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ANATOMY OF A MURDER (1959)

Posted on February 29, 2020 by Jason Fraley

The courtroom is a cinematic goldmine for its many dramatic elements. The high
stakes of someone’s life on the line. The terminated life of someone else
requiring proper justice. The sleepless nights and legal research that both
sides have to dig through to prepare their case. The endless supply of surprise
witnesses giving unpredictable testimony. The examination and cross-examination
of these witnesses. The battles and objections between prosecution and defense.
The rulings and overrulings of judges. The unpredictability of the jurors. And
the final climatic reading of the verdict. It’s all real and perfect for the
movies.

In most cases, these elements file into a one-sided construct, placing audiences
in favor of one particular side (either defense or prosecution) and allowing the
drama to unfold as a function of the case. This tried-and-true approach has
worked brilliantly from Inherit the Wind to A Few Good Men to Philadelphia. But
there’s also something to be said for a film like Anatomy of a Murder, which
baits viewers into believing it’s a standard courtroom drama, only to reveal
itself as something much deeper with no easy answers. Even after the verdict has
been read and the characters have happily moved on with their lives, viewers are
left wondering whether their initial sympathies were correct, and more
importantly, whether justice was actually served.  Continue reading →

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THE NUTTY PROFESSOR (1963)

Posted on February 29, 2020 by Jason Fraley

Jerry Lewis and Eddie Murphy are two of Hollywood’s greatest comics and both
will be forever linked for their equally hilarious versions of The Nutty
Professor. Murphy’s 1996 remake was not only popular, grossing $273 million
worldwide and another $166 million for its sequel, The Klumps, it was also
innovative with Oscar-winning makeup that allowed Murphy to play five roles in
the same scene, launched the careers of Jada Pinkett Smith as Mrs. Purdy and
Dave Chappelle as nightclub stand-up Reggie, and split our sides with unrivaled
laugh factor as a granny taunted, “Come on, Cletus!” at a farting dinner table.
However, if we’re going to give credit where credit is due, we must tip our hat
to Lewis for writing and directing the 1963 original, as well as
executive-producing the remake.

In a comic send-up of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the film literally opens with a
bang, as the bucktoothed, geeky Professor Julius Kelp (Lewis) explodes a
chemistry experiment, rocking the university and landing him in hot water with
the dean (Del Moore). His clumsiness continues to embarass him, especially in
front of his knockout pupil, Stella Purdy, played by Stella Stevens (Marilyn
Monroe, eat your heart out). Though Stella actually admires Kelp’s intelligence,
he cannot see beyond his failure to live up to his own idea of her desires.
Thus, he concocts a potion to turn himself into Buddy Love, an alter-ego he
fancies as “the world’s greatest everything, the best dressed, the swingingest
performer and one of the nicest guys in the whole world.” In reality, he’s rude
as can be. Continue reading →

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THE KING AND I (1956)

Posted on February 29, 2020 by Jason Fraley

Of the five movies mentioned in Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” —
The Bridge on the River Kwai, Ben-Hur, Psycho and Lawrence of Arabia — The King
and I is the only film that does not routinely show up on all-time best lists.
Not on the AFI’s Top 100. Not on Filmsite’s Top 300. Not even in the 1001 Movies
You Must See Before You Die.

However, when the conversation is narrowed to specific genres, it’s a guaranteed
selection, ranking #31 on AFI’s 100 Passions and #11 on AFI’s 25 Greatest
Musicals. This is a rather interesting phenomenon if you think about it. Is the
film so gimmicky that it nails a target audience but misfires more broadly? Does
it only stand out above other ’50s-era musicals? Or has public tolerance of
cultural appropriation doomed it despite lavish production values? Whatever the
answer, The King and I will always be a cultural touchstone, an important
landmark of the romantic musical genre, the parent to a handful of popular new
tunes, and a time capsule of the Western World’s sensibility toward the rest of
the world. Continue reading →

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FIGHT CLUB (1999)

Posted on February 29, 2020 by Jason Fraley

“The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second
rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club!”

Yet to this day, Fight Club is all moviegoers want to talk about. The
testosterone-filled fist fights. David Fincher’s unconventional storytelling
methods. Brad Pitt’s badass performance. And, most of all, that shocker of a
twist that no one saw coming.

Though some critics called the twist forced and implausible, there’s no denying
its click with mainstream audiences. Fight Club developed an instant cult
following, voted to a whopping 8.8 on IMDB and placing as high as #8 on Empire
magazine’s reader-voted poll, above such critically acclaimed classics as
Casablanca (1942) and Citizen Kane (1941).

