Film reviews usually written at 1AM . By B. Stanton, 24. From Chaplin to Godard, One A.M.
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)
