Sleepless nights
“You’d think that he’d spend his time worrying about China… or Russia… [Shakes head] Hasn’t slept in eight nights, worrying about Libya.” That line from THE PRESIDENT’S ANALYST has always stuck out for...
View ArticleGo a go-go
Felicitations to Guy Budziak for supplying me with a copy of THE YIN AND THE YANG OF MR GO which refused to play, breaking up into mosaic pixillations of Francis Bacon flesh-smear, sound stuttering in...
View ArticleThe Couch Trip
I read Nigel Balchin’s The Small Back Room some years back, being a fan of the Powell-Pressburger film. It’s very good, and the film is very faithful, apart from softening the ending — Balchin had a...
View ArticleMay 6th
Without any particular plan, we watched THE HINDENBURG on Friday. We were supposed to be getting married, but we watched THE HINDENBURG instead. I can’t actually tell you whether this was a wise...
View ArticleChambermaid of Secrets
Burgess Meredith (above, left) must be the actor most associated with author Octave Mirbeau — he stars in the Amicus horror compendium TORTURE GARDEN, which admittedly owes nothing but its title to...
View ArticleHe Doesn’t Bark Like a Dog, And He Knows the Secrets of the Deep
Dana Andrews and Lilli Palmer adopt a lobster. Pauline Kael admired it. Its own director dismissed it. But neither of these facts need unduly influence us — like it or love it or hate it or be...
View ArticleA tracking shot is a moral act
Or, how did we get from this ~ (Lewis Milestone’s own hand giving an Oscar-worthy performance at the end of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT) To this ~ Dana Andrews observe’s a dead German’s hand in A...
View ArticleBare-ass in the Park
I’m slowly polishing off the Otto Preminger filmography. Chris Fujiwara’s career study names SUCH GOOD FRIENDS, scripted by a pseudonymous Elaine May, as the best of the late-period Premingers, and I...
View ArticleTruth is a menace
“You walk into this room at your own risk. Because it leads to the future. Not a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a new world. It is simply an extension of what began in the old...
View ArticleAnd as timeless as infinity…
I knew this episode of The Twilight Zone mainly from its spoiler-heavy synopsis in the intro to TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE. I’m going to be equally spoilerific here, since the episode is practically a...
View ArticleAngles and Dirty Phases
Lesser Litvaks — CASTLE ON THE HUDSON is a remake of Curtiz’s 20,000 YEARS IN SING SING, which I’ve never seen, though the title fascinated me as a kid. I ought to do a compare-and-contrast. I found...
View ArticleStar-Craving Mad
I went down a rabbit hole investigating The Jet-Propelled Couch, a chapter of the book The Fifty-Minute Hour by Robert Mitchell Lindner, a celebrated collection of psychiatric case histories. In The...
View ArticleStudent Bodies
SPRING MADNESS, from a play by Philip Barry, is very Philip Barry, but not substantial the way HOLIDAY and THE PHILADELPHIA STORY are. Feels like they left something out. Since part of the plot is Lew...
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