Born To Be Bad (1950, Nicholas Ray)

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 …

The Big Sky (1952, Howard Hawks)

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 …

Bringing Up Baby (1938, 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 …

Verboten! (1959, Samuel Fuller)

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 …

Underworld USA (1961, 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 …

Bitter Victory: Alternative View

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 …

Bitter Victory (1957, Nicholas Ray)

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. …

Wisconsin Death Trip (1999, James Marsh)

Sometimes one can’t see what is under their nose. Peruse the reviews of Wisconsin Death Trip from the time of its release and the film is described variously, in positive and negative terms, as a document of one particularly crazed and cursed town, as a fever dream and as the equivalent of a couple of …

The Spiral Staircase (1945, Robert Siodmak)

A thriller directed by the underrated Robert Siodmak and derived from the overrated David O Selznick’s company. Siodmak revels in silence in The Spiral Staircase, for it is when the dialogue, the cosy literariness familiar from the films Hitchcock made under Selznick’s eagle eye and controlling grasp, slips away that he can exercise himself. In …