News

Giona A. Nazzaro will serve as Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival for an extra three years following a contract extension announced this afternoon by the Swiss festival.

Nazzaro, a popular critic, film historian, and former head of the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week, has been Locarno’s chief since 2021. Under the extension, he will stay with the festival until 2028.

“I would like to thank President Maja Hoffmann and the entire Board of Directors of the Locarno Film Festival for the trust and esteem placed in me and in the team that I have the privilege of leading,” Nazzaro said in a statement.

“To pursue together the work of these first five years, in a moment full of unheard-of transformations in the audiovisual sector and film industry – at a complex historical moment – is an exciting challenge that will inspire us confidently towards our 80th anniversary.”

The festival’s...

We’ve always loved setting trends at The Film Stage and are accordingly chuffed that, nine months after we screened a 35mm print at the Roxy, Roman Polanski’s late-career triumph The Ghost Writer comes to the Criterion Channel in next month’s Coastal Thrillers, a series that does what it says on the tin: The Lady from Shanghai, Key Largo, The Long Goodbye, The Fog, and the other best film of 2010, Scorsese’s Shutter Island. It pairs well with Noir and the Blacklist featuring films by Joseph Losey, Fritz Lang, Jules Dassin, and so on. Retrospectives are held for Terry Southern, Kathryn Bigelow, Jem Cohen, and (just in time for Caught By the Tides) Jia Zhangke, while Spike Lee gets his own Adventures In Moviegoing.

For recent restorations, Antonioni’s Il Grido and Anthony Harvey’s Dutchman appear. Criterion Editions include The Runner, Touchez pas au grisbi, Godzilla vs.

The Locarno Film Festival is to host a retrospective on British postwar cinema for its 78th edition which runs from August 6-16.

The retrospective, comprising more than 40 films, will focus on British cinema from 1945-1960, and will include classics by filmmakers including David Lean, Carol Reed, and Powell and Pressburger as well as genre titles by lesser-known filmmakers like Seth Holt or Lance Comfort.

The significant role women played in the period – in films directed by Muriel Box, Wendy Toye, Margaret Tait, and Jill Craigie – as well as the role of US filmmakers exiled by the anti-Communist blacklist – like Joseph Losey,...

“Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945-1960” is the theme of this year’s Locarno Film Festival Retrospective, unveiled on Monday. It follows the festival’s 2024 look back at Columbia Pictures at 100.

Described as “a tribute” to British cinema from that period promising to be “painting a rich and diverse picture of life in the postwar years as reflected in British popular cinema,” the retrospective will feature more than 40 films and is produced in partnership with the BFI National Archive and the Cinémathèque Suisse, with the support of StudioCanal and curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht.

“After the end of the Second World War — and as its overseas empire began to crumble — Britain embarked on the rocky road to national reconstruction and revival,” Locarno organizers said. “Featuring everything from beloved classics by legendary filmmakers like David Lean, Carol Reed, and Powell and Pressburger (themselves the subject of a major Locarno retrospective in 1982 and...

August’s Locarno Film Festival will go British with its latest retrospective: Great Expectations: British Post-War Cinema, 1945-1960.

The retrospective forms a major strand of the film festival’s programming and for many festival goers is a standout and popular attraction. Boasting fresh restorations and rare screenings of difficult to get prints, past seasons have been devoted to filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk or studios such as last year’s retrospective, The Lady with the Torch, which celebrated the centenary of Columbia Pictures.

Great Expectations: British Post-War Cinema, 1945-1960 is organized by the Locarno Film Festival in partnership with the BFI National Archive and the Cinémathèque Suisse, with the support of Studiocanal. The film curator responsible for the last program, Ehsan Khoshbakht, returns this year with Great Expectations. He spoke exclusively with Variety about the lineup and the rules dictating his selection.

What are the criteria for selection?

I chose...

British postwar cinema will serve as the focus of the retrospective programme at this year’s Locarno Film Festival.

Locarno has teamed with the BFI National Archive, Cinémathèque suisse, and Studiocanal on the retrospective, curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht.

The program will span the work of well-known British filmmakers like David Lean, Carol Reed, and Powell and Pressburger to lesser-known directors like Seth Holt and Lance Comfort. Women filmmakers working on British shores like Muriel Box, Wendy Toye, Margaret Tait, and Jill Craigie as well as American filmmakers exiled to the UK by the anti-Communist blacklist like Joseph Losey, Cy Endfield, and Edward Dmytryk will also feature.

Digital restorations and archival prints from the BFI National Archive will be projected in Locarno. The retrospective will be accompanied by an English-language book published by Les Éditions de l’Œil, edited by Ehsan Khoshbakht, and featuring contributions from international writers. Once Locarno ends,...

In 1975, George Kennedy starred in an unusual revenge thriller in which AI was used to catch the bad guys. A look back at The ‘Human’ Factor:

Revenge films and vigilantes were all over the place in the 1970s, whether it was Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey gunning down crooks in Death Wish (1974) or Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle going on a rampage in Taxi Driver (1976). One of the more unusual thrillers of its type from the era, though, was The ‘Human’ Factor from 1975. For one thing, there’s its high-tech premise, in which George Kennedy’s protagonist uses cutting-edge technology to track down his enemies.

