This weekend we watched Fritz Lang’s classic crime drama ‘M’, starring Peter Lorre as a child molester/murderer. The film is still shocking. Cinematically it’s filled with technical achievements years ahead of the times. Dramatically it’s perverse, scary and ultimately moving in a quite horrific way. Click here to read more
Robert Shaw is probably best known for his roles in ‘Jaws’, ‘The Sting’ and as Henry the 8th in ‘A Man For All Seasons.’ But he was also a fine writer–his play (and later film) ‘The Man In The Glass Booth’ is a compelling and quite provocative study of an
As humor goes, blooper reels are set at a pretty low bar. Hearing actors screw up and punctuate things with a tasty expletive gets old fast. So why am I posting a 14 minute reel of Warner Brothers contract actors blowing their lines from films made in 1939? Because it’s
Ronald Neame was a distinguished English cinematographer who worked with David Lean on their earliest films–‘Great Expectations’, ‘The Happy Breed’, ‘Oliver Twist’ etc. He then moved into directing and had a relatively good–if perhaps a bit spotty–run, directing a diverse set of films which included ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ (which he
Several years ago I produced and hosted a podcast featuring conversations between me and many legendary filmmakers. Among the guests were Mel Brooks, Andy Garcia, Peter Bogdanovich, Randal Kleiser, John Sayles, Mary Harron, John Avildsen…you get the idea. I stopped doing it because, frankly, I ran out of people I
At the peak of the Marx Brothers revival of the late 60s–mid 70s, an LP consisting of snippets of Marx Brothers routines was released and became my favorite record of all time…at least during the summer of 1974. The record is narrated by Garry Owens, an announcer who was a
As many of you cinema-geek sorts probably know, the original ending of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ was a pie fight that broke out in the war room. There are different reasons given for why it was cut–the above five minute doc claims the studio was nervous because Kennedy had just
Here’s a lovely clip from a 1970-ish Dick Cavett show featuring an interview with Orson Welles. Here, Welles trots out a few anecdotes that are popular in his repetoire but still delightful to hear from the great man himself. And trying to separate fact from fiction with Welles is always
Did you know David Mamet–playwright, screenwriter, director, essayist, loudmouth conservative pundit–was also an aviator? Apparently he learned to fly in his 60s and continues to do so now, in his 70s. Above is a nice little video of him discussing southern Califormia’s role in the history of flight as well
I recently re-watched an excellent, not-too-well-known noir from 1955 called ‘The Big Combo’. It was directed by Joseph Lewis who most film buffs know as the man who directed the famous one-take bank robbery sequence in the 1949 noir ‘Gun Crazy’. In ‘Big Combo’, Lewis takes his limitations–it’s clearly a