Recent viewing includes a stark western (compared to the work of Dreyer by Bertrand Tavernier), an entertaining adventure souffle from frequent collaborators John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, and a ground-breaking satirical drama from Robert Aldrich which dealt sympathetically with lesbianism in the late 1960s.
A round-up of recent viewing ranging from classic fantasy to low budget horror to rugged adventure and a western.
Two distinguished British actors passed away in June after long and varied careers in film and television: the imposing Christopher Lee and the debonair Patrick Macnee, both at age 93.
Looking back over 2013, the most significant titles in my disk viewing have been imported from England or released by Criterion.
While Death Hunt is an enjoyable outdoor adventure, it plays fast & loose with history, transforming northern Canada into a facsimile of the American west
Mikhail Kalatozov, whose career began in his mid-20s with a number of documentaries, made some of the most interesting films to come out of Soviet Russia. Like most major filmmakers under the communist regimes of the ’30s through the ’60s, he had a rocky relationship with the authorities who controlled filmmaking, at one point even […]
An 11-year-old orphan, discovered working in a maharajah’s stables by a cameraman on a scouting trip, represents one of the strangest anomalies in the history of movie-stardom. Osmond Borradaile was in India in preparation for a project based on a story by Rudyard Kipling when he met Selar Shaik and brought him to the attention […]
Not surprisingly, given the amount of time I spend watching movies at home, I came across quite a few worthwhile titles during the year. I’ve already written about many of these in this blog, so will just offer capsule comments here (in no particular order) about ones that I particularly recommend. Dramatic features The World, […]
Time was – longer ago than I care to contemplate – I would have devoured a movie like Zoltan Korda’s The Four Feathers (1939) as nothing more than a thrilling adventure that appealed to a boy’s imagination. Watching it now in Criterion’s lush new edition, I found various parts of myself in conflict for the […]
Alexander Mackendrick (1912-1993), who was born in the United States but grew up in Scotland from the age of five, made only nine features between 1949 and 1969, when he took up a teaching position at the California Institute of the Arts. But within that limited output, he managed to create several masterpieces, including his […]