Kennedy plays John Kinsdale, a middle-aged, American computer expert stationed in Naples. Each day, he says goodbye to his picture-perfect Nuclear family – wife, two sons, a daughter with an outsized clown doll – and drives to his workplace at a nearby NATO base. There,...

With Janus possessing the much-needed restorations, Catherine Breillat is getting her biggest-ever spotlight in November’s Criterion Channel series spanning 1976’s A Real Young Girl to 2004’s Anatomy of Hell––just one of numerous retrospectives arriving next month. They’re also spotlighting Ida Lupino, directorial efforts of John Turturro (who also gets an “Adventures In Moviegoing”), the Coen brothers, and Jacques Audiard.

In a slightly more macroscopic view, Columbia Noir and a new edition of “Queersighting” ring in Noirvember. Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse trilogy and Miller’s Crossing get Criterion Editions, while restorations of David Bowie-starrer The Linguini Incident, Med Hondo’s West Indies, and Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue make streaming debuts; and Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park arrives just in time for another grim election day.

See the full list of titles arriving in November below:

36 fillette, Catherine Breillat, 1988

Anatomy of Hell, Catherine Breillat,...

Nineteen forty-seven was a crucial year for Robert Mitchum’s rising star. The enduring popular classic, of course, is Jacques Tourneur’s seminal Out of the Past, and he headlined Edward Dmytryk’s Oscar-nominated prestige thriller Crossfire. It’s in Raoul Walsh’s noirish, Freudian western Pursued, though, that we see Mitchum crossing the divide between what Hollywood expected of the young man and the godlike figure they got in return.

The performance is a total menu of Mitchum’s various modes: an uneven mix of the young, beefy neurotic with a few too many shirt buttons undone; the high-riding titan who would star in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter; and the varnished-oak elder statesman who still has a few moves left in him, in Dick Richards’s Farewell, My Lovely and Peter Yates’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle. But it’s an unevenness that’s...

Obviously it wasn’t by design, but the early-1950s renewal of the western genre, aided in large part by the success of Winchester ’73, which heralded a career second act for both its director, Anthony Mann, and its star, James Stewart, was answered in other quarters of the industry by multiple endeavors to take the once disreputable genre, previously dismissed as Roy Rogers/Saturday-matinee bunkum, all the way into the hallowed halls of state-sanctioned, capital-a art. And, as it happened, the two westerns that made a big runner-up showing at the 1952 and 1953 Oscars, High Noon and Shane, respectively, also served, by virtue of holding what wide swaths of the future cinephile demographic would come to view as Vichy letters of transit, as high-value targets for skeptics of the official cultural narrative.

These auteurist critics and film buffs, whose philosophy acquired definite contours some 10-odd years later, observed a different watershed moment: Rio Bravo.

Update: A memorial service for Norma Barzman will be held tomorrow from 10 Am-1 Pm at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park & Mortuary in Los Angeles.

Norma Barzman, a prominent screenwriter who was blacklisted due to her involvement with the American Communist Party, died Sunday at her Beverly Hills home, according to a social media post from her daughter Suzo Barzman. She was 103.

Barzman wrote the original story for Never Say Goodbye (1947) starring Errol Flynn with husband Ben Barzman. She was an uncredited writer on The Locket (1946) starring Laraine Day and Robert Mitchum. She wrote Finishing School (1952) and on the TV series Il triangolo rosso (1967). She also appeared as an actress in Theatre 70 (1970) and Pajama Party (2000) as the “Groovy Grandma.”

Barzman was unapologetic about her involvement with the Communist party from 1943-49. In a 2014 interview with the L.A. Times, she maintained that “one should be proud to have been a member...

Norma Barzman, one of the last surviving members of the Hollywood Blacklist, has died at her home in Beverly Hills at the age of 103, according to media reports.

Born in New York City, Barzman moved to Hollywood in the 1940s and married fellow screenwriter Ben Barzman. Looking for ways to organize around progressive politics, the pair joined the Communist Party from 1942-49.

“Hitler was invading the Soviet Union, so there was no reason to be anti-Russian. They were our allies at the time,” Barzman told the blog FilmTalk last year.

But after World War II, Barzman began to get warnings from her neighbors that her family was under surveillance, and one day heard a conversation she had with a friend days prior when she picked up the phone.

“I could hear it playing back. Then I put down the phone because I realized that my phone was tapped and I knew they were watching us,...

Norma Barzman, an admired screenwriter of 1940s films whose career was derailed by the Hollywood blacklist and who was one of its last survivors, died Sunday. She was 103.

Barzman died of natural causes, surrounded by family, at her home in Beverly Hills, her daughter Suzo Barzman told The Hollywood Reporter.

Born Norma Levor in New York City on Sept. 15, 1920, and raised between the U.S. and Europe, Barzman moved to Hollywood on her 21st birthday. By that time, she had already attended Radcliffe for two years before dropping out and had spent a year living in Princeton, New Jersey, as the young bride of Claude Shannon — later known as “the father of information theory” — before their divorce in 1941.

