Clara Bow takes top billing in Paramount’s lavish 1927 war drama Wings (1927) and Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Richard Arlen (both virtual unknowns at the time) play the buddies and fellow pilots at the center of the film, but the real star of this World War I picture is the amazing aerial spectacle: the dogfights […]
Free press and free enterprise are uniquely intertwined in Samuel Fuller’s Park Row (1952), the great American maverick director’s tribute to the pioneers of the modern American press in 19th century New York City. Gene Evans—Fuller’s burly alter ego in The Steel Helmet and Fixed Bayonets!—plays Phineas Mitchell, a newsman with big ambitions who goes […]
“Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” All About Eve (1950), Joseph L. Mankeiwicz’s acerbic view askance at the Great White Way, is the writer/director’s Citizen Kane, a little less complex perhaps, but masterful in its own way in its cynical portrait of ambition on the boards. The barbed dialogue is […]
Hombre (1967), adapted from the novel by Elmore Leonard, plays as a ruthless, revisionist take on Stagecoach. Paul Newman is the blue eyed “savage,” a white man raised by the Indians who rejects so-called civilized society for his spiritual family, who has chosen to go native rather than live in the lies and corruption of […]
A decade before he directed Dirty Harry and The Shootist, Don Siegel brought his tough world view and crisp, no-nonsense direction to Hell is for Heroes (1962), a quintessential World War II drama of an undermanned American platoon in France holding off a German advance through sheer bluff and bravery. Steve McQueen is curt and […]
Hitchcock patented the romantic thriller with The Lady Vanishes (1938), a bright, breezy confection that takes his quirky cast (and the audience along with them) from an idyllic picture postcard of fantasy Europe to a nightmarish journey to the heart of the dark days of World War II that lay just ahead. This snappy, sophisticated […]
You know the scene: Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling around the beach as the surf crashes around them and the foamy tide washes around their clenched bodies. It’s a cliché now, but it’s as primal as erotic scenes got in the production code days, and it helped transform From Here to Eternity (1954), Fred […]
The High and the Mighty was the biggest hit of 1954 and nominated for six Academy Awards (it won for Dmitri Tiomkin’s memorable score). Seen today, this lavish aviation drama falls squarely between Stagecoach and Airport, a large ensemble drama about a mechanical crisis on a Honolulu-to-San Francisco flight where every passenger has a story […]
Orson Welles’ 1952 masterpiece Othello, his shoestring-budgeted adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy, is an example of creative will overcoming physical liability. Using primitive (by Hollywood standards) equipment and a rotating crew, and interrupting his shoot to raise money, Welles shot in spurts over three years all over Italy and Morocco and matched images shot in […]
