Smart Words About Cinema
Le beau Serge and Les cousins, the first two films from Claude Chabrol, mark the official birth of the French nouvelle vague. The two confident, mature dramas don’t have the stylistic flash or narrative invention of the more famous works by Godard and Truffaut that followed, but that was always the way with Chabrol, the [...]
Roman Polanski once cited Cul-De-Sac (Criterion), a sly little character piece set in an isolated medieval castle on the barren British coast, as his personal favorite of his films, and the closest he came to creating “pure cinema.” It’s also been the hardest of Polanski’s films to see, at least in acceptable (and legitimate) editions. [...]
by Kathleen Murphy and Richard T. Jameson [Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977] Howard Winchester Hawks was home the afternoon of July 12, 1976. For some time there, it looked as if it wouldn’t happen. Kathleen Murphy had finally taken the leap and declared Howard Hawks: An American Auteur in the Hemingway Tradition [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977. This essay on Bringing Up Baby is a chapter of the author's University of Washington doctoral dissertation Howard Hawks: An American Auteur in the Hemingway Tradition.] Bringing Up Baby‘s narrative and thematic directions have much in common with those of Shakespearean comedy. Positing the green world of [...]
The death of Blake Edwards at the end of 2010, more than fifteen years after his last film work, was a reminder of a gaudy and maddening career which had been in a state of collapse for over a decade before it finished; and also of an undoubted auteur who needed to be rescued from [...]
The biggest film history news of 2010 was without a doubt the discovery of Upstream (1927), a John Ford comedy from the late silent era previously thought lost, found in a New Zealand film archive along with numerous other American shorts, features and fragments. After screenings in Los Angeles, Pordenone, New York and elsewhere, San [...]
John Carpenter famously commented, “In France, I’m an auteur; in Germany, a filmmaker; in Britain, a genre director; and in the USA, a bum.” Or as another J.C. put it, a prophet is never without honor, save in his own country. Carpenter may have understated his following: He has under his belt one undisputed masterpiece, [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977] War is an inescapably personal experience in Cross of Iron. Nearly always from middle-shot or closer, the soldiers see the enemy they fight: many die in the embraces of their killers. No field-size moving masses of men, no distant artillery, no “targets” and “objectives.” In Peckinpah’s war [...]
Thursday, June 30, is the birthday of Emil Anton Bundsmann, who entered the world in 1906 at San Diego, California, and departed it April 29, 1967, in Berlin, Germany. In between he had streamlined his name to Anthony Mann, become a movie director, and acquired a passionate cult among connoisseurs of film style for having [...]
Claude Chabrol, the most doggedly prolific of the New Wave directors all the the through the to the final months of his life, died less than a year ago. To this day it’s as if we take him for granted. Where we have deluxe, lovingly-restored and mastered editions of the films Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, [...]
By Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy [Originally published in Movietone News 55, September 1977] Robert Altman visited Seattle late last year in connection with the world premiere of Welcome to L.A. at the Harvard Exit. The directorial debut of his sometime assistant director and—on Buffalo Bill and the Indians—co-screenwriter Alan Rudolph, Welcome also marked [...]
[This was a program note written to accompany the October 10, 1972, showing of Scarface in "The Cinema of Howard Hawks," an Office of Lectures & Concerts Film Series at the University of Washington. At that time Scarface was a very rara avis; indeed, the print shown was the property of a private collector. It [...]
[This was a program note for the October 12, 1971, showing of The Magnificent Ambersons in the University of Washington Lectures & Concert Film Series "The Cinema of Orson Welles." It begins with continued commentary on Citizen Kane, shown the week before—an essay located here.] One of Charles Foster Kane’s least sympathetic moments occurs in [...]
[This is a program note written for "The Cinema of Orson Welles," the Autumn 1971 film series of the University of Washington Office of Lectures & Concerts, and distributed at the October 5, 1971, showing of Welles' first feature film.] Thirty years after its initial release, Citizen Kane may very well be the most talked-about [...]
Back in 1993, during a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the auteur theory in America, critic-turned-filmmaker Paul Schrader identified a then-current Hollywood trend: “If you learned your craft in episodic television, you learned two things. One: how to take orders and be on time. And two: how to please people. So now who are [...]