Out west, Barzman was enrolled by her older cousin, a writer, at the left-leaning School of Writers. In 1942, after a fateful meeting at a Halloween party, she married the up-and-coming screenwriter Ben Barzman,...

Catering directly to my interests, the Criterion Channel’s January lineup boasts two of my favorite things: James Gray and cats. In the former case it’s his first five features (itself a terrible reminder he only released five movies in 20 years); the latter shows felines the respect they deserve, from Kuroneko to The Long Goodbye, Tourneur’s Cat People and Mick Garris’ Sleepwalkers. Meanwhile, Ava Gardner, Bertrand Tavernier, Isabel Sandoval, Ken Russell, Juleen Compton, George Harrison’s HandMade Films, and the Sundance Film Festival get retrospectives.

Restorations of Soviet sci-fi trip Ikarie Xb 1, The Unknown, and The Music of Regret stream, as does the recent Plan 75. January’s Criterion Editions are Inside Llewyn Davis, Farewell Amor, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and (most intriguingly) the long-out-of-print The Man Who Fell to Earth, Blu-rays of which go for hundreds of dollars.

See the lineup below and learn more here.

Back By Popular Demand

The Graduate,...

Long before he made Popeye Doyle race a Brooklyn subway and Regan MacNeil’s head spin, William Friedkin began his career doing live TV. He’d move on to an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, short documentaries, a Sonny-and-Cher joint (Good Times), theatrical adaptations (The Birthday Party, The Boys in the Band), and then an all-guts-all-glory double shot that instantly made him a New Hollywood power player. But like a lot of directors coming up in the early 1960s, his roots were with actors, words, conflict, and not much more.

News that William Friedkin’s final film, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” would be released on Showtime after premiering at the Venice Film Festival was met with widespread disappointment from cinephiles. After forging an unimpeachable Hollywood legacy that included “The Exorcist,” “The French Connection,” and “Sorcerer,” the consensus was that the late director had more than earned a theatrical release for his curtain call.

It was an understandable sentiment, as we’re all occasionally tempted to fantasize about a world where mid-budget adult dramas are a viable box office draw. But the one-two punch of a prestigious festival bow followed by Sunday night pay cable glory feels like the most authentic distribution model that this film could possibly merit. Because at its core, it’s a made-for-tv movie in every sense of the word.

Yes, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” is the work of an auteur who expanded our perception of the...

The filmmaking legend and one of the last standing titans of New Hollywood, William Friedkin, died last month. Tributes have poured out around the globe in the form of heartfelt open letters from collaborators, unearthed clips from the bombastic director's interviews and home video commentaries, and just about every repertory cinema in the country programming special Friedkin retrospectives. Now, we've gotten our first look at the best thing to remember Friedkin by: his last film.

"The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial" is by this point a classic U.S. text, adapted and re-adapted for the stage and screen numerous times since its original 1951 publication. It originated as a novel called "The Caine Mutiny" by Herman Wouk, and it won its year's Pulitzer Prize. Wouk then adapted the novel into a play in 1953, and it became another smash hit. Charles Laughton directed Peter Fonda in the lead role once it hit Broadway. It...

Herman Wouk’s celebrated play and novel The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial couldn’t even be called “peak boomer”; it’s pre-boomer. And having been brought up in the UK, it’s an aesthetic and realm of interest worlds away from what I know: of prideful American military history and prideful hawkishness, all the myths of the “greatest generation.” One pictures hardback airport novels of which Tom Clancy, after Wouk, would corner the market––this film’s title reveal is even in an embossed sans-serif “impact” font, taking up all empty space in the frame otherwise showing the military minesweeper of its title.

Yet it’s never so simple. Wouk, a navy hero of key Pacific theatre campaigns like Okinawa, and then a man of letters, grew up in a Brooklyn Jewish family, and his orthodox religious beliefs solidified further in post-war adult life. The military-enlistment / man-of-letters / Judaism crossover isn’t...

William Friedkin, a renowned director, unfortunately ended his career with his worst film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. The film, a retelling of the original movie's court-martial, lacks the action and war scenes that make war movies engaging. The courtroom drama focuses too much on characters telling their stories rather than showing pivotal moments, making it a disappointment for viewers expecting a thrilling war film.

We give quite a bit of credit to amazing directors. They are allowed to create because we know they have great films in them. These projects elevate the film industry, bring us joy, and make us think. That being said, sometimes they release some real clangers.

One director, William Friedkin, spent his life making great films. Unfortunately, his last film may be his worst.

Who Was William Friedkin?

William Friedkin died in 2023 after having worked in Hollywood for over forty years in a variety of roles,...

Pedro Almodóvar, the most celebrated Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel, will be the toast of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. There, his latest film — Strange Way of Life, a short Western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal and set to be distributed by Sony Classics — will have its North American premiere; he’ll receive the Jeff Skoll Award in Impact Media at the TIFF Tribute Awards; and he’ll participate in an “In Conversation” discussion on Sept. 9.