But if the film is going to get heaped with such high praise, fans should at
least learn to appreciate it for the right reasons. Those viewers who adore the
film for its masculine brutality and mimick it as such are missing the entire
point, that the material is really an indictment, a mockery, of such behavior.
Continue reading →

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THE THIN MAN (1934)

Posted on February 28, 2020 by Jason Fraley

“Oh, Nickee. I love you, because you know such lovely people.”

We all know The Pink Panther, if not from Peter Sellers’ movies than from the
cartoon. But this idea of zany whodunits and thinly-mustached detectives was
itself inspired by The Thin Man, W.S. Van Dyke’s archetype that first combined
the movies’ most entertaining genres — mystery and romantic comedy — to create a
film that remains one of the most wildly entertaining of all the classics.

Based on the fifth and final novel by Dashiell Hammett, just four years after
The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man would transcend the genre of hardboiled
detectives by replacing the lone gumshoe with a romantic pair of sleuthing
spouses, Nick and Nora Charles, two fun-loving soulmates swapping clues, jokes,
glances, even punches to the jaw to knock the other out of the line of fire.
Continue reading →

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CLERKS (1994)

Posted on February 13, 2020 by Jason Fraley

What do a college tuition, comic book collection, FEMA car reimbursement and
countless credit cards have in common? Kevin Smith used them all to fund Clerks
in 1994. (A) A 23-year-old film school drop-out at the time, Smith shot the film
over three weeks in the New Jersey convience and video stores where he worked
and did it for just $27,500 with mostly local friends and his own production
company, View Askew. Before long, the film got the attention of now-disgraced
Miramax head Harvey Weinstein, whose distribution allowed the film to gross $3
million in the U.S.

This “making of” story is one of the most famous independent success stories, so
cool in fact that Empire ranked Clerks the #4 Greatest Independent Film of All
Time around the turn of the century. In the film history books, it remains one
of a handful of films, along with Soderberg’s sex, lies and videotape (1989),
Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992) and Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), that
catapulted the independent film industry into a legitimate enterprise. Continue
reading →

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A CHRISTMAS STORY (1983)

Posted on February 13, 2020 by Jason Fraley

“I triple dawg dare ya!” “Hmm, Schwartz created a slight breach of etiquette by
skipping the triple dare and going right for the throat!”

One of the most eccentric, oddball, yet lovably enduring holiday movies, A
Christmas Story should be one to last forever, certainly if recent airtime is
any indication. Since 1997, the Turner networks have broadcast the film on
24-hour TV marathons every Christmas, allowing one to conceivably watch A
Christmas Story 12 times in a row if they like.

For fans, the marathons are great; for Turner Broadcasting, it’s just good
business. In 2002, director Bob Clark reported an estimated 38.4 million people
tuning into the marathon at some point in the day, which was almost one sixth of
the country. (A) The numbers have only continued to grow, with TBS reporting
45.4 million viewers in 2005 (B) and 45.5 million in 2006. (C) Not bad for a
film that did only lukewarm at best at the box office in ’83. Continue reading →

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WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (1971)

Posted on February 13, 2020 by Jason Fraley

“If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it.”

With such a fantastical promise, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory remains
second only to The Wizard of Oz (1939) in a movie’s ability to capture a world
of “puuure imagi-na-tion.” In fact, the film turns several Oz elements on their
head, from a door opening to a mystical land of color (the all-edible chocolate
room) to the introduction of singing little people (green-haired, orange-faced
Oompa Loompas). But the most important similarity is its ability to capture the
imaginations of children and adults alike, inspiring generations to think back
fondly on the film all these years later, reminded of its impact each time they
grab a Wonka Bar or Everlasting Gobstoppers at the grocery store.

Based on the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, Willy Wonka
and the Chocolate Factory began when director Mel Stuart’s daughter came to him
in love with the novel, prompting Stuart to read the book and pitch the project
to producer David L. Wolper. When Wolper got word that his TV sponsor Quaker
Oates was exploring the release of a new candy bar, he was able to talk the
oatmeal company into a joint promotion with his new movie, giving birth to the
Wonka Bar in stores and earning $3 million from Quaker Oatesto fund his future
movie classic. Continue reading →

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PLATOON (1986)

Posted on February 13, 2020 by Jason Fraley

“They come from the end of the line, most of ’em. Towns you never heard of. …
most of ’em got nothin’. They’re poor, they’re the unwanted, yet they’re
fighting for our society and our freedom. It’s weird, isn’t it?”

