movie buff who has ever seen it will probably concur...
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A Paean for Terra Firma
From an early age I developed a fascination with film but it wasn’t until college when my film interests expanded beyond American cinema to include international films and more specialized genres like...
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The Naked Lens of Philippe Garrel
Jean Seberg is the main focus of Philippe Garrel’s Les Hautes Solitudes (1974). In 1974 very few people outside of France knew anything about Philippe Garrel, an experimental filmmaker who had first...
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Like Catnip for Women
David Manners (center) turns on the charm for Ann Dvorak as Ken Murray looks on in Crooner (1932). Thanks to Warner Archives and several other distributors there have been an astonishing number of...
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Degenerates at Large
Long before it ever became available for the home video market, The Girl in Black Stockings would occasionally pop up on late night television screenings in unexpected places like Turner Classic...
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Dining in the Buff
The idea of a nude restaurant where the clientele and wait staff are composed of various members of Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd such as Taylor Mead and Viva wearing little more than skimpy black briefs...
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Teenage Science Geeks Might Save the World
2018 is turning out to be another great year for critically acclaimed and commercially successful documentary features that might end up as Oscar nominees in that category. Morgan Neville’s Won’t You...
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A Cowpoke and His Cow
Buster Keaton plays a hapless cowpoke who tries to save a cow named Brown Eyes from the slaughterhouse in Go West (1925). Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary homage, The Great Buster, is scheduled to open...
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Remembering Hal Ashby
Mark Harris’s best-seller Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood pointed to 1967 as the year that the studio system crumbled and a new order emerged while Peter...
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Dietrich and von Sternberg’s Last Tango
When The Scarlet Empress (1934), Josef von Sternberg’s lavish historical epic starring Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great, proved to be a critical and commercial disaster for Paramount, the...
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Curse of the Doll People
The Mexican film poster for Curse of the Doll People (1961). Some phobias, often triggered by movies, develop in childhood and stick with you for life like an overwhelming fear of circus clowns or...
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The Streetwise Anthropologist
The name Garry Winogrand might not be familiar to you but you have probably seen some of his most famous photographs over the years. There are his candid celebrity shots that include a young John F....
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Highlights from VFF 2018
The annual Virginia Film Festival (VFF) in Charlottesville recently celebrated its 31st year of operation on Nov.1-4 and offered attendees the opportunity to select from over 150 films, many of which...
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William A. Seiter’s If You Could Only Cook (1935)
Whenever the subject of screwball comedy comes up, I usually think of the same handful of titles in this short-lived movie genre which began sometime in the early thirties with such models of the form...
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Embryonic Journey
A young Japanese butterfly collector sees a rare species in his part of Japan in Silence Has No Wings (aka Tobenai Chinmoku, 1966), directed by Kazuo Kuroki. What happens when you take an idea for a...
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