Almodóvar has made 21 features, among them classics like 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which was nominated for the best foreign-language film Oscar; 1999’s All About My Mother, which won that Oscar; and 2002’s Talk to Her, for which he was nominated for best director and won the best original screenplay Oscar, marking only the fifth time that a non-English-language script had been awarded that trophy. But his past two...

Guillermo del Toro is determined to have late director William Friedkin’s final film reach theaters.

Friedkin’s “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” which del Toro served as an assistant director on, premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is set to debut on streaming platform Paramount+ later this year, as well as screen on Showtime.

“I know it’s not the ‘model’ for a streamer but this is Friedkin’s final film. Can we get a theatrical run?” del Toro tweeted. “No matter if it is a limited one. Just respect for a master.”

Friedkin died at age 87 in August 2023. The Oscar-winning “Exorcist” and “French Connection” director adapted Hermon Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play for “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial” as his last film. Kiefer Sutherland stars as a Lt. Commander who stands trial for mutiny after taking over a ship from its captain who was acting mentally unstable and endangering his crew.

Damien Chazelle paid tribute to late great director William Friedkin on Sunday in a moving speech at the Venice Film Festival where Friedkin’s last film “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” premiered out-of-competition to warm applause.

Friedkin, who died on Aug. 7 in Los Angeles at age 87, completed the film – which stars Kiefer Sutherland as Lt. Commander Queeg who stands trial for mutiny for taking command from a ship captain he feels is acting in a mentally unstable way that is endangering both the ship and its crew – shortly before passing,

“When I first became aware of the name Billy Friedkin I was a child, and the name itself filled me with fear,” said Chazelle, who is presiding over this year’s Venice jury.

“I probably had ‘The Exorcist’ in my mind. I hadn’t see the film yet, but I’d seen the letters written in that typeface, and the sound...

The last works by artists who have just died often acquire a strange patina of significance. Whether the deceased knew the work would be their last or not, it’s almost impossible not to read into them a foreshadowing of the maker’s imminent departure, a railing against the dying of the light or a tidy return to earlier themes.

The storied director William Friedkin passed on Aug. 7 at the age of 87, just weeks after he completed his last feature film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. I don’t know if Friedkin was aware this would be his last when he decided to make it, but it does feel like a fitting final artistic word in many ways. Like so many of his other movies, it’s pithy, punchy, a little shouty at times, but made with brio and swagger.

From the earliest days of his filmmaking career, he was drawn to theatrical material.

Guillermo Del Toro acted as back-up director for his friend, the late great William Friedkin, during the shoot of Friedkin’s last movie “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” which world premieres on Sunday at the Venice Film Festival.

Friedkin, who died on Aug. 7 in Los Angeles at age 87, contractually needed a back up in order for the movie to be made, “That’s very common, Hollywood is ageist,” said producer Annabelle Dunne who decided to reveal what until now had been a “state secret” and recounted that when she raised this issue with Friedkin he said: “let me think about that.”

Friedkin then called her the next day and said: “Ok, honey I have the guy. Get a pen: it’s Guillermo Del Toro, you got that?

When Dunne called Del Toro, who at the time, was promoting his “Pinocchio,” he told her: “I am going to come to set every...

Born in the final year of the 19th century, Humphrey Bogart rose to prominence with the best thrillers from the Golden Age of Hollywood as a leading man in many iconic romances, noirs, and epics. Known for his charismatic screen presence and timeless pairings with iconic heroines, Bogart was an actor par excellence who starred in cult classics like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. Bogart's brilliance lay in the intense psychological realism that he brought to his morally gray characters. Widely regarded as an American cultural icon, the American Film Institute even ranked him as the greatest male actor of classic Hollywood in 1999.

Even though he started out as a supporting actor with antagonistic side roles, Bogart cemented his legacy as a leading man with some of the earliest works of the noir genre and some of Hollywood's greatest romances. But his towering success didn't prevent him from taking on...

Sony Pictures Classics announced that they have acquired worldwide rights to Pedro Almodóvar’s short film, Strange Way Of Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal.

The film will be screened in the Official Selection and in world premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, along with the director and the two main actors. Shot in the south of Spain, this short film is the second experience of the filmmaker in English, after La Voix Humaine made in 2020. Sony Pictures Classics picked up the short in pre-production and will release it this fall.

Strange Way Of Life follows two gunmen who reunite after 25 years. Almodóvar describes the film in his director’s statement: “A man rides a horse across the desert that separates him from Bitter Creek. He comes to visit Sheriff Jake. Twenty-five years earlier, both the sheriff and Silva, the rancher who rides out to meet him, worked together as hired gunmen.

This very traditional chamber murder mystery starring David Farrar and Geraldine Fitzgerald has been beautifully restored by Studiocanal and bears the original U.K. title The Late Edwina Black. When the sickly wife Edwina dies in bed the bitter housekeeper accuses the husband and another very attractive servant; all the Scotland Yard Inspector need do is stir the pot, and paranoid suspicions take over. Is Edwina’s spirit still present in the house? The housekeeper thinks she communicates through a wind chime by the window . . .

