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After making what many people cite as the greatest film ever made, “Citizen Kane” (1941), multi-talented actor, writer, director and producer Orson Welles struggled to live up to the success he achieved when he was just 26 years old. Yet seen today, many of the films he made afterwards have attained a similar acclaim. Let’s take a look back at all 13 of his completed feature films as a director, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1915, Welles first came to prominence as a stage director, mounting groundbreaking productions of “Macbeth,” “Dr. Faustus,” and “The Cradle Will Rock” before forming his own repertory company, The Mercury Theater. In addition to Welles, the Mercury Theater Players included Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, Agnes Moorhead, Everett Sloane, George Coulouris, Norman Lloyd, Martin Gabel and Paul Stewart, many of whom would go onto appear in the director’s films.

It was the Mercury Theater’s transition into...

Hulu’s acclaimed “Only Murders in the Building,” currently vying for 11 Emmys, has gone all razzle dazzle in its third season. Make that rattle dazzle! Beleaguered Broadway director Oliver (Martin Short) was hoping for a comeback on the Great White Way with the mystery thriller “Death Rattle.” But when his leading man (Paul Rudd) is murdered, he decides to turn the straight play into a musical, “Death Rattle Dazzle!” And in the third episode, Meryl Streep’s nervous journeyman actress and Ashley Park’s leading lady performed the show-stopping ballad “Look for the Light” co-written by Sara Bareilles. One almost forgot the prime suspects in “Death Rattle Dazzle!” are the infant Pickwick triplets.

The 1959 multiple Tony winner “Redhead” also has a rather strange plot for a musical: a serial killer is stalking women in London in the 1880s during the time Jack the Ripper was terrorizing the city. Sounds like a real toe-tapper.

François Truffaut goes deep and morbid adapting a Henry James story about a man who chooses to ‘devote himself to his beloved dead.’ He builds an altar-shrine to a departed bride and comrades that didn’t survive the Great War. A sympathetic woman considers aiding him, but his obsession keeps choosing life-negating directions. It’s a weird, morbid but highly understandable tale from the edge of the fantastic. The cinematographer is Néstor Almendros; the film is part of a 4-title François Truffaut Collection.

The Green Room

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

Part of Kino’s François Truffaut Collection, with The Wild Child, Small Change and The Man Who Loved Women

1978 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 94 min. / Street Date February 14, 2023 / La chanbre verte, The Vanishing Fiancée / available through Kino Lorber / 59.95

Starring: François Truffaut, Nathalie Baye, Jean Dast´, Patrick Maléon, Jeanne Lobre, Antoine Vitez, Jean-Pierre Moulin, Serge Rousseau, Annie Miller, Nathan Miller, Marcel Berbert.

Cinematography:...

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By Fred Blosser

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “There Was a Crooked Man . . .” debuted in theaters on Christmas Day 1970, a disruptive year for Hollywood as the moviegoing audience continued to fracture along the Vietnam War divide. Studios were desperate to retain their core demographic of older, conservative viewers while courting younger, affluent ticket-buyers who wanted stronger fare. “There Was a Crooked Man . . .” tried to offer a little something for everybody. For the older guys at the Vfw Hall, it was a Western starring Henry Fonda and Kirk Douglas, supported largely by a cast of other well-established, middle-aged actors. For the “Easy Rider” crowd, there was plenty of nudity, cussing, and innuendo about weed that you’d never encounter on “Gunsmoke” or “Bonanza.” In Mankiewicz’s cynical, R-rated Western, now available from the Warner Archive Collection, outlaw Paris Pitman Jr. (Kirk Douglas) and his partners rob a wealthy banker,...

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By Fred Blosser

In George Axelrod’s “Lord Love a Duck” (1966), Roddy McDowall and Tuesday Weld play high school seniors in Los Angeles. McDowall was 38 at the time, Weld 23. Such casting, where actors in their twenties or older play teenagers, is typical for Hollywood, then and now. In “Lord Love a Duck,” which Axelrod produced, co-wrote, and directed from a novel by Al Hine, neither McDowall nor Weld exactly looks like an 18-year-old, nor do the actresses who play their classmates. They include Jo Collins, 21, then a recent Playmate of the Year. But here the disconnect doesn’t really detract from the film. It simply underscores its overall cartoonish surrealism. McDowall plays Alan, the genius-level valedictorian of his class, who fixates on his classmate, pretty but vacuous Barbara Ann (Weld). “Her deepest and most heartfelt yearnings express with a kind of touching...

