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

In celebration of the birthday of director Michael Powell (1905-1990) today, I’d like to share with you this clip from Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s 1947 color masterpiece, Black Narcissus, a story of spirituality, sexuality, and madness set in the exotic Himalayas. Note in particular the many similarities to the climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo made ... read more »

La Belle Captive (1983) is an erotic noir mystery by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad. It is also quite tongue-in-cheek. The following three images which appear in succession in the film capture something of the movie’s fetishistic flavor. If the last shot reminds you of the orgy sequence in Kubrick’s Eyes ... read more »

With a tip of the hat and, perhaps, apologies to Nathaniel R, here is my version of his 20 Actress meme – not just 20 favorite actresses, but 20 outstanding 20th Century co-stars. Here are 10 pairs of actresses (with two bonus pairs for the 2000s) who were not just wonderful individually, but who, co-starring ... read more »

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 »

It’s official now. According to Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo “belongs among the great musical works of the century.” And surely, if Herrmann’s Vertigo is among the great musical works of the last century, Herrmann’s highly influential, formally radical, strings-only score for Psycho is there ... read more »

Now that Anna Nicole Smith is deceased and the paternity of her baby has been resolved, Camille “Sexual Personae” Paglia is hailing her as a “populist heroine” (here and here). Paglia compares Smith to Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Anita Ekberg, regretting that today’s Hollywood couldn’t have made better use of what Paglia sees as ... read more »

Eugenia from Los Angeles writes: I just watched Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) and didn’t find it to be all that noir! The heroine was too clean-cut, and the movie was more of a regular murder mystery to me than a noir, by my understanding of that term. I think of noirs as dealing with the ... read more »