The best insights and the best works of art come when there’s some level of
authenticity behind their creation. In that case, who better to do a Vietnam
picture than an actual veteran? Oliver Stone’s depiction in Platoon is brutal,
emotionally draining and unapologetically anti-war, but maybe, just maybe, this
is what actually went down in a war that many historians call the biggest
foreign policy debacle in U.S. history. Continue reading →

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AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951)

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Jason Fraley

“Paris? No, not this city. It’s too real and too beautiful. It never lets you
forget anything. It reaches in and opens you wide, and you stay that way. I
know. I came to Paris to study and to paint because Utrillo did, and Lautrec
did, and Roualt did. I loved what they created, and I thought something would
happen to me, too. Well, it happened all right. Now what have I got left? Paris.
Maybe that’s enough for some, but it isn’t for me anymore because the more
beautiful everything is, the more it will hurt without you.”

Such is the predicament facing Jerry Mulligan, the titular American in Paris, an
ex-G.I. who decided to stay in the city as a painter. Jerry (Gene Kelly) has
come to love the city for its culture, but now only sees it as a curse, thanks
to a broken heart over a Frenchwoman, Lise Bouvier (Leslie Caron). Their
relationship is reminiscent of Bergman and Bogie’s in Casablanca — two lovers
who fall in love in Paris and share a musical standard as their love song, yet
who also can not be together because outside factors prohibit it. Standing in
for Paul Heinreid’s Victor Lazlo in this case is Henri Baurel (Georges Guetary),
who completes the love triangle of An American in Paris as both Jerry’s good
friend and Lise’s fiance. Continue reading →

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GUYS AND DOLLS (1955)

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Jason Fraley

“The companionship of a doll is a pleasant thing, even for a period of time
running into months. But for a close relationship that can last us through all
the years of our life, no doll can take the place of aces back to back.”

This is the advice given by wiseguy Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando) to his
crap-game colleague Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra) in an early restaurant scene
from Guys and Dolls, a tale of crooks, cons and courtship, all emanating from
the bustling streets of Times Square. Like the Pacino-DeNiro showdown in Heat
(1995), the diner scene is an iconic duel between two of the era’s biggest
stars. (A) More importantly, it sets up the film’s central thematic debate —
whether it’s best to be a player or to settle down with true love.

Masterson and Detroit represent two opposite viewpoints. Despite being
preoccupied with a gambling addiction, Detroit genuinely loves his girlfriend,
Adelaide (Vivian Blaine), and argues that women are a necessity. Masterson, on
the other hand, contests that women “are something to have around only when they
come in handy, like cough drops.” When Masterson finally asserts that “all dolls
are the same” and easily wooable, Detroit pounces on the chance to win some
much-needed dough to set up his latest crap shoot. He bets Masterson that he
won’t be able to get prim-and-proper missionary Sarah Brown (Jean Simmons) to go
with him on an upcoming trip to Havana. Continue reading →

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REDS (1981)

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Jason Fraley

For years, rarely was an actor so involved with his projects quite like Warren
Beatty. The handsome younger brother of Shirley MacLaine was all over his films,
not just starring (McCabe and Mrs. Miller), but writing (Shampoo), producing
(Bonnie and Clyde) and casting. So in 1978, it was no surprise he decided to try
out his directing chops, co-directing with Buck Henry (screenwriter of The
Graduate) to direct the fantasy comedy Heaven Can Wait, which made Beatty the
first person since Orson Welles on Citizen Kane (1941) to earn Oscar nominations
as producer, director, writer and lead actor.

Three years later, he would repeat this feat with his solo directorial debut,
Reds, a super ambitious project, part biopic, part history lesson, part
political propaganda about the Communist Revolution in Russia. While an
instantly touchy subject for the Reagan ’80s, the audacious film showed great
guts on the part of Beatty and gained him instant respect from Hollywood, which
handed him the Oscar for Best Director and the top prize from the Directors
Guild of America. Continue reading →

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APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

Posted on March 8, 2014 by Jason Fraley

“My film isn’t about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It
was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were
in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to
too much money, too much equipment and little by little we went insane.” (A)

No film is more linked to its “making of” story than Francis Ford Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now. It should be required, like a Coppola wine pairing, to watch the
film together with the fantastic behind-the-scenes documentary, Hearts of
Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), created by Coppola’s wife Eleanor,
who recorded the director’s most personal fears throughout the “horror” of
production.

