Archive for the ‘Classic Movies’ Category
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
Just watched 1948 musical oddity On an Island With You, about an aquatic movie star (Esther Williams) making a film on location in Hawaii. A young Navy lieutenant (Peter Lawford) has a crush on her, and hopes to pry her loose from her matinee-idol boyfriend (Ricardo Montalban). The picture requires ...
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Thursday, August 21st, 2008
So much of film criticism in 2008 is the blind leading the lame, so the loss of the long-retired but not forgotten Manny Farber is just one more bad indicator, as they say in the financial world. Got to meet the man once; he was hard of hearing and it ...
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Monday, August 18th, 2008
Days of Delon It’s been a good summer for Alain Delon; first came a five-film set from Lionsgate (reviewed here), followed by Le Choc as part of Lionsgate’s Catherine Deneuve set (read review). The latest reissue comes from Koch-Lorber. Joy House; one disc; Koch-Lorber; $24.98This rococo 1964 thriller ...
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Monday, July 21st, 2008
Always on the lookout for cinematic portrayals of the oft-maligned newspaper editor, I was pleased to see 1948's That Wonderful Urge (part of a great new 10-film set of Tyrone Power movies from 20th Century Fox). As the rapscallionesque scandal reporter Tom-Tom Tyler, Power bedevils Duffy (vet character actor Lloyd ...
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Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
Waded through To Please a Lady, a tedious 1950 romance about a race-car driver (Clark Cable) and a high-powered newspaper and radio columnist (Barbara Stanwyck), on the apparently mistaken notion that any movie with Stanwyck in it is worth watching. (Why is this turkey available on DVD while All I ...
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Friday, July 4th, 2008
Sometimes, even the cheesiest ’50s sci-fi can benefit from some snappy writing. Cast in point gleaned while watching a two-fer DVD of The Giant Claw and The Creature With the Atom Brain. The former features lame special effects—a flying turkey pupper—and pedestrian dialogue. The Creature With the Atom Brain, however, ...
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Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
Most of the reviewers mentioned John Huston when describing Daniel Day-Lewis’ oilman megalomaniac in There Will Be Blood. But maybe the movie would have been better if Day-Lewis had modeled himself on the other family actor, Walter Huston, John's father.Witness Huston the elder in The Furies (1950), his last movie. ...
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Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
PossessedOne night it’s Christian botheration (see entry below on The List), the next night it’s Santeria exploitation. My Netflix queue will soon be in need of an exorcist—perhaps Udo Kier’s wacky padre from Dario Argento’s The Mother of Tears is available.Anyway, this brings us to The Possession of Joel Delaney, ...
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Monday, May 26th, 2008
All hail, Vertigo, which premiered 50 years ago this May and remains one of the greatest movies ever made. Although the film was supposedly a disappointment at the box office, it clearly influenced a few films of the time. There's Portrait in Black, for instance, from 1960, with Lana Turner ...
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Saturday, May 17th, 2008
KFJC-FM 89.7's may fling is called Mayhem (which runs through May 19 at the Los Altos station), which is when the DJs play whatever they feel like. I keep the station glued to it, even if some of the programs are a little greater in concept than they are in ...
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