“No matter when one lives in Hollywood, one brings one’s own mental furniture along.”      – Otto Friedrich,  journalist / cultural historian The final (and rarest) episode of Jacques Demy’s Lola film trilogy has made its home video debut this month.   Unlike the first two, MODEL SHOP was in English and shot in Southern California. [...]

On a British site, I read that the mid-sixties surf film RIDE THE WILD SURF had a Gay following. That was news to me, so I gave it a look. The film is more naturalistic (if you can call a movie that is 50% rear-projection ‘realistic’) than the cartoony Frankie-and-Annette beach party films cranked out [...]

It’s May:  a time when degrees are bestowed.  It’s the season of commencement ceremonies. Which reminds me of the first words I uttered as I graduated from film school in Los Angeles in 1980.  As it sank in that I finally had a bachelors of cinema in my hands, I — in true film lover [...]

Here’s another example of studio roulette: Warner Home Video has released DANCE, GIRL, DANCE, a neglected and challenging RKO movie from 1940 which was the penultimate feature film directed by Dorothy Arzner. As an A-List female director in classic-era Hollywood, Arzner was virtually the only one in town (Lois Weber directed silents; Ida Lupino directed [...]

How can it be?? BELLS ARE RINGING: a butt-ugly, proscenium-bound, stand-and-deliver musical film directed by that most polished, chic, and painterly of all studio-era filmmakers, Vincente Minnelli??? In this delish-ly digital DVD, the glaringly phony sets and the consciously theatrical performances almost kill the pleasure of viewing this film. I say almost because despite its [...]

My friend David was excited recently because of the DVD release of M-G-M’s 1945 THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, directed by Albert Lewin. That got me thinking of the next collaboration by the DORIAN GRAY creative team: an independent film called THE PRIVATE AFFAIRS OF BEL AMI (1947). Lewin startled THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY‘s [...]

Allan Dwan made over 400 movies during a fifty-year period. When he started directing, there was no such thing as an American feature film: movies lasted 20 minutes, tops. He was making movies before Chaplin. Dwan’s debut behind the camera came only a few months after the East Coast-based movie industry had relocated to a [...]

TEA TREE GULLY, SOUTH AUSTRALIA. DVD shopping in Australia. I scored almost from the start when I found a used copy of the ‘lost’ David Bowie / Marlene Dietrich film, JUST A GIGOLO, for around 5 USD in downtown Melbourne. As I understand it, the original negs were lost in a fire. Never got to [...]

ELECTION NIGHT — Around the time the polls started closing, I decided to watch the stunning, powerful Criterion Collection DVD of Fritz Lang’s THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE. Good choice. Mabuse was a criminal genius (Lang had made a film about Mabuse in the 1920s and his last film in the 1960s was also about [...]

I’ve been on a Brain Food Diet that has kept my thinking processes in overdrive this week. Even when my body would scream “No more!!” my brain would keep barreling down the highway with a cinder block on the accelerator. In order to chill, I spent Columbus Day morning sipping red wine and watching CIMARRON [...]