It all started off innocent enough, with an acclaimed director bringing
Hollywood’s biggest stars to the Philippines, where a young Sofia Coppola
(future director of Lost in Translation) quipped, “It looks like the Disneyland
jungle cruise.” (A) Then all hell broke loose. A massive typhoon named Olga
wiped out the sets and shut down production for two months to rebuild. The
Philippine government offered helicopters to use on set, but suddenly recalled
them to fend off rebel forces. Martin Sheen suffered a near-fatal heart attack
at the young age of 36, receiving last rites from a non-English speaking priest
and being sidelined for five weeks.

If that wasn’t enough, Marlon Brando threatened to take his million dollars and
run, annoyed at the production delays. While he ultimately agreed to stay, he
showed up overweight without having read the film’s source novel, Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Dennis Hopper was stoned out of his mind and
unable to remember his lines, and supporting actors like Sam Bottoms dropped
acid and speed throughout the production. Perhaps most problematic was Coppola
himself, who was filled with enough hubris after the success of the two
Godfather films that he tried to tackle material that had licked even the great
Orson Welles, who wound up doing Citizen Kane instead. (A) Continue reading →

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JAWS (1975)

Posted on February 23, 2014 by Jason Fraley

Call it the scariest horror flick ever made, a Moby Dick action adventure, a
social commentary on beach towns and greedy mayors, a humanistic family story of
science and wonder, one of the best film adaptations of a best-selling novel,
one of the pioneering summer blockbusters and the winner of three Academy Awards
(editing, sound, score). Or, if you’re GQ magazine, you can take a more cynical
approach and call it the beginning of the end for the Hollywood Renaissance:
“It’s now a movie-history commonplace that the late-’60s-to-mid-’70s creative
resurgence of American moviemaking — the
Coppola-Altman-Penn-Nichols-Bogdanovich-Ashby decade — was cut short by two
movies, Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977, that lit the fuse for the
summer-blockbuster era.”

Still, just because many of their starry-eyed followers went on to make
effects-heavy garbage for short-attention spans, doesn’t mean that Spielberg and
Lucas themselves made garbage. Young Spielberg (Jaws) and Young Lucas (American
Graffiti) understood film history — which is more than many of their fanboys can
say — with references to John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) in both Close
Encounters and Star Wars, before teaming on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
Scholar David Thomson put it best: “Like Coppola on The Godfather, Spielberg
asserted his own role and deftly organized the elements of a rollercoaster
entertainment without sacrificing inner meanings.”

This, my friends, is the essence of The Film Spectrum, a website that urges
future filmmakers to find that “sweet spot” of riveting first-time experience,
yet increasing depth on repeat viewings. If you won’t take it from me, take it
from Billy Wilder: “When people try to belittle The Exorcist or Jaws, I just
think these people are crazy. Mr. Spielberg knows exactly what he did, and he
did it brilliantly.” And so, let’s all come to grips with a simple fact: Jaws is
not only massive entertainment, it remains one of the best directed movies ever
made. If you look at our website’s banner in this context, there are fins to the
left, fins to the right, and it’s the only shark in town. Continue reading →

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HIGH NOON (1952)

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Jason Fraley

What’s in a name? Better yet, what’s in a song? The title and title song of
“High Noon” tell us everything we need to know about Fred Zinnemann’s western
masterpiece. Just 13 percent of American feature films used a “title song”
between 1950-1954, but the number grew to 22 percent over the next five years,
and reached 29 percent by the late ’60s. Sparking the trend was “The Ballad of
High Noon,” an Oscar-winning song written by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington
and sung by Tex Ritter (father of John Ritter). Not only would it become a
popular country music record, it also allowed the film to both introduce the
stakes of its plot and reinforce the moral of its story:

Do not forsake me O my darlin’ / On this our wedding day / Do not forsake me O
my darlin’ / Wait, wait along. / The noon-day train will bring Frank Miller. /
If I’m a man I must be brave / And I must face that deadly killer / Or lie a
coward, a craven coward / Or lie a coward in my grave. / O to be torn ‘twixt
love and duty! / Supposin’ I lose my fair-haired beauty! / Look at that big hand
move along / Nearin’ high noon. / He made a vow while in State’s Prison / Vow’d
it would be my life or his and / I’m not afraid of death, but O, / What will I
do if you leave me? Continue reading →

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BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Jason Fraley

1967 was the year that American cinema grew up. Hollywood’s Golden Age of the
’30s and ’40s had long since given way to the sword-and-sandal epics of the ’50s
and ’60s. Meanwhile overseas, the French New Wave had shattered every convention
known to man. When a crop of young American filmmakers saw these edgy French
flicks, they were inspired to create their own period of maverick filmmaking
known as the “Hollywood Renaissance,” marking the arrival daring new voices like
Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, John Cassavettes, Sam Peckinpah, George Roy
Hill, Hal Ashby, John Boorman, John Schlesinger, William Friedkin, Roman
Polanski, Peter Bogdanovich, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Brian DePalma, Terrence
Malick, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola.

