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God Told Me To. Directed by Larry Cohen. USA, 1976.
This is one of those films that starts as one thing and then morphs into something completely different. As the layers of the onion are stripped away one by one, you end up somewhere that you had no idea you were heading for when you started out. I think of...
1909. Corner in Wheat. Directed by D.W. Griffith.
1909 in "100 Years, 100 Films" sees the advent of the one director who is responsible for more films in this series than any other, D.W. Griffith. Looking back at film history in chronological order, it is very obvious that there be a B.G. and an A.G. after the...
Men in Black. Directed by Ray McCarey, Featuring The Three Stooges. USA, 1934.
The Three Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Curly Howard) hit their stride in their third short feature for Columbia Pictures, Men in Black. The title is a play on "men in white," referring to hospital staff doctors in white coats. The Stooges play three...
1908. El Hotel Electrico (The Electric Hotel), directed by Segundo de Chomon
Acquiring the Lumière patents, the French company Pathé quickly rose to dominate the film industry in the early days of cinema. Around this time (1908), Pathé invented the newsreel, which came to supplant the actuality films as the leading form of documentary on...
8-1/2. Directed by Federico Fellini. Italy, 1963.
In his book The Great Movies (2002), Roger Ebert speaks disparagingly of those who follow the conventional wisdom that Fellini was better in his early, neo-realist films than in his later visions of personal fantasy and excess. Ebert flat out writes "This...
That Fatal Sneeze, directed by Lewin Fitzhamon. UK, 1907.
A comedy trick film from the makers of Rescued by Rover. Lewin Fitzhamon (1869-1961) was producer Cecil Hepworth's favorite director until "Fitz" broke away to form his own film company in 1912. Like many early film-makers, they played a lot with "trick films,"...
Grindhouse, directed by Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino (2007)
Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino are kindred cinematic spirits. They both had their directorial debuts in 1992. Rodriguez made one of the 3 or 4 most celebrated independent films of all times with El Mariachi, which produced the miracle of $2 million from a...
The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend. Directed by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Company. USA, 1906.
Winsor McCay's comic strip "Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend" ran in the Evening Telegram (a sister newspaper to The New York Herald) from 1904-1911. Pictured here is the Dover Books facsimile edition of a 1905 Frederick A. Stokes publication collecting the early...
The Battle at Elderbush Gulch, directed by D.W. Griffith (1913)
Two orphan girls are sent to live with their uncle in the wild West. They bring along two puppies in a picnic basket as companions. When the puppies run off, they are picked up by Native Americans (depicted as broad stereotypes with Griffith's usual ham-handed...
Rescued by Rover. Directed by Lewin Fitzhamon; Produced by Cecil Hepworth. UK, 1905.
This delightful film is the template for all hero dog movies to follow, especially the Lassie films. Maybe it is an urban legend, but allegedly the surge in popularity of the name Rover for pet dogs started with this movie. When a baby is kidnapped, the family dog...
1971. The Devils. Directed & Written by Ken Russell. United Kingdom.
I first encountered Ken Russell's dizzyingly shocking The Devils on the big screen in college. The University of Arizona had several outlets for the education of a young cinephile in those days (1979-1983), but the one I most regularly attended (about three nights...
1904. The Impossible Voyage. Directed by Georges Melies. France.
Two years after A Trip to the Moon, Georges Melies continued his tongue-in-cheek riff on Jules Verne with The Impossible Voyage. A group of inept geographers take off on a comic voyage of exploration. They manage to crash or destroy every conveyance that they...
1919. Male and Female. Directed by Cecil B. DeMille.
The 1920 publicity photo of De Mille that graces the cover of this otherwise unadorned DVD release of Male and Female shows the director as a confident young man in his late 30's, already one of the legends who created Hollywood (DeMille's first full-length movie,...
1903. The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S. Porter.
The Great Train Robbery always takes me back to Disneyland, which is where I first watched it in the calm darkness you would step into off the hustle and bustle of Main Street, playing in an endless loop all day, available to be viewed over and over again before...
Torment. Directed by Alf Sjoberg. Screenplay by Ingmar Bergman. (Sweden, 1944)
Ingmar Bergman's first stamp on the film world was his brooding screenplay for Torment (1944) about a high school senior trying (and ultimately failing) to finish his finals and graduate despite a sadistic Latin teacher and a relationship with a troubled shopgirl. ...
A Trip to the Moon. Directed by Georges Melies. (France, 1902)
Georges Melies (1961-1938) was a French magician who owned his own theater, designed his own stage magic, and jumped at the first chance to incorporate the new medium of film into his shows. He witnessed a Lumiere Brothers projected film display in 1895 and was...
Make Mine Music (1946). Walt Disney Animation Studios.
The conventional wisdom is that Fantasia (1940) was a box office flop, and that Walt Disney abandoned the idea of having a rotating set of cartoons set to music form the basis for an ever evolving film. However, Fantasia went on to become a beloved classic and did...
1901. William McKinley Inauguration Footage.
The Dalenberg Library of Antique Popular Literature presents. . .100 Years, 100 Films. A vertical tasting of world cinema. Not always the obvious choices, these films are intended to be somehow representative of their year of release. In each case, for any given...
Murder! (1930) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Here is Hitchcock's 13th feature film as director, and by now several of his cinematic signatures are beginning to coalesce. We have the trademark cameo as he walks by the scene of the murder early in the film. And we have "the wrong man" plot, only this time it...
Sunday Film Series, Week #50. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. (2004). Directed by Wes Anderson.
On the surface a parody of Jacques Cousteau's undersea documentaries, but even if you were born too late to grow up on Cousteau on television, this is a brilliant masterpiece of understated droll comedy with a touch of Chaplinesque pathos. Starring Bill Murray,...
1922. Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler. Directed by Fritz Lang.
In this one film, Fritz Lang lays the groundwork for much of film noir (Lang practically created the genre) AND provides the mold for what would come to be known in the future as supervillains. Comic book supervillains, such as the nemeses of Superman and Batman, ...
Sunday Film Series Week #20: The Princess Bride (1987), Dir. Rob Reiner
In memory of fine novelist/screenwriter William Goldman who passed away November 16, 2018. What he surely thought of as a light novel and a screenplay that would make for a minor film that would play for a couple weekends has turned out to be a beloved classic...
SUNDAY FILM SERIES, WEEK #19: DESPAIR, DIRECTED BY RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER (1978).
Despair. Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Germany, 1978. Rarely has a film had so many luminaries behind it and been so thoroughly forgotten. One of the greatest novelists of the 20th Century, Vladimir Nabakov, wrote the novel upon which it is based;...
Sunday Film Series, Week #16: Victim, directed by Basil Dearden (1961).
I have selected my birthday month to highlight the films of one of my very favorite screen actors of all time, Dirk Bogarde (1921-1999). We will have 4 Bogarde films over 4 weeks, but it is painful to select only four, because there are so many great performances....
1921. “The Kid.” Directed by Charlie Chaplin.
Produced, directed, scored by & starring Charlie Chaplin. The young Jackie Coogan delivers one of the most precious, endearing child performances in film history as he plays the orphan unwittingly adopted by Chaplin in his signature role as The Little Tramp. ...
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