Notizie

Natalie Wood movies: From loving Warren Beatty to stripping like Gypsy Rose Lee Three-time Academy Award nominee Natalie Wood, one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the ’60s, is Turner Classic Movies’ "Summer Under the Stars" performer today, August 18, 2013. TCM is currently showing Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961), a romantic drama written for the screen by playwright William Inge (Picnic, Bus Stop). Wood is fine as a young woman who loses her emotional balance after she’s seduced and abandoned by the son (Warren Beatty) of a wealthy family in Kansas shortly before the Great Depression. For her efforts, she received a Best Actress Oscar nomination. (Sophia Loren was that year’s winner, for the Italian-made Two Women.) (See “TCM movie schedule: Natalie Wood Hot Hollywood Star.” Next in line is Richard Quine’s feeble attempt at screwball comedy, Sex and the Single Girl (1964), a movie that promises much more than it delivers,...

Charlton Heston: Moses has his ‘Summer Under the Stars’ day Charlton Heston is Turner Classic Movies’ "Summer Under the Stars" star on Monday, August 5, 2013. TCM will be presenting one Heston movie premiere: Guy Green’s Hawaiian-set family drama Diamond Head (1963), in which Heston plays a pineapple grower, U.S. Senate candidate, and total control freak at odds with his strong-willed younger sister, the lovely Yvette Mimieux. Also in the Diamond Head cast: France Nuyen, Best Supporting Actor Academy Award winner George Chakiris (West Side Story), The Time Tunnel‘s James Darren, and veteran Aline MacMahon (Gold Diggers of 1933, Five Star Final) in one of her last movie roles. And last but not least, silent film star Billie Dove reportedly has a bit role in the film. (Photo: Charlton Heston ca. 1955.) (Charlton Heston movies: TCM schedule.) Now, with the exception of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, in which Charlton Heston...

“Now you listen to me, Hinchecliffe. It’ll be for the last time. I’m through with your dirty rag, and I’m through with you. Oh, I’m not ducking any of the blame for this thing. You thought of the murder and I committed it. But I did it for smaller profit. For wages. You did it for circulation.” — Randall, as played by the brilliant Edward G. Robinson

I’ve written about LeRoy’s work before, a director quickly becoming a favorite of his era, but that was a comedy, albeit one with sharp teeth and tragic implications. Five Star Final is unbearably tense melodrama more in the vein of the also exceptional Two Seconds. Superficially concerned with the actions of a newspaper and its working parts as they dig up an old murder story to rejuvenate circulation numbers, like Hard to Handle, it winds up being a...

“Now you listen to me, Hinchecliffe. It’ll be for the last time. I’m through with your dirty rag, and I’m through with you. Oh, I’m not ducking any of the blame for this thing. You thought of the murder and I committed it. But I did it for smaller profit. For wages. You did it for circulation.” — Randall, as played by the brilliant Edward G. Robinson

I’ve written about LeRoy’s work before, a director quickly becoming a favorite of his era, but that was a comedy, albeit one with sharp teeth and tragic implications. Five Star Final is unbearably tense melodrama more in the vein of the also exceptional Two Seconds. Superficially concerned with the actions of a newspaper and its working parts as they dig up an old murder story to rejuvenate circulation numbers, like Hard to Handle, it winds up being a...

Edward G. Robinson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Glenda Farrell, Little Caesar Little Caesar Review Pt.1 More cogent is the claim that Little Caesar represents a look at American capitalism without the blinders. Rico is like many of the Gilded Age thugs who made violence and murder an accepted practice of business. In much the same way that the Rockefellers and Carnegies avoided being publicly seen with blood on their hands, so too do the big movers and shakers of the city’s underworld. Diamond Pete Montana (Ralph Ince) and the Big Boy (Sidney Blackmer), both of whom are several notches above Rico, survive because they keep low profiles — in the world of Big Business, too, the CEOs that stay behind the scenes survive the longest. Rico, on the other hand, does his Al Capone and John Gotti-like best to court the press and as a result, is doomed. Now, while nowhere near great cinema,...

Part of a series by David Cairns on forgotten pre-Code films.

Edward L. Cahn—how shall I sing your praises? Perhaps before seeing this film I wouldn't have bothered, though It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) is a genuinely exciting sci-fi horror, and a clear precursor to Alien. Apart from that, Cahn seems to resemble W. Lee Wilder (Billy Wilder's idiot brother), in that he was capable of semi-decent Z-grade noirs, but concentrated much of his attention on science fiction, a genre he seemed to have no understanding of and nothing but contempt for. Cahn's Invisible Invaders (1959) may safely be recommended to anybody who likes really, really stupid movies. Movies so stupid they forget to breath.

Above: The chain gang chorus line—a surprisingly uncommon trope.

But decades earlier, things were different. Cahn was already churning out several quickies a year, with snap-brimmed titles like Homicide Squad (1931) and Radio Patrol (1932). The difference was,...

Bright Lights Film Journal editor Gary Morris introduces #74: "This issue opens with Jd Markel's enchanting exegesis of Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, but as in Jd's previous contribution, expands into a much wider cultural critique…. In the Movies section, one of our new writers — come on down, Graham Daseler! — appears with two delightful entries, one on My Dinner with André, the other on the life and career of John Huston. Bl regular David Pike authoritatively analyzes Denis Villeneuve's disturbing feature Incendies, while Bl newbie Barry Stephenson offers a thoughtful study of ritual in Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited. First-time contributors William Anselmi and Sheena Wilson shine light on the dark side of cinema technologies in a daring piece on Inception. And two recent returnees to these cyberpages, Mark Chapman and Alex Kirschenbaum, stylishly weigh in on, respectively, the 'aesthetic of disavowal' of Haneke's La Pianiste and Scorsese's The Color of Money...