Here’s a quirky little interview with John Huston shot on (or near?) the Irish location of ‘Casino Royal’, the sort-of James Bond movie which he co-directed with twenty other directors. This is ‘portrait of the artist as bullshit-salesman’ deluxe. Huston is charming, evasive, clearly perplexed by what he’s doing involved
Humphrey Bogart called him ‘the monster’ (with great affection, of course). Women found him wildly attractive (even though he treated them rather dreadfully, being proudly ‘multi-amorous’ long before the New York Times wrote admiring articles about threesomes buying and renovation multi-amorous brownstones in Brooklyn). But I digress. John Huston was
In the late 1940s and early 1950s it was generally accepted that Sir Carol Reed, the British filmmaker responsible for ‘The Third Man’, was Europe’s greatest filmmaker. This wasn’t just based on that beyond-classic noir. (Actually placing ‘The Third Man’ in a genre–like noir–is reductive; it’s many different types of
Filmed in February 1929, when sound was well on its way in, ‘Double Whoopee’ was a defiantly silent entry and one of the best of all Stan and Ollie non-talkies. The hotel setting, characters and costumes are wonderfully evocative of the 20s, complete with ‘The Prince’, a Von Stroheim-esque character
By the late 1920s, Hal Roach had struck a lucrative distribution deal with MGM, resulting in expanded theatrical exposure, better music soundtracks and a lion roaring silently in the opening credit sequence. (Actually this version of the MGM lion is a rather sullen one, who seems to be grumbling about
I’ve always loved this blessed last week of the year. It’s a week free of the calendar–no day has any significance since almost everything but basic services is closed, nobody’s at work and it’s not even a holiday. Truly a lost week–a wonderful, liberating and rare occurrence. For several years
I hadn’t seen the Cary Grant Vs. the Crop Duster scene from ‘North By Northwest’ in ages so I looked it up over lunch today and was surprised by how little of it I recalled. The long prelude–six minutes before the plane begins its attack–is Hitch at his methodical best,
Last night we watched the HBO Paul Anka doc and I knew from the very beginning, which featured 85 year-old Anka on board his private jet with his sixteen year old wife, that he was a prick. Not that he said or did anything obviously prick-ish. He wouldn’t have let
Whoever thought that one day Woody Allen would be even more detested than William F. Buckley? I personally must confess to having great respect and affection for each of these freaks of nature, something that pretty much nobody I know shares anymore. Above we see them in action as they
A couple of months ago I posted about Howard Hawks 1939 movie ‘Only Angels Have Wings’. The discussion largely centered on the magnificent aerial photography by Elmer Dyer. It turns out that the Criterion Collection has included the film in their august DVD pantheon of classic cinema and provided a