Smart Words About Cinema
For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III, which runs from Sunday, May 13 through Friday, May 18, 2012, is dedicated to helping the National Film Preservation Foundation raise money to score and stream the recently unearthed reels of The White Shadow, a silent film from director Graham Cutts that young Alfred Hitchcock worked [...]
For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III, which runs from Sunday, May 13 through Friday, May 18, 2012, is dedicated to helping the National Film Preservation Foundation raise money to score and stream the recently unearthed reels of The White Shadow, a silent film from director Graham Cutts that young Alfred Hitchcock worked [...]
When a director throws a cinematic frame around an actor, literally dictating how audiences will see the man or woman caught in the camera’s gaze, that’s real power—and it can be a form of possession. The high-voltage connection—between a filmmaker’s visual imagination and the performer who brings it to life—can be mutually productive, a fertile [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] As with many of Fuller’s films, Run of the Arrow is finally about nothing less that the United States, even though it is “just” a Western. As a matter of fact, it is perhaps the most conventionally “Western” of Fuller’s Westerns, the only one that really utilizes [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] There are two kind of people in The Steel Helmet: those who are dead and those who are about to be; men who have ceased to move anywhere and mean anything, and those whose idiosyncratic, even crazy energy keeps them in motion until they too are stopped [...]
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 [...]
As the weather warms up, so do our movie screens. Summer’s the season when hulky superheroes rise and tentpole franchises rule, all aiming to break the bank big-time. Get ready for close encounters with a posse of cinematic bad boys — dark knights, men in black, aliens and bloodsuckers, grifters and drug lords. Grrl power [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] “I wanted the camera to tilt slightly in one direction and the picture to tilt in another. So when it evens out, we have death. I wanted something weird in the beginning, but when it’s over, dead men are usually horizontal, and everything is simple, on one [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] Sam Fuller: “You can always tell about a leaper by the distance his toes are from the edge of either the window or the ledge of the roof he’s threatening to jump from. If you’re covering it, watch those toes. If they stick out, he’s not a [...]
[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 the program for the Grand Illusion Sam Fuller series in 1999] Samuel Fuller straddled two generations: he was the last of that breed of old Hollywood tough guy directors and, along with Orson Welles, one of the first independent mavericks Like Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh and William Wellman he came from [...]
“What is cinema?” asks New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Belmondo of Sam Fuller in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou.” He answers: “Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, death… In one word, EMOTION.” It doesn’t matter whether Godard or Fuller wrote the line (regardless, Fuller’s gruff, cigar chomping delivery makes it his). It stands as [...]
Northwest Film Forum is screening six Robert Bresson films, Tuesdays through Thursdays over the next two weeks (May 1-May 10), so we’re reprinting this essay written for the 1999 Bresson retrospective. [Originally published in slightly different form in The Seattle Weekly, March 24, 1999] It’s a cliché, but it bears repeating: Robert Bresson is an [...]
Opening April 27, The Raven stars a serial killer who reenacts the famously grotesque homicides conjured up by Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) in his many tales of perversity. During his final drunken, drug-addled days, the writer who invented the detective genre helps the police hunt down the mocking murderer. To mark The Raven‘s flight, we invite you to savor [...]
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 [...]