Obsessed

Blu-ray

ClassicFlix

1951 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 78 min. / Street Date February 28, 2023 / The Late Edwina Black / Available from / 29.99

Starring: David Farrar, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Roland Culver, Jean Cadell, Mary Merrall, Harcourt Williams, Charles Heslop, Ronald Adam.

Cinematography: Stephen Dade

Art Direction: George Provis

Costume Designer: Elizabeth Haffenden

Film Editor: Douglas Myers

Original Music: Allan Gray

Screenplay by Charles Frank, David Evans from the play by William Dinner, William Morum...

Thrillers from the Vault – 8 Classic Films

Blu-ray

Mill Creek Entertainment

1941, 1942, 1943, 1951 / B&w / 1.33: 1 / Blu ray

Starring Boris Karloff, Anne Revere, Peter Lorre, Bela Lugosi

Written by Robert Andrews, Edwin Blum, Randall Faye, Arch Oboler

Directed by Edward Dmytryk, Lew Landers, Arch Oboler

This is part two of a review for Mill Creek Entertainment’s Thrillers from the Vault, 8 Classics Films. Part one can be found here.

The Devil Commands is a hell of a title, and it’s a pretty good movie too. Released in 1941, Edward Dmytryk’s spookfest stars Boris Karloff as Julian Blair, a scientist whose experiments are a family affair—his wife Helen is one of his subjects.

Blair achieves his goal—a machine that records thought processes—but on a night he should be celebrating, his wife is killed in a car crash. Something breaks inside Blair and when he discovers that Helen may continue to live on through his invention,...

The French Alps in VistaVision and Technicolor really sell this inspirational thriller. Spencer Tracy stars is the utterly ethical mountaineer, and young Robert Wagner his venal, verminous, just plain no damn good younger brother. Make that Much younger. Edward Dmytryk directs for big dimensions and strong emotions, and Paramount’s remaster makes the special effects of the mountain climb look good again. It’s a morality tale pitched at grade school level, and one of Tracy’s better late-career pictures. With Anna Kashfi as a plane crash victim deserving of rescue, and William Demarest as a French priest with a Preston Sturges accent.

The Mountain

Region Free Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] #198

1956 / Color / 1:78 widescreen (VistaVision) / 105 min. / Street Date February 22, 2023 / Available from [Imprint] / Aud 34.98

Starring: Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Claire Trevor, William Demarest, Barbara Darrow, Richard Arlen, E.G. Marshall, Anna Kashfi, Richard Garrick, Harry Townes.

Cinematography: Franz Planer

Costume Designer: Edith Head

Art Director: Hal Pereira,...

Wally Campo, the Roger Corman regular who did his best Det. Joe Friday impersonation as Sgt. Joe Fink — and also served as the narrator — in the original The Little Shop of Horrors, has died. He was 99.

Campo died Jan. 14 of natural causes in Studio City, his son, musician Tony Campodonico, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Campo also played a goofball in Monte Hellman‘s Beast From Haunted Cave (1959) and appeared for director Burt Topper in Hell Squad (1958), Tank Commandos (1959) — where he was top-billed — and the Victor Buono-starring The Strangler (1964).

Campo showed up in the Corman-directed Machine-Gun Kelly (1958), Ski Troop Attack (1960) and Tales of Terror (1962) and in the Corman-produced Devil’s Angels (1967). Many of his movies were made at the filmmaker’s low-budget American International Pictures.

His acting credits also included Edward Dmytryk’s Warlock (1959), the Vincent Price-starring Master of the World (1961) and Shock Corridor (1963), directed by Sam Fuller.

Born...

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the Waldorf Declaration, which on November 25, 1947, officially launched the Hollywood Blacklist. On that day, the heads of the major studios, with a few notable exceptions, agreed after a contentious two-day conference at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City to ban the Hollywood Ten and to not “knowingly” employ Communists.

And so began one of the darkest chapters in Hollywood’s history.

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Just a few weeks earlier, the Hollywood Ten had denounced and refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee and later were sent to federal prison for contempt of Congress.

“We will forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ,” the Waldorf Declaration stated,...

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?

In October 1947, 10 Hollywood screenwriters, directors and producers refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (Huac), at the highly publicized, three-ring circus hearings in Washington, D.C. They wouldn’t acknowledge if they were Communists, nor would they name names of people whom they knew or thought were Commies citing their first amendment rights.

The group, who became known as the Hollywood Ten, were voted in contempt of Congress in November and sentenced to prison for six months to a year. They were blacklisted by the Hollywood studios. Some wrote under pseudonyms or used fronts (check out the 1976 film “The Front”) while others never worked again in Hollywood even after the blacklist ended in 1960.

On the 75th anniversary of those infamous Huac hearings, let’s take a look back at the Hollywood Ten and what...

Hollywood talent agents are famously competitive with one another. Whether big or boutique, agencies parry and joust in wooing talent and sealing deals.

But some issues transcend money and ego. Hate speech is one of them.

