Actors & Personalities · Pre-Code · Sex & Relationships · Women in Film
Mae West: Pleasure Woman
West is a born outlaw, a queen of the underworld who knows that two and two are four but five will get you 10 if you know how to work[…]
Category: Artists
Directors · Drama · Outsiders · War · Writers & Critics
“Write Some Good Ones”: How Billy Wilder’s Most Autobiographical Film Was Directed by Somebody Else
Rumanian refugee Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer) conning a guileless California schoolteacher, Emmy Brown (Olivia de Havilland, in an Oscar-nominated role), into marrying him so he can enter the United States[…]
Counterculture · Directors · Drama · Interviews · Restorations
My My, Hey Hey, Out of the Blue Is Here to Stay: John Alan Simon and Elizabeth Karr Talk about the Restoration of Dennis Hopper’s Masterpiece
Dennis wasn’t originally hired to direct Out of the Blue, rather he was hired to act in it. After about a week of shooting, the production manager, Paul Lewis, who[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Drama · Silents · Women in Film
An Innocent Lulu: How Pabst Rewrote Wedekind in Pandora’s Box
If she is seen simply as a free spirit, a woman who lives for sexual pleasure, and as exemplary on that account, a model liberated woman (as Louise Brooks herself[…]
Directors · Historical & Epic · Horror · Politics
Five Screenplays by Larry Cohen: Bone, J. Edgar Hoover x2, It’s Alive III, Return to Salem’s Lot
I have been a fan of writer/director Larry Cohen ever since viewing his 1970s classics The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977) and It Lives Again (1978). Cohen was[…]
Directors · Drama · Production History
Mysteries of The Deep: The Making and Unmaking of Orson Welles’s Dead Reckoning
For all his flaws, Welles was not a man with a fear of completion, but rather one who would hold on to finishing his work to the absolute breaking point.[…]
Tall Cool One: The Artful Life of Anthony James
As some of those character names echo, James portrayed a lot of villainy and savage desperation over the course of his career, inaugurated by his performance as burning racist Ralph[…]
Actors & Personalities · Asian · Directors · Theory
Inhabiting the Frame: Building as Body in Tsai Ming-Liang’s Stray Dogs
When Lee’s daughter asks her new caretaker why the apartment is such a mess, she answers, “A house is like a person. It gets sick, grows old. The cracks in[…]
Directors · Essays · Romance · Writers & Critics
Vertigo and Lolita: The Supreme Love Fictions of the 20th Century?
But these reflections bring Vertigo down to “depressing” reality. The view that reality is a downer redeemable only by “exalted seeing” is the basis for James Harvey’s disparagement of 1950s[…]
Actors & Personalities · Colonialism · Drama · Essays · Historical & Epic · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
A Passage to India with James Fox: Understanding a Curious Country through an English Film
Near the close of our Skype meeting, my conversation with James Fox turned inside out. He enquired if he could ask me a question. He then tried to assemble the[…]
French Cinema · Literature and Film · Philosophy · Writers & Critics
The Invention of Marienbad: Resnais, Robbe-Grillet, Morel, and Adolfo Bioy Casares on the Left Bank
Tout le film est en effet l’histoire d’une persuasion. (The whole film is the story of a persuasion.) – Alain Robbe-Grillet1 En fait, je pense qu’on a tout à fait[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama
The Erotic Persona of Jimmy Stewart: From Visionary to Voyeur
You would never guess either from looking at him or from the “aw shucks” way in which he’s remembered that Stewart is responsible for some of the most erotic romantic[…]
Actors & Personalities · Women in Film
Vivien Leigh: Becoming Scarlett
“[Vivien Leigh] is, I should say, the most important recruit British films have ever had . . . She is still not at all keen on going to Hollywood. She could go any day if she said the word. It’s up to the English studios to develop her over here.” — Picturegoer, April 3, 1937
Biopic · Drama · Writers & Critics
The Sentence and the Shot: Revisiting Citizen Kane and Absalom, Absalom!
In both texts, these strategies suggest similar attempts to represent the present moment’s relationship to the American past. Faulkner’s devastating analysis of race and Welles’s meditations on wealth and worth[…]
Directors · Interviews · Writers & Critics
Winners and Losers: A Conversation with Screenwriter Gerald Wilson
“There isn’t a fucking comma in the original script [for Dangerfield, aka Scorpio] that I used,” Wilson says. “All that about Burt and double agents is my own experience. If[…]
John Barrymore: Sweet Prince of Irony
“Isn’t it extraordinary that the most popular character ever written should apparently be defeated by life instead of transcending it?”
Literature and Film · Thrillers & Action · Writers & Critics
Six Ways of Looking at Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
A master of the spy novel whose work inspired some of the most memorable films of the genre, John le Carré died on December 12, 2020. We honor him with[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · Historical & Epic · Politics
Looking at Charlie — Modern Times (An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin)
Charlie Chaplin was born on April 16, 1889. To honor the old boy, we herewith present Alan Vanneman’s witty discussion of one of Charlie’s masterpieces, originally published in Bright Lights[…]
Books · Directors · Women in Film
Book review: Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure
Anna Backman Rogers, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019). The Coppola who emerges from Rogers’s study is therefore something of a double agent. On[…]
Genres · Horror · Producers & Studios
Darkness, Darkness: The Films of Val Lewton: Looking Back at a B-Movie Master
Producer Val Lewton died on this day (March 14) in 1951, age 46. We honor this visionary talent by reposting this profile of Lewton by frequent BLFJ contributor Mark Vieira,[…]
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