The Frenchman, Maurice Tourneur, and the Austrian, Richard Oswald, were major producer/directors during cinema’s Silent Era, but are hardly remembered today. These days, movie lovers are more likely to know the films and television shows directed by their sons — Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, Out of the Past), and Gerd Oswald (Brainwashed, Screaming ... 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 »

Hello Out There (1949), like virtually all of the films James Whale directed after Show Boat, had a troubled production history. It never obtained a commercial release. Yet, unlike any of the other films made by Whale after his brief period of Hollywood supremacy (1930-1936), it shows the director fully in control and at the height ... read more »

Director Robert Siodmak was born on August 8, 1900, in Dresden, Germany. If alive today, he would be 110. In 1994, in an article entitled Beyond the Golden Age: Film Noir Since the ’50s, I wrote: It is almost (but not quite) a rule of thumb that the more personal a director’s vision, the less ... read more »

Nine out of ten bloggers agree – the dreams in Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION are not particularly dream-like, at least, not much more so than the action sequences in your average James Bond film. Whether that makes INCEPTION a bad movie is another issue.  Nolan essentially uses the dream invasion scenario as a MacGuffin – an excuse to ... read more »

In his nonfiction text On Writing, Stephen King describes the artist’s work as telepathy. Hardly the new-age type, King is referring to how thoughts can transmit though a quiet practice of mass communication. His technology, of course, is the printed word, though he’s never been averse to finding new narrative forms, like the movies. Like ... read more »

Can a film’s designer be its effective auteur?  He can, if his name is William Cameron Menzies. Menzies is best known for directing and designing two classics of the science fiction/fantasy genre, his 1936 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ Things to Come (above) and his 1953 masterpiece of Childrens’ Expressionism,* Invaders From Mars (below right).  However, Menzies can also ... read more »

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) – Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka gives Missi Pyle, James Fox, David Kelly, Freddie Highmore, et al. the guided tour. One man’s cliché is another man’s archetype. Tim Burton’s version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, like most of Burton’s work, is filled with clever ideas, but they are ... read more »

A 5-hour epic film in two parts about a bride who swears vengeance on the conspirators who killed her husband. That’s Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. It’s also an accurate description of Fritz Lang’s 1924 fantasy classic, Die Nibelungen, Part 1: Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried’s Death), and Part 2: Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild’s Revenge). Unlike Tarantino’s Bride, Lang’s ... read more »