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 »

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 »

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 »

The amount of discussion generated by Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds demonstrates, if nothing else, that whether you like the film, hate it, or harbor mixed feelings about it, what Tarantino has created is some kind of movie. Unless you have been living in the proverbial cave – and I don’t mean Plato’s – you should ... read more »

In 1976, Claude Chabrol made a special appearance at the Los Angeles Film Exposition (FILMEX). A friend tipped me off that he was staying at the Century Plaza Hotel, and that if I hung out in the lobby I was likely to run into him there. The tip paid off. I met Chabrol in the ... read more »

As long as we’re discussing the semiology of the wink, here is the ultimate evil wink, the wink of Fritz Lang’s 1926 Metropolis fembot, unforgettably mimed by 16-year-old Brigitte Helm, the slow knowing shutting of the metal eyelid that says to flesh-and-blood mankind, “You are so fucked!”

GOOD – Western Union (Fritz Lang 1941) This is one of Lang’s first color films. He shot it in Arizona’s Painted Desert with special attention to the natural scenery, and the three-strip Technicolor cinematography is quite beautiful to look at it, even today. It must have bowled over audiences in 1941. The surprising thing about ... read more »

Big news, folks – via GreenCine Daily – that I’m too excited about not to share. An *original* version of Fritz Lang’s 1926 sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis has been discovered in a Buenos Aires film archive, including scenes long considered to be lost forever. The Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation will be working with the Buenos Aires ... read more »

Proceed immediately to artist 14′s Gallery of the Absurd to see a wonderful caricature portrait inspired by this poster for the restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

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 »