In catching up with lesser or minor Hitchcock it becomes easy to forget how fully and perfectly integrated and complete a film he could turn out, if allowed the (half-) chance. In Notorious, famously named by Francois Truffaut as the film in which Alf got the closest to delivering his original intentions exactly, a sigh … Continue reading Notorious (1946, Alfred Hitchcock)
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)
Mediterranee (1963, Jean-Daniel Pollet) If the endless circuit of repetitive simulations and duplications continues then we should at least attempt to find some ecstasy, some liberty and some echoes of what we have lost within it. Jean-Daniel Pollet’s essay film is an edifice (strong yet weak, monumental but crumbling, still just together but ready to … Continue reading Round-Up: Pollet, Guitry, Robson/Lewton, Mizoguchi
The Postman Always Rings Twice has been kicked so severely out of consideration as a top-drawer noir (in favour of more obviously auteurist works, or those with the stamp of approval from twenty-first century mannerists) that it is now probably somewhat underrated. Never mind all that because it’s a film rich with pleasures; from the … Continue reading The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, Tay Garnett)
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)
It may rarely get credited as such, but Bringing Up Baby is one of the most beautiful films in the American cinema, as well as one of its most definitive. In very few other places would the American dream of independence be so thoroughly explored and so thoroughly exalted, even with the knowledge that it … Continue reading Bringing Up Baby (1938, 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)
*Contains Spoilers* Underworld USA was made just after Samuel Fuller came out of his main period of Hollywood prominence and success. He’d left Fox (and a productive, supportive relationship with Darryl F Zanuck) and set up his own production company, releasing The Crimson Kimono, Verboten! and Run of the Arrow. Underworld USA marked a return … Continue reading Underworld USA (1961, Samuel Fuller)
