Take an all-star cast, stick them in an exotic location and have one of them drop dead. Voila, you have the basic ingredients of the Lavish Agatha Christie Production, a peculiarly English brand of murder-mystery that in the seventies and early eighties brought us death on a train in Murder on the Orient Express, death […]
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: Femme Fatales
“She was bad. She was dangerous. I wouldn’t trust her any further than I could throw her. But, she was my kind of woman.” -Rod Riley (Fred Astaire) in the ‘Girl Hunt’ ballet, The Band Wagon Happy Valentine’s Day! And what better day to celebrate femme fatales, those sinuous, cold-hearted, duplicitous sirens who lead hardboiled […]
A Brief History of Short Timespans
Monday was Groundhog Day, the quirky winter holiday that’s also synonymous with Bill Murray, timeloops and Sonny and Cher. In honour of Phil Connors’ endlessly repeating day, here are a few films which prove just how much can happen in twenty four hours. On the Town (1949) “There’s just one thing necessary in Manhattan/ When […]
René Clair’s Cloud Cuckoo Land: ‘Le Million’ (1931)
Watching Le Million is like getting pulled into the world’s most enthusiastic chorus line: you don’t know all the steps, but you’re having much too much fun to stop. It’s midnight in Paris and there’s a large party going on in a garret—but why? Flashback to earlier in the day, when penniless painter Michel (René […]
The Six People You Meet in a Screwball Comedy
Watch enough screwball comedies and you might notice a pattern: the same people turn up over and over again. I don’t just mean actors—though Carole Lombard, Cary Grant, Jean Arthur and Melvyn Douglas were ubiquitous—but characters. Blame it on endless plot recycling or the assembly-line nature of the studio system, but in the thirties and […]
A New York Story: ‘The Clock’ (1945)
Another hundred people just got off of the train And came up through the ground, While another hundred people just got off of the bus And are looking around – ‘Another Hundred People’, Company, Stephen Sondheim The Clock is a New York story, even though the actors never set foot there. Practically everything, from Penn […]
Bread and Circuses: ‘Ben-Hur’ (1925)
No, not that Ben-Hur– the other one. Three decades before MGM’s mighty, Technicolor sword-and-sandal epic starring Charlton Heston, there was MGM’s mighty, black-and-white sword-and-sandal epic starring Ramon Novarro. Both are adaptations of the same novel, Lew Wallace’s 1880 best-seller Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and, naturally, feature the most magnificent chariot races ever committed […]
Love and Other Drugs: ‘Burton and Taylor’ (2013)
In the final scene of Burton and Taylor, the BBC’s recent television film about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, the pair share a mournful tête-a-tête in Taylor’s dressing room. “We’re addicts Elizabeth, you and I,” he says. “Love is not a drug,” she counters, wearily. “Isn’t it? I don’t know,” he replies. Burton and Taylor […]
The Girl with Dark Eyes: ‘Portrait of Jennie’ (1948)
Portrait of Jennie is a dream. Or rather, it seems to spring from that narrow space between sleeping and waking, where the wisps of dreams still cling to you and blend seamlessly with reality. You don’t really watch this film; you drift along with it. Struggling artist Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) is alone and lonely, […]
Through the (Feminist) Looking-glass
And now for something completely different: a review of one of my favourite film books. Enjoy! “A woman’s intelligence was the equivalent of a man’s penis: something to be kept out of sight.” So writes Molly Haskell in From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies: a fusillade of feminist film criticism that’s […]
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