Notizie

Haya Harareet, the Israeli actress who played Esther opposite Charlton Heston’s titular character in the 1959 religious epic Ben-Hur, has died at the age of 89 at her home in Buckinghamshire, UK. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz broke the news, citing Harareet’s niece.

Born in Haifa, then Mandatory Palestine (now Israel), Harareet began her career in Israeli movies including the war pic Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, which garnered international attention after it premiered in competition at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.

She then starred in the 1956 Italian drama La donna del giorno for director Francesco Maselli, before being cast in William Wyler’s big budget remake of Ben-Hur. She landed the role of Esther, star Charlton Heston’s love interest, off the back of a 30-second silent screen test, having previously encountered Wyler in Cannes when accompanying Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer.

The blockbuster release of Ben-Hur catapulted Harareet into the limelight, and...

Veterans Day movies on TCM: From 'The Sullivans' to 'Patton' (photo: George C. Scott in 'Patton') This evening, Turner Classic Movies is presenting five war or war-related films in celebration of Veterans Day. For those outside the United States, Veterans Day is not to be confused with Memorial Day, which takes place in late May. (Scroll down to check out TCM's Veterans Day movie schedule.) It's good to be aware that in the last century alone, the U.S. has been involved in more than a dozen armed conflicts, from World War I to the invasion of Iraq, not including direct or indirect military interventions in countries as disparate as Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. As to be expected in a society that reveres people in uniform, American war movies have almost invariably glorified American soldiers even in those rare instances when they have dared to criticize the military establishment.

Jack Clayton's masterpiece is full of repressed sexual hunger and throbbing darkness

Fifty-two years young, Jack Clayton's masterpiece The Innocents is as unsettlingly beautiful and insolubly ambiguous today as it was on the day it was released, and remains, along with Robert Wise's The Haunting, one of the great British psychological horror movies. Based on Henry James's The Turn Of The Screw – derived by screenwriters Truman Capote and John Mortimer from the 1950 Broadway stage adaptation by William Archibald – it's a perfect alignment of script and director, stars and subject matter, and it offers a ton of subsidiary pleasures in its casting (including Peter Wyngarde, a decade before Jason King, and Martin Stevens, the lead blond psycho kid from Village Of The Damned).

The striking camerawork comes courtesy of Freddie Francis, who less than two years later would embark upon a second career as a successful director...