According to the U.K. Guardian, President Barack Obama, upon leaving Great Britain, gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown a very special present, a box set of 25 classic American films (see above), which the Guardian snarkily describes as “a gift about as exciting as a pair of socks.” Well, maybe to a non-film buff. But to ... read more »

Speaking of books – having been invited by Movieman to contribute to his Reading the Movies meme, I submit a list of the 10-plus film-related books that had the greatest impact on me. 1. William K. Everson, The American Movie – Everson was not a critic; he was a film historian, a dying breed, and ... read more »

Everybody knows the music Maurice Jarre wrote for Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago (“Lara’s Theme”). Much less well known are the scores he wrote before Lawrence – including one of Alain Resnais’s first short subjects (Toute la Memoire du Monde, 1956), and the short films and, later, features of French poetic surrealist, Georges Franju. ... read more »

Erich Kuersten’s younger sister series (starting here) inspired me to think about the younger sisters in Hitchcock films, particularly Pat Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train (1951), and her bespectacled predecessor, Edna May Wonacott as Ann Newton in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Alfred Hitchcock’s *minor* characters are rarely throwaways. Little Ann was the co-creation ... read more »

I had no idea there was anything like this out there. But here we are – and the year could not be any later than 1930, maybe as early as 1929 – and here’s young Alfred Hitchcock, certainly no more than 30 in this clip, hectoring one of his leading actresses (Anny Ondra of Blackmail) ... read more »

The Alices in flight, those beautiful women alone in their cars on the run – Sylvia Kristel in Alice ou la Dernière Fugue, Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls, and Inger Stevens in “The Hitch-Hiker” episode of The Twilight Zone – recall the most iconic of such women, Janet Leigh as Marion Crane on the ... read more »

Actress. Comedienne. Talk show personality. And in The Birds (above, screenplay by Evan Hunter), perhaps the most fully realized of Alfred Hitchcock’s dark-haired girls. GreenCine Daily has links to to the BBC obituary and other tributes here.

Erich Kuersten’s Xmas homage to The Bad Seed reminds me of one of my favorite character actors, the utterly unique Henry Jones (1912-1999) who made his film debut playing the retarded-but-cunning (?!?) janitor Leroy in that film, a role that he had created on stage. Jones’s Leroy (above) is the only character in The Bad ... read more »

The following titles from Cahiers du cinéma’s list of 100 plus beaux films de monde are the French titles of some of the greatest non-French films ever made, but – warning – none of them are literal translations. For example, the literal English translation of Les Enchaînés (above) would be The Enchained Ones, but it ... read more »

Boris Karloff in “The Wurdalak” episode of Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963) This is my ranked list of 31 Essential Horror Films culled from Ed Hardy, Jr.’s 183 Official Nominees for the 31 Flicks That Give You the Willies List. In keeping with the parameters of Ed’s poll, my primary criterion for inclusion and ranking ... read more »