This mid-‘sixties black comedy from the mischievous George Axelrod defines and dissects ‘crazy California culture’ just as West Coasters were being slandered as godless weird-oh hedonists. It’s partly a sarcastic put-down, citing anecdotal extremes like drive-in churches (how 2020 can you get?), perverse youth encounter groups and mindless beach party movies. But Axelrod’s paints indelible images of maladjusted women of three age groups: Tuesday Weld, Lola Albright and Ruth Gordon. Where Roddy McDowall fits in is anybody’s guess — he’s meant to glue the satire together and instead turns it into a big Question Mark.

Lord Love a Duck

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1966 / B&w / 1:85 widescreen / 105 min. / Street Date September 22, 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Roddy McDowall, Tuesday Weld, Lola Albright, Martin West, Ruth Gordon, Harvey Korman, Sarah Marshall, Lynn Carey, Donald Murphy, Max Showalter, Joseph Mell, Dan Frazer, Martine Bartlett, Jo Collins, Judith Loomis, Gay Gordon,...

Orson Welles would’ve celebrated his 104th birthday on May 6, 2019. After making what many people cite as the greatest film ever made, “Citizen Kane” (1941), the multi-talented actor, writer, director and producer struggled to live up to the success he achieved when he was just 26 years old. Yet seen today, many of the films he made afterwards have attained a similar acclaim. In honor of his birthday, let’s take a look back at all 13 of his completed feature films as a director, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1915, Welles first came to prominence as a stage director, mounting groundbreaking productions of “Macbeth,” “Dr. Faustus,” and “The Cradle Will Rock” before forming his own repertory company, The Mercury Theater. In addition to Welles, the Mercury Theater Players included Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, Agnes Moorhead, Everett Sloane, George Coulouris, Norman Lloyd, Martin Gabel and Paul Stewart, many of whom would go onto...

This Friday (September 15), The Metroraph in New York City and the UCLA Film And Television Archive team up for what is bound to be one of 2017’s great repertory film series.

As part of their mission statement if you will, the UCLA Film And Television Archive strives to bring back to life some of cinema’s great forgotten masterworks. Be it social activist documentaries from the Civil Rights era or long lost silent masterpieces, the group’s Festival Of Preservation is a bi-annual series and subsequent national tour of new restorations spanning the history of film. With past festivals include titles as wide ranging as Too Late For Tears and God’s Little Acre, these series are some truly exciting restorations and the perfect way to discover your new favorite film.

After a run in La earlier this year, the series is now set to hit The Big Apple this week,...

Richard Brooks' exciting Humphrey Bogart picture is one of the best newspaper sagas ever. An editor deals with a gangster threat and a domestic crisis even as greedy heirs are selling his paper out from under him. Commentator Eddie Muller drives home the film's essential civics lesson about what we've lost -- a functioning free press. Deadline - U.S.A. Blu-ray Kl Studio Classics 1952 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 87 min. / Street Date July 26, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Humphrey Bogart, Ethel Barrymore, Kim Hunter, Ed Begley, Warren Stevens, Paul Stewart, Martin Gabel, Joe De Santis, Audrey Christie, Jim Backus, Willis Bouchey, Joseph Crehan, Lawrence Dobkin, John Doucette, Paul Dubov, William Forrest, Dabbs Greer, Thomas Browne Henry, Paul Maxey, Ann McCrea, Kasia Orzazewski, Tom Powers, Joe Sawyer, William Self, Phillip Terry, Carleton Young. Cinematography Milton Krasner Film Editor William B.Murphy Original Music Cyril J. Mockridge Produced by Sol C. Siegel...

It's ring-a-ding time, with producer-star Frank Sinatra and his cooperative director Gordon Douglas doing a variation on the hipster detective saga. The two Tony Rome pictures are lively and fun and chock-ful of borderline offensive content, like smash-zooms into women's rear ends. Tony Rome & Lady in Cement Blu-ray Twilight Time 1967, 1968 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 110 and 93 min. / Street Date September 8, 2016 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95 Starring Frank Sinatra, Richard Conte; Tony Rome: Jill St. John, Sue Lyon, Gena Rowlands, Simon Oakland, Lloyd Bochner, Robert J. Wilke, Virginia Vincent, Joan Shawlee, Lloyd Gough, Rocky Graziano, Elisabeth Fraser, Shecky Greene, Jeanne Cooper, Joe E. Ross, Tiffany Bolling, Deanna Lund. Lady in Cement: Raquel Welch, Dan Blocker, Martin Gabel, Lainie Kazan, Paul Mungar, Richard Deacon, Joe E. Lewis, Bunny Yeager. Cinematography Joseph Biroc Original Music Billy May, Hugo Montenegro; song by Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra Written by Richard L. Breen...