Bob Gersh, longtime leader of the agency founded by his father in the 1960s, has watched Kanye West’s abhorrent outbursts of antisemitism over the past two weeks with dismay. On Saturday, the Gersh Agency chief reached out to Variety to express support for Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel’s call for businesses to condemn and cut ties with West. That list includes Apple, Spotify and Adidas. West has already had accounts restricted on Twitter and Instagram because of the nature of his comments about Jewish people.

“This is as low as it can get,” Gersh told Variety of West’s recent comments. “This is the most blatant form of hatred and antisemitism one could imagine.

Click here to read the full article.

Seventy-five years ago, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (Huac for purposes of pronunciation) launched the first of its series of postwar investigations into alleged communist subversion in Hollywood.

The show trial was staged from Oct. 20 to 30, 1947, and you can probably rewind the newsreel images in your mind’s eye: the unhinged committee chairman, J. Parnell Thomas (D-n.J.), yelling over witnesses and furiously pounding his gavel; the compliant straight men accusing former colleagues of the most unpatriotic heresies in Cold War America; and the backtalking recalcitrants being hauled away from the witness table mid-harangue.

In countless documentaries and fictional reenactments, the confrontations are cast as a morality play pitting the craven Friendlies (as those who named names and sucked up to the committee are called) against the defiant Unfriendlies, who refused to cower before their inquisitors and would soon to be immortalized...

“This picture is perfect, end of review.” That may not be 100 true, but Leo McCarey’s unabashed leap into romantic Nirvana really hasn’t been bettered, although his color & ‘scope remake is very good. Never was smart adult dialogue this winning — Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer’s cinematic courtship is a highlight of the Big Studio years. And Maria Ouspenskaya’s performance will send you out to pamper the nearest grandmother. The restoration for this one is a revelation, as the show has looked terrible for sixty years- plus. Serge Bromberg and Farran Smith Nehme make the extras especially valuable.

Love Affair

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1114

1939 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 88 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date February 15, 2022 / 39.95

Starring: Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer, Maria Ouspenskaya, Lee Bowman, Astrid Allwyn, Maurice Moscovitch, Ferike Boros, Scotty Beckett, Bess Flowers, Harold Miller, Dell Henderson, Frank McGlynn, Sr., Joan Leslie.

Cinematography: Rudolph Maté

Art Director: Van Nest Polglase,...

As 2021 mercifully winds down, the Criterion Channel have a (November) lineup that marks one of their most diverse selections in some time—films by the new masters Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Garrett Bradley, Dan Sallitt’s Fourteen (one of 2020’s best films) couched in a fantastic retrospective, and Criterion editions of old favorites.

Fourteen is featured in “Between Us Girls: Bonds Between Women,” which also includes Céline and Julie, The Virgin Suicides, and Yvonne Rainer’s Privilege. Of equal note are Criterion editions for Ghost World, Night of the Hunter, and (just in time for del Toro’s spin) Nightmare Alley—all stacked releases in their own right.

See the full list of October titles below and more on the Criterion Channel.

300 Nassau, Marina Lameiro, 2015

5 Card Stud, Henry Hathaway, 1968

Alone, Garrett Bradley, 2017

Álvaro, Daniel Wilson, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandra Lazarowich, and Chloe Zimmerman, 2015

America, Garrett Bradley, 2019

Angel Face, Otto Preminger, 1953

Angels Wear White,...

Next month’s Criterion Channel selection is here, and as 2021 winds down further cements their status as our single greatest streaming service. Off the top I took note of their eight-film Jia Zhangke retro as well as the streaming premieres of Center Stage and Malni. And, yes, Margaret has been on HBO Max for a while, but we can hope Criterion Channel’s addition—as part of the 63(!)-film “New York Stories”—opens doors to a more deserving home-video treatment.

Aki Kaurismäki’s Finland Trilogy, Bruno Dumont’s Joan of Arc duology, and Criterion’s editions of Irma Vep and Flowers of Shanghai also mark major inclusions—just a few years ago the thought of Hou’s masterpiece streaming in HD was absurd.

I could implore you not to sleep on The Hottest August and Point Blank and Variety and In the Cut or, look, so many Ernst Lubitsch movies,...

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What makes film noir so fascinating? There are a lot of components that come into play with noir films, but cynicism, suspenseful music, a mysterious plot, figures lurking in the shadows, femme fatales, and fedora-wearing detectives are some of the staples of the classics.

Film noir, or “dark cinema,” was first coined by a French film critic in 1946 to describe the downtrodden themes in American movies. Although the term wasn’t widely adopted by American directors until years later, the ’40s and ’50s are regarded as a classic era that produced pioneering noirs such as “The Maltese Falcon” and “Double Indemnity.”

With that in mind, we have curated a list of films that...

A review for a movie not on video disc. CineSavant bears down hard on a now-obscure UK thriller that proves a crossroads for several key themes of modern terror: Nazis, bacteriological warfare and paranoid conspiracies. ‘007’– associated writer Jack Whittingham scripted a tale that connects old-school espionage to visionary super-crimes against humanity, the thriller genre of ‘The Unthinkable.’ Who’s the threat? An innocuous little doctor with a horrendous secret background and a somewhat preposterous ability to go undetected as he kills to assume and protect a new identity. The techno-chiller was released in 1948 yet seems screamingly relevant now.

