Standing in an aquarium with his arms outstretched, the Creature from the Black Lagoon makes a cameo appearance in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, but his presence is anything but gratuitous.  Like everything else in this poetically unified film, he is there to echo, relect, or comment upon some other aspect of the movie.  3 Women is a movie filled with doubles ... read more »

  The Down-to-Earth must know She cannot rival the Sky We move on suspended Between Reality and Dream Between Oblivion and Eternity Through a Labyrinth of Evergreens   cjk  8/10/05

   Lost Horizons Beneath the Hollywood Sign, by David Del Valle. Albany, Georgia: BearManor Media, 2010. Paperback. $27.95. 458 pp. ISBN 1593936079.   David Del Valle collects. Among other things, he collects movie people. Lost Horizons Beneath the Hollywood Sign is a book of reminiscences, some of which previously appeared in Films in Review, of movie ... read more »

Speaking of campy extraterrestrials, do you recognize this classic horror film star? Here’s another publicity image from the same production. I hope you’re as surprised and delighted as I was.  It’s Ernest Thesiger, best known as Dr. Pretorius in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, playing “The Monster,”  a talking microbe (not really an extraterrestrial, but he sure looks ... read more »

I have written before of my admiration for the late Michael Gough (1916-2011), a British actor who could move effortlessly from the serious classical theater of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Harold Pinter, and Berthold Brecht, to the florid melodramas of Jimmy Sangster and Herman Cohen.  Which is another way of saying that – like Sirs Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness, or John Gielgud ... read more »

Featuring Andrea and Steve Martin. Comic geniuses. If the scene in which Steve Martin as Inspector Clousseau attempts to learn English pronunciation (bottom) bears more than a passing resemblance to the SCTV “English for Beginners” sketch with Andrea Martin as Pirini Scleroso (top), don’t look at it as a rip-off.  Consider it an homage.  You might even ... read more »

Is Two Seconds (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) the first American noir? I’ve read some historians who trace American film noir as far back as Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927). But Underworld, with its light-hearted gangster protagonist, is a veritable romp compared to the unrelenting descent into darkness that is Two Seconds. Two Seconds is a showcase ... read more »

Reaching across time, this poster for Gregg Araki’s 2011 film, Ka-Boom, echoes the kaleidoscopic poster design of Daniel Haller’s 1970 psychedelic monster-fest, The Dunwich Horror (screenplay by Curtis Hanson), and makes explicit the subtext of the earlier film, which is Those Crazy Kids.

Otto Preminger had a thing for saintly blondes. The best known of Preminger’s saintly – and hauntingly beautiful – blondes was Jean Seberg whom Preminger discovered and cast as the lead in his version of Saint Joan (1957), but the archetype appears in his movies as far back as Alice Faye’s performance in Fallen Angel (1945 – the year ... read more »

Although most film noirs take place in an urban setting, the “dark city,” Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) shows how the noir vision can thrive almost anywhere – it is an effectively written and directed ”rural noir.” You could hardly get more rural than the bleak Missouri backwoods where Winter’s Bone takes place.  Yet it shares with the ... read more »