Do you recognize this dastardly villain? It’s Boris Karloff, playing a hostile Native American in The Last of the Mohicans (1920) directed by Maurice Tourneur. The hero of the film was another Native American, Uncas, played by Alan Roscoe (standing, below).  Subsequent versions such as Michael Mann’s would make Hawkeye, Uncas’s white companion, the hero of ... read more »

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 »

More than 20 years before Jacques Tourneur took us to an exotic tropical isle in 1943′s I Walked With a Zombie, his father, producer/director Maurice Tourneur (1876-1961), blazed a similar trail with his 1919 production of Victory.  Although most of his work is now lost, Tourneur’s reputation – confirmed by surviving stills and by images like the one ... read more »

Frances Dee was born in Los Angeles in 1909, and died in Connecticut in 2004 – reversing the movie star’s usual trajectory. She was married to Joel McCrea. Her first film was released in 1929, her last in 2006. I treasure her primarily for three performances: 1) As the spoiled but likeable rich girl in ... read more »

The first is a supernatural horror film. The second is a horror story without any trace of the supernatural. Otherwise, they are remarkably similar. Both apply the horror film’s fundamental “return of the repressed” formula to the current economic malaise. Both films feature pretty but not-so-sympathetic heroines whose independence as career women is visually defined ... read more »

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 »

The name of the film is Black Magic, it was released in 1949, and it stars Orson Welles in one of his most flamboyant performances as Joseph Balsamo, aka Cagliostro, the hypnotist/charlatan whose schemes in pursuit of wealth and power were a factor in bringing about the French Revolution. I am delighted to report that ... read more »

Orpheus Descending - Kim Hunter (left) in The Seventh Victim    Hunter’s screen sister, Bettie Page-coiffed Jean Brooks (center), intimidated by Greenwich Village Satanists.   Bright Lights After Dark tips its hat to the Val Lewton Blogathon hosted here, and encourages its readers to check out the documentary, Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, screening ... read more »

Commie on a plane – Oliver Blake and Dana Andrews in The Fearmakers Under the credits of Jacques Tourneur’s The Fearmakers (1958) we see a bearded Dana Andrews being tortured by Chinese communists. The bulk of the film concerns what happens to Andrews’ character after he is released from the Korean/Chinese prison camp and returns ... read more »