Smart Words About Cinema
Contributor
[Originally published in Pacific Northwest, January 1988] • Hope and Glory: Down among the green leaves of his family’s backyard garden, young Bill Rohan (Sebastian Rice Edwards) confronts the wizard Merlin, while in the house the stillness of the adults ’round a grumbling radio signals that the Second World War has just been declared…. • [...]
A year after its landmark release of Budd Boetticher’s “Ranown” Westerns, Sony showcases another great maverick filmmaker. Samuel Fuller spent most of his career in B pictures, creating ultrapersonal, formula-defying films that got little notice from workaday reviewers but impressed sharp critics like Andrew Sarris and Manny Farber. His streetwise worldview, his voice, his advisedly [...]
[originally published in Steadycam, February 13, 2005; an earlier version of this article was published late 2004 in Queen Anne & Magnolia News] Samuel Fuller—whose credit on his movies always read WRITER PRODUCER • DIRECTOR SAMUEL FULLER with WRITER on top like that—came to Seattle in May 1976 for a special appearance with two of [...]
No one could have foretold, in the lazy, post-Watergate summer of 1975, that the Spielbergian tide swelling on the horizon would forever wash away tried-and-true traditions in the summer movie business. Nor could anyone have guessed how the success of a single film about a fish with very big teeth would lead to the kind [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] Sam Fuller visited the Seattle Film Society the weekend of May 8 and, among many other things that happened within 46-and-a-half exhilarating, excruciating, mind-boggling, adrenalin-jagging hours, he told a story about Lazslo Kovacs and The Last Movie, in which Fuller played a movie director for director-of-the-movie Dennis [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] Guy starts his movie with loving closeups of a ramrod squeezing oil down a rifle bore and a hand stroking off the outer barrel, he’d better have either a sense of humor or a deep enough fetishistic commitment to justify the indulgence. Harvey Hart, a Canadian director [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] Although the advertising works hard to suggest Mother, Jugs and Speed is “a black and blue comedy” in the tradition of M*A*S*H, the actual film bears little resemblance to Altman’s in the areas that count. It’s a cynical comedy and it deals with unsentimental souls on the [...]
Late last year—late afternoon on 2011′s final day, in fact—I emailed the editors of the forthcoming book Film Noir: The Directors my essay on Fritz Lang. As of March 1, the book has come forth in reality. A couple of dozen film noir scholars and/or fans have written on slightly more than that number of key [...]
Among the best reasons for feeling optimistic about the expanded reach of SIFF Cinema—the new facilities at Seattle Center and the acquisition of the three Uptown screens nearby—is that it increases Seattleites’ chances of getting access to institutional film programming from elsewhere in the movie universe. Case in point: the imminent sampling of “Rendez-Vous with [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] To make an uninvolving movie out of one of the most decisive battles of the Second World War may seem a dubious challenge, but there’s no denying Universal their full credit in meeting it. Midway has very little to recommend it. Persons who never subjected themselves to [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday may rate a footnote in film history as the first Hollywood Western to include oral-genital humor, and if that’s your idea of cinematic immortality, enjoy. As American-International Pictures’ first “class” production, the film does not bode well. Any one of AIP’s [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] Vincent is losing his mistress, his factory and his health. In the dark night of the bourgeois soul he goes to see the wife he’s already lost because of the mistress. Embarrassed by his needs, discomfited by the sudden knowledge that another man has just left his [...]
Yes, we’re past the point when anything more needs to be said about the 84th Oscars, and yet I’ve seen no mention of the most wackily wonderful moment of the evening. It afforded a look inside Academy ritual, and an instance of late-blooming justice being done against considerable odds. So please indulge one last Oscar [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] Death-wish mechanic Michael Winner first made his name as a director of comedies (You Must Be Joking, The Jokers, I’ll Never Forget Whats’isname)—a fact one remembers only with some straining, and without the assistance of his latest film. James Agee once suggested that really bad movies should [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] That’s Entertainment, Part Two begins where the first compilation should have ended, with (a portion of) the first performance of “That’s Entertainment” by Fred Astaire, Nanette Fabray, Jack Buchanan and Oscar Levant in Minnelli’s The Band Wagon. Around this footage Saul Bass has devised one of the [...]