Blog
These stories have been around a long time. Some of them I have updated. Many of them I haven’t. This started out when blogs were like, new!
“Chariots of Fire,” Onward!
Early in the film Chariots of Fire (1981), a working class chap comments apropos of two Cambridge students that British young men fought a hellish war (World War I) so that "shits like [the two students] could get a decent education." But the wealthy need not be...
Don’t Look Now, It’s Roeg’s ’73 Effort
I simply do not like the films of Nicolas Roeg. Don't Look Now (1973) is a fancy, fatuous occult-heavy---and thus supernatural---thriller. Hitchcock's scary Frenzy, which came out close to the same time as Roeg's movie, is offensively misogynistic, but at least it...
Steve Cyrano: “Roxanne”
John Simon asserted that Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac is not a great play, merely a perfect one (which amounts, of course, to a great deal). The 1987 movie that Fred Schepisi and Steve Martin derived from Cyrano---entitled Roxanne---is neither great nor perfect, but...
The Film, “Intruder in the Dust” Succeeds
A brave old lady (Elizabeth Patterson) initiates the digging up of a dead body after nightfall to see what kind of bullet was used to kill the person. The boys who assist her are brave too. What prompts this action---a plot device in Clarence Brown's Intruder in the...
The Stark Original: “All the King’s Men”
The 1949 All the King's Men is crisp and fluid as it tells of a flatly indecent governor (Broderick Crawford's Willie Stark). It has a better, if blemished, script than Citizen Kane, another film about a powerful man, because it's adapted from Robert Penn Warren's...
Get That Account Book! “The Drowning Pool”
With the car washing scene in Cool Hand Luke, director Stuart Rosenberg was a bit of a sexist, but not in The Drowning Pool (1975), which hardly means it is a good film. The fault is not Rosenberg's, though, but that of the writers, including, I assume, Ross...
“Two English Girls” Redux
Francois Truffaut's fine 1971 film, Two English Girls, seems intent to tell us that young men and women cannot be close friends, that personal sacrifice cannot withstand non-conjugal physical desire. Based on a novel by Henri Pierre Roche, just as Jules and Jim is,...
Sparklin’ Earrings: “Madame De . . .”
In my view, the Max Ophuls film The Earrings of Madame De . . . (1953, a.k.a. Madame D . . .) is not art, but rather a lovely, outstandingly directed and edited work of craft. Adulterous love arises in French aristocratic culture, as it does in Renoir's The Rules of...
North Dallas Dreck: “North Dallas Forty” (1979)
Was football controversial in 1979? No. It was considered pretty innocent stuff, albeit, as North Dallas Forty demonstrates, it brought plenty of pain to athletic bodies no longer young. This is convincingly depicted (by Nick Nolte and director Ted Kotcheff),...
