Bright Lights Film Journal :: November/December 1999

November/December 1999 | Issue 26

Articles

Poets of Everyday Life: Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin

Gary Morris

TThree pioneering American neorealist indies: Little Fugitive, Weddings and Babies, Lovers and Lollipops

Maverick Metzger: Dark Odyssey and Little Mother

Gary Morris

Radley Metzger’s first film and his veiled biopic of saintly slut Evita now on DVD

Radley's Metzger's The Dirty Girls; Carmen, Baby; The Princess and the Call Girl

Gary Morris

Will Metzger mania never end?

Movies

Mario Bava's Baron Blood

Gary Morris

This middle-range Bava looks better than ever on DVD

Antonioni's Red Desert

Gary Morris

The Italian maestro's stroll through the modern wasteland

Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin’s Little Fugitive Escapes to DVD

Gary Morris

A breakthrough indie and a crash course in no-budget film productions

Tragic Poignancy: Mizoguchi’s The Loyal 47 Ronin

Gary Morris

The great director’s legendary version of Chushingura is finally available in a sparkling DVD transfer

Fred and Ginger Take Off in Flying Down to Rio

Alan Vanneman

"Hey fella, twirl that old propella"

Pre-Code Follies: Murder at the Vanities

Alan Vanneman

This 1934 musical mystery has girls, grins, guns, and Duke Ellington, too

Forgotten and Fantastic: The King of Jazz

Alan Vanneman

Hot licks and high kicks in a rare early musical

Beatnik Chic: Chuck Workman’s The Source

Gary Morris

An uneven new documentary looks at all things Beat

American Beauty: Why It Sucks and Why the Critics Love It

Alan Vanneman

Beautiful it ain’t, says an outraged Alan Vanneman

Shifting Sexualities: Bedrooms and Hallways

Gary Morris

The Go Fish queen goes fishing again — this time for gay boys and the men and women who love them

All Roads Lead to Love: Tanya Wexler’s Finding North

Gary Morris

A good-natured low-budget road movie with a queer twist

Draining the Drama: Simon Shore’s Get Real

Gary Morris

This mixed-bag British coming out drama doesn’t quite come out.

Unhappy, Critic on Happy, Texas

Gary Morris

Mark Illsley’s dicey debut feature about faux gay cons in the hideous heartland

Deadly Crawl: The Velocity of Gary

Gary Morris

The "velocity" of this misguided AIDS drama never materializes

Directors

The Day the Bronx Invaded Earth: The Life and Times of Mike and George Kuchar

Jack Stevenson

Forget all those other boring indie brother teams — these guys were the original geniuses of cinema’s bargain basement

Chatting About Other Things: An Interview with Federico Fellini

Toni Maraini

The Master speaks on life, art, and Carlos Castaneda

Lonesome Leni: The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl

Gary Morris

Hitler’s hired hand and master filmmaker Riefenstahl is indeed both wonderful and horrible in Ray Muller’s 1993 documentary.

Books

Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew

Gary Morris

She made a strong impression — negative, positive, sometimes both — on practically everybody she encountered

VideoHound’s War Movies: Classic Conflict on Film

Gary Morris

More sampler than encyclopedia

100 Years of Oz: A Century of Classic Images from The Wizard of Oz collection of Willard Carroll

Gary Morris

As eye-popping as the film, the book is a glamorously visual trip through a century of Emerald City commercial imagery

Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir

Gary Morris

Hirsch moves into trickier territory: surprisingly little has been written about neo-noir

Eccentrics of Comedy

Gary Morris

An enjoyably pithy collection of essays

The Ultimate Directory of Film Technicians: A Necrology of Dates and Place of Births and Deaths of More Than 9,000 Producers, Screenwriters, Composers, Cinematographers, Art Directors, Costume Designers, Choreographers, Executives, and Publicists; The Ultimate Directory of Silent and Sound Era Performers

Gary Morris

Doyle's two latest books are handsome in an appropriately stark way and, like the death industry on which they draw, wildly overpriced