Counterblast

Blu-ray

Savant Revival Screening Review

1948 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 98, 90 min. / The Devil’s Plot / Not On Home Video

Starring: Robert Beatty, Mervyn Johns, Nova Pilbeam, Margaretta Scott, Sybille Binder, Marie Lohr, Karel Stepanek, Alan Wheatley, Gladys Henson, John Salew, Anthony Eustrel, Peter Madden, Archie Duncan, Olive Sloane.

Cinematography: Moray Grant, James Wilson...

As the psychotic delivery man whose hatred is reserved for women, Arthur Franz found the perfect vehicle for his flinty personality in this 1952 policier from director Edward Dmytryk. Produced by Stanley Kramer, the film is notable for cinematographer Burnett Guffey’s neo-realist take on the Bay Area locale. Franz must have been disappointed that this didn’t make him a star, but the loyal Dmytryk managed to find roles for him in many of his big budget assignments over the years.

The post The Sniper appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

Witness six noir heroes, doing what noir heroes do: one crooked gambler, one psycho, another psycho with access to a gun, a dope railroaded into a prison sentence, and an even bigger dope who doesn’t realize he’s poisoning himself. That’s only five, but the sixth is a cop, and not a particularly compromised one, the way we like ’em in noir. This third Columbia Noir Collection can boast big stars and some name directors, beautiful HD transfers and some fascinating short subjects as extras.

Columbia Noir #3

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1947-57 / B&w / 1:37 Academy, 1:85 widescreen / Street Date May 17, 2021 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £49.99

Starring: Dick Powell, Lee J Cobb, Nina Foch, William Holden, Edmond O’Brien, Dorothy Malone, Glenn Ford, Broderick Crawford, Marie Windsor, and Vince Edwards.

Directed by Robert Rossen, Rudolph Mat&eacute, Henry Levin, Gordon Douglas, Edward Dmytryk, Irving Lerner

Powerhouse Indicator’s...

While the summer movie season will kick off shortly––and we’ll be sharing a comprehensive preview on the arthouse, foreign, indie, and (few) studio films worth checking out––on the streaming side, The Criterion Channel and Mubi have unveiled their May 2021 lineups and there’s a treasure trove of highlights to dive into.

Timed with Satyajit Ray’s centenary, The Criterion Channel will have a retrospective of the Indian master, along with series on Gena Rowlands, Robert Ryan, Mitchell Leisen, Michael Almereyda, Josephine Decker, and more. In terms of recent releases, they’ll also feature Fire Will Come, The Booksellers, and the new restoration of Tom Noonan’s directorial debut What Happened Was….

On Mubi, in anticipation of Undine, they’ll feature two essential early features by Christian Petzold, Jerichow and The State That I Am In, along with his 1990 short documentary Süden. Also amongst the lineup is Sophy Romvari’s Still Processing,...

Despite the proliferation of streaming services, it’s becoming increasingly clear that any cinephile only needs subscriptions to a few to survive. Among the top of our list are The Criterion Channel and Mubi and now they’ve each unveiled their stellar April line-ups.

Over at The Criterion Channel, highlights include spotlights on Ennio Morricone, the Marx Brothers, Isabel Sandoval, and Ramin Bahrani, plus Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, Frank Borzage’s Moonrise, the brand-new restoration of Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, and one of last year’s best films, David Osit’s Mayor.

At Mubi (where we’re offering a 30-day trial), they’ll have the exclusive streaming premiere of two of the finest festival films from last year’s circuit, Cristi Puiu’s Malmkrog and Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Labyrinth of Cinema, plus Philippe Garrel’s latest The Salt of Tears, along with films from Terry Gilliam, George A. Romero,...

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“Hate Is A Loaded Gun”

By Raymond Benson

The years of the 1940s following World War II exhibited a striking change in Hollywood movies. The moods and world outlooks of post-war GIs and the people they had left behind and to whom they returned were more reflective and serious. Awareness of societal ills that had always been with us were now at the forefront… and Hollywood stepped up to address this new American angst in the form of a) what film historians call “social problem films” that tackled issues such as alcoholism, drug addiction, anti-Semitism, racism, government corruption, and other hitherto taboos of motion pictures, and b) film noir, the gritty crime dramas that never sugar-coated anything and portrayed both men and women—the femmes fatale—as hard-boiled, cynical, and paranoid.

Two pictures were released in 1947 that tackled anti-Semitism with frank, hard-hitting realism.

Hollywood learns to imbed a social message into a crime thriller. John Paxton’s adaptation of Richard Brooks’ neat murder tale is solid noir because it sheds light on the malaise of returning soldiers. No parades and confetti here: Robert Ryan is the hateful bigot but the other characters live amid equally shadowy values — laid-back Robert Mitchum, unhappy bar girl Gloria Grahame. Edward Dmytryk puts a polish on a fine screenplay with a fresh viewpoint, that avoids thriller clichés.

