A thriller that, for all the elements typical to its creator, presents really a variation of Samuel Fuller, a variation somewhat familiar from certain glimpses in certain moments of his other films; House of Bamboo shows Sam Fuller, gifted a large budget and a chance to shoot in Tokyo, as an observer rather than the … Continue reading House of Bamboo (1955, Samuel Fuller)
Franju’s film is not, despite first appearances, just a film about insanity; it is also a film about being twenty-five, the age of Jean-Pierre Mocky’s protagonist and that age at which one is perhaps finally forced to put aside the things of youth and enter fully into the asylum that is contemporary adult society with … Continue reading La Tête contre les Murs (1959, Georges Franju)
One day I’ll write a great essay on the theme of hypnagogic noir, a subgenre sort of my own creation and one of which I am slowly but surely beginning to trace the important defining features and themes. A few of these features and themes, ones I have already discovered, I’ll write about now in … Continue reading Murder Is My Beat (1955, Edgar G Ulmer)
For Nicholas Ray love (or ‘love’) is corrosive. It is unstable and moves with the waves and currents of societal corruption and sickness. Born to Be Bad, despite what Dave Kehr persuasively argued, is not a major work, not a masterpiece and not a particularly important signal in Ray’s career. It sits comfortably somewhere in … Continue reading Born To Be Bad (1950, Nicholas Ray)
Is this the most underrated of Howard Hawks’ films? It is, without a doubt, a masterpiece although it is a film rarely accorded with that distinction (except by the critics, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, who are less fazed by the monolithic canon-complacency of industry-derived or AFI-approved film criticism) and it continues (as far as I’m … Continue reading The Big Sky (1952, Howard Hawks)
In 1945 Samuel Fuller was in Czechoslovakia, serving with the US Army as the war ended and the Denazification process beckoned. It was there he shot what was, according to Jonathan Rosenbaum, his first ever film footage; this footage was of the liberation of Falkenau, a sub-site of the Flossenburg concentration camp, the infantrymen showing … Continue reading Verboten! (1959, Samuel Fuller)
“But, my friend, happiness is not a joyful thing.” Was Max Ophuls the greatest, the most perfect of the classical film-makers? In a series of masterpieces throughout three decades (the 1930s, 40s and 50s) he composed images with the soft luminescence, hazy or precise, of Degas (with a similar feeling of constant movement), and stories … Continue reading Le Plaisir (1952, Max Ophuls)
La Poison represents Sacha Guitry condemning a perfidious public, and then gifting that condemnation to them in form of the bleakest, the sourest of comedies. This is not the sort of dark comedy which relies on infantilism, the adolescent or the easy expression (ironic or not) of bigotries and predjudices to make its effect, in … Continue reading La Poison (1951, Sacha Guitry)
Bitter Victory has none of the self-conscious epicness in its filming of the desert that afflicts so many other works set in the same or similar terrain. The film is shot in cinemascope so there is still a sense of grandness, but this bare expanse becomes a nothingness, a void, a blank of sorts against … Continue reading Bitter Victory: Alternative View
And so the onetime-apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright here makes men look like the ruins of buildings. Jimmy Leith (Richard Burton), a civilian volunteer who was once an archeologist, and Major David Brand (Curt Jurgens) are leading a mission through the Libyan Desert, transporting a set of stolen Nazi documents from Benghazi back to HQ. … Continue reading Bitter Victory (1957, Nicholas Ray)
