What happens when man’s reach exceeds not just his grasp, but also his common sense? That’s the premise of Michael Crichton’s Westworld, in which visitors go to an amusement park for the experience of a lifetime—and get it. Welcome to Delos, the resort which promises its guests “the vacation of the future, today”. For a […]
All That Money Can Buy: ‘The V.I.P.s’ (1963)
Ensconced in the lobby of Grand Hotel, Dr. Otternschlag famously observes: “People coming, going. Nothing ever happens.” The joke is of course that he’s wrong. The V.I.P.s is filled with people coming and going, specifically a group of passengers at a London airport en route to the US. We witness one tumultuous day in their […]
Grand Tapestry: ‘War and Peace’ (1966-67)
Yesterday I spent eight and a half hours swept up in the great current that is Sergei Bondarchuk’s adaptation of War and Peace—now playing in a dazzling new restoration at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. A patriotic Soviet response to King Vidor’s 1956 version—which starred Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn and had been a […]
Love on the Lower East Side: ‘Crossing Delancey’ (1988)
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, here’s the first instalment in my ‘New York State of Mind’ series. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Jewish grandmother in possession of an eligible granddaughter and an enterprising disposition must be in want of a grandson-in-law. Such is the tale of Crossing Delancey, Joan Micklin Silver’s […]
Street Fighter: ‘The Way of the Dragon’ (1972)
In The Way of the Dragon, Bruce Lee fights in an alley behind a restaurant, in the restaurant itself, on a rooftop, in a park and at a World Heritage Site. The film exists so that we might have the pleasure of watching its hero dispatch thugs in increasingly imaginative ways. When the hero is […]
La Belle Dame sans Merci: ‘Baby Face’ (1933)
Baby Face has earned a reputation as one of the films that led to the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code—and it’s easy to see what gave censors the vapours. Not only does Alfred E. Green’s film dare to speak plainly about female exploitation, it depicts a woman ruthlessly exploiting men and celebrates her. (The story […]
Stranger in a Strange Land: ‘Local Hero’ (1983)
Local Hero is a fish-out-of-water comedy about an American oilman who travels to a tiny Scottish town and tries to do business with the locals. So far, so run-of-the-mill. But look again. Bill Forsyth’s film is also about the price we pay for progress, the emptiness lurking in seemingly full lives and the beauty of […]
Adventures in Time and Space: ‘Dr. Who and the Daleks’ (1965) and ‘Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.’ (1966)
At 5:16 PM on 23 November 1963, a new science fiction show premiered on the BBC. What started out as a mild curiosity in a junkyard has grown into the world’s longest-running science fiction series, a grand adventure spanning over 50 years across television, radio, comics, videogames and novels (plus a marvellous, fan-made stop-motion animation series). […]
The Measure of Love: ‘Pandora and the Flying Dutchman’ (1951)
This post is part of The James Mason Blogathon, hosted by Maddy Loves Her Classic Films. See the other posts here. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is set in Spain in the 1930s. Much of it takes place by the sea. Its lead characters are the embodiment of a Dutch maritime legend and a woman […]
His Last Duchess: ‘Corridor of Mirrors’ (1948)
Corridor of Mirrors begins with a respectable British housewife sneaking out of the house to see her lover—or rather, the wax figure of her lover in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s. FilmStruck was made for oddities like this. How else would I have found a film so nonchalantly bizarre, so casually baroque? The […]
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