Crossfire

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1947 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 86 min. / Street Date , 2021 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Robert Young, Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, Gloria Grahame, Paul Kelly,

Sam Levene, George Cooper, Jacqueline White, Steve Brodie, William Phipps, Lex Barker, Marlo Dwyer.

Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt

Film Editor: Harry Gerstad

Art Direction: Albert S. D’Agostino, Alfred Herman

Original Music: Roy Webb

Written by John Paxton from the novel The Brick Foxhole by...

Robert Mitchum in Crossfire (1947) is available on Blu-ray from Warner Archive. Order it Here

Years of police work have taught Detective Finlay that where there’s crime, there’s motive. But he finds no usual motive when investigating a man’s death by beating. The man was killed because he was a Jew. “Hate,” Finlay says, “is like a gun.” Robert Young portrays Finlay, Robert Mitchum is a laconic army sergeant assisting in the investigation of G.I. suspects, and Robert Ryan plays a vicious bigot in a landmark film noir nominated for five Academy Awards®, including Best Picture. Edward Dmytryk directs, draping the genre’s stylistic backdrops and flourishes around a topic rarely before explored in films: anti-Semitism in the U.S. Here, Hollywood takes aim at injustice…and catches bigotry in a Crossfire.

Special Features: Commentary by Film Historians Alain Silver and James Ursini, with Audio Interview Excerpts...

“I want friend like me.”

Article by Jim Batts, Dana Jung, and Tom Stockman

No other actor in the long history of horror has been so closely identified with the genre as Boris Karloff, yet he was as famous for his gentle heart and kindness as he was for his screen persona. William Henry Pratt was born on November 23, 1887, in Camberwell, London, England. He studied at London University in anticipation of a diplomatic career; however, he moved to Canada in 1909 and joined a theater company where he was bit by the acting bug. It was there that he adopted the stage name of “Boris Karloff.” He toured back and forth across the USA for over ten years in a variety of low-budget Theater shows and eventually ended up in Hollywood. Needing cash to support himself, Karloff landed roles in silent films making his on-screen debut in Chapter 2 of the 1919 serial The Masked Rider.

Universal Horror Collection Volume 5

Blu ray

1943, 1944, 1945, 1941 / 61, 61, 63, 64 min.

Starring Ellen Drew, John Carradine, Acquanetta

Cinematography by George Robinson, Jack MacKenzie, Maury Gertsman, Victor Milner

Directed by Edward Dmytryk, Reginald Le Borg, Harold Young, Stuart Heisler

The Universal Horror Collection Volume 5 should appeal to ape suit fans everywhere—and spoiler alert—one of the films in the set is genuinely good, a lyrical genre-buster that is as inventive as it is poignant.

That movie, The Monster and the Girl, shares space with a trio of bottom-rung potboilers concerning the misadventures of Paula Dupree, a beautiful circus performer with the bad habit of changing into a monster—though she’s not “changing” so much as reverting to her true nature; Paula is a deracinated gorilla given human form by a not-so-mad doctor The statuesque Aquanetta plays Paula and, except for some grunts and growls in her ape state, her’s is a completely mute performance.

It’s lurid, it’s soapy, it’s forbidden: where does the line form? Joseph E. Levine made hay from Harold Robbins’ best seller, with prose that The New York Times said belonged more properly “on the walls of a public lavatory.” So why is the picture so much fun? When the performances are good they’re very good, and when they’re bad they’re almost better. Plus there’s a who’s who game to be played: If George Peppard is Howard Hughes and Carroll Baker is Jean Harlow, who exactly is Robert Cummings? I think this is the first time on Blu for this title, and playback-wise it’s A-ok for Region A.

The Carpetbaggers

Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] 9 (Australia)

1964 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 150 min. / Street Date August 26, 2020 / Available at [Imprint] 34.95

Starring: George Peppard, Alan Ladd, Robert Cummings, Martha Hyer, Elizabeth Ashley, Martin Balsam, Lew Ayres, Carroll Baker, Ralph Taeger, Archie Moore,...

Updated at 1 p.m.: A tweet was just posted on the account for the Angeles National Forest saying the raging Bobcat Fire is within 500 feet of the historic Mt. Wilson Observatory. Yesterday, a tweet from the Forest Service said fire crews were seeking to protect the observatory and the the infrastructure around it with “strategic firing operations.”

The #BobcatFire is within 500 ft of the Mt. Wilson Observatory & crews are in place ready to receive the fire. Strategic firing is taking place in the south where air operations are strengthening dozerlines. Crews are working a spot fire that crossed Hwy 2 near Buckhorn. pic.twitter.com/33rI3dNet2

— Angeles_NF (@Angeles_NF) September 15, 2020

Previously at 9:45 a.m.: “The Bobcat Fire is knocking on our door,” Mount Wilson Observatory tweeted about 9:25 p.m. Monday. “Fire officials predicted that the fire would approach Mt. Wilson from Echo Rock. It looks like they are correct.