Debbie Reynolds ca. early 1950s. Debbie Reynolds movies: Oscar nominee for 'The Unsinkable Molly Brown,' sweetness and light in phony 'The Singing Nun' Debbie Reynolds is Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” star today, Aug. 23, '15. An MGM contract player from 1950 to 1959, Reynolds' movies can be seen just about every week on TCM. The only premiere on Debbie Reynolds Day is Jerry Paris' lively marital comedy How Sweet It Is (1968), costarring James Garner. This evening, TCM is showing Divorce American Style, The Catered Affair, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and The Singing Nun. 'Divorce American Style,' 'The Catered Affair' Directed by the recently deceased Bud Yorkin, Divorce American Style (1967) is notable for its cast – Reynolds, Dick Van Dyke, Jean Simmons, Jason Robards, Van Johnson, Lee Grant – and for the fact that it earned Norman Lear (screenplay) and Robert Kaufman (story) a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award nomination.

Joan Lorring, 1945 Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominee, dead at 88: One of the earliest surviving Academy Award nominees in the acting categories, Lorring was best known for holding her own against Bette Davis in ‘The Corn Is Green’ (photo: Joan Lorring in ‘Three Strangers’) Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nominee Joan Lorring, who stole the 1945 film version of The Corn Is Green from none other than Warner Bros. reigning queen Bette Davis, died Friday, May 30, 2014, in the New York City suburb of Sleepy Hollow. So far, online obits haven’t mentioned the cause of death. Lorring, one of the earliest surviving Oscar nominees in the acting categories, was 88. Directed by Irving Rapper, who had also handled one of Bette Davis’ biggest hits, the 1942 sudsy soap opera Now, Voyager, Warners’ The Corn Is Green was a decent if uninspired film version of Emlyn Williams’ semi-autobiographical 1938 hit play about an English schoolteacher,...

Maisie goes to Manhattan in this fine modern-day adaptation of Henry James's novel of irresponsible parenting

Henry James famously failed in his attempts to become a popular playwright in the 1890s and apparently never thought, like his friend Joseph Conrad, to engage with the new medium of the cinema. But starting some 30 years after his death, his fiction has reached a larger audience as a source of screenplays. Immediately after the second world war The Aspern Papers, shot in Hollywood on stylised Venetian sets, became the underrated The Lost Moment (the only film directed by the actor Martin Gabel) and was followed by William Wyler's highly regarded The Heiress (a version of Washington Square). Since then there have been a dozen or more James movies, adapting such complex books as The Golden Bowl, The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove, and "the Master" has...

"I felt the past closing around me like a fog, filling me with a nameless fear..."

A cinema tragedy: the phrase can probably best be exemplified by the fact that Charles Laughton directed only one film, and that film is so great that one can only wonder at what we've been deprived of.

Another actor, Martin Gabel, a character thesp with a bulbous head and a genuine talent for playing creeps, likewise directed one film only: the blacklist put paid to his career. The level of tragedy is harder to assess, since Gabel's only movie as director is very good, but not a masterpiece on the level of Night of the Hunter. But The Lost Moment (1947) is mysterious, romantic, atmospheric and altogether intriguing; and if Gabel were set to build on this starting point and improve still further, we may well have been deprived of a truly major cinematic talent.

I was saddened to learn this morning that Betty Garrett, the great star of stage, screen, and TV, passed away yesterday at the age of 94 after suffering an aortic aneurysm.

Garrett was one of those rare people — like, say, Jack Valenti — who happened to be a witness to and/or participant in a remarkably high number of historic events of the 20th century. She was a member of Orson Welles’s famed Mercury Theatre company, and was with him on the night that he shook up America with his infamous radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” (1938); she was Frank Sinatra’s leading lady in two of the earliest great M-g-m musical-comedies, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (1949) and “On the Town” (1949); her career was greatly hurt by the Hollywood Red Scare after her husband, the Oscar nominated actor Larry Parks, refused to name names before the House Committee...