Helping the cause was 1967’s removal of the Hays Code in favor of the MPAA
rating system. That meant filmmakers could make sexier, more violent films, as
long as they carried a particular rating. Out of this grew anti-establishment
pieces that broke down barriers of race, religion and sexuality. And while the
title of Peter Biskin’s controversial book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls sets the
bookends at 1969-1980, the Hollywood Renaissance truly ran from 1967-1980.

October 1967 brought In the Heat of the Night (1967), November brought Cool Hand
Luke (1967), and December brought both The Graduate (1967) and Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner (1967). But predating all of those films was a revolutionary
picture that shocked audiences in August ’67, a film with unprecedented violence
and simmering sexuality, film’s greatest indication that the times they were a
changin’, the one and only Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Continue reading →

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THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Jason Fraley

Many great movies stick out by featuring one of the greatest actors of their
generation. Rarely can a movie claim to feature three of the greatest actors of
all time in one glorious cast. The Philadelphia Story is that rare exception,
featuring a leading trio that will blow any other leading three out of the water
— Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, all at their very best.

For Stewart, The Philadelphia Story marked his first — and egregiously only —
Academy Award for Best Actor. Many scholars think it was a make-up for the
statue he should have won the previous year for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(1939) when he most likely split the vote with favorite Clark Gable in Gone With
the Wind (1939), allowing Richard Donat to score the upset for Goodbye Mr. Chips
(1939). Even if Stewart’s Philadelphia Story victory was an Oscar penance, it
doesn’t diminish the brilliance of his performance as Macaulay “Mike” Connor, a
wise-cracking gossip columnist for Spy magazine, reluctantly sent by publisher
Sidney Kidd (Henry Daniell) to get the snarky scoop on the lavish wedding of
Philadelphia socialite Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn). Continue reading →

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BREAKING AWAY (1979)

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Jason Fraley

Of all the AFI’s Top 10 Most Inspirational Films — from Rocky (1976) to It’s a
Wonderful Life (1946) — Breaking Away is easily the least known. What a shame.
Peter Yates’ uplifting, and surprisingly funny, underdog cycling story is one of
the very best of its kind, moving beyond the realm of sports and touching on
such powerful issues as class struggle, self worth, familial relationships and
rebellion against the norm. Perhaps this is why Breaking Away remains one of the
few sports movies ever to be nominated for Best Picture and to win Best
Screenplay. Pop it in the DVD player right now, but don’t expect a typical
sports film. Expect more.

Set in Bloomington, Indiana, the film introduces us to four teens who each hail
from a working class family. Having just graduated from high school, they put
off growing up by spending the summer days taking high dives off a rock quarry
and wondering what perks, if any, come from turning 19. There’s Mike (Dennis
Quaid), a former quarterback who always keeps a pack of smokes in his
shirtsleeve; Moocher (Jackie Earle Haley), a bullied shrimp who’s gradually
getting more serious with his girlfriend Nancy (Amy Wright); and Cyril (Daniel
Stern in his debut film), a lanky kid who missed out on a basketball scholarship
and now must put up with the put downs of his father. Continue reading →

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THE PRODUCERS (1968)

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Jason Fraley

When you consider the career of Mel Brooks, it’s impossible not to crack a smile
just thinking of his countless contributions — comedy routines like his “10,000
Year Old Man” with Carl Reiner, television sitcoms like the James Bond spoof Get
Smart (1965) and hilarious movies like Blazing Saddles (1974), Young
Frankenstein (1974), History of the World: Part I (1981), Spaceballs (1987) and
Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993).

Yet of all these popular favorites, the only film to ever win Brooks an Oscar
was his debut effort, The Producers, earning Best Original Screenplay over
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Brooks should be proud — even a
single Oscar is better than most comedy filmmakers, as comedians are often
unfairly overlooked by The Academy. What makes the feat all the more impressive
is that Brooks is one of the few to have ever won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy and
Tony. The Producers remains a worthy heir to Ernst Lubtisch’s To Be or Not to Be
(1942), the remake of which Brooks appeared in alongside wife Anne Bancroft in
1983. And while both films follow theater productions with Nazi overtones, The
Producers offers one of the most genius movie premises in all of 20th century
entertainment. Continue reading →

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SAY ANYTHING (1989)

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Jason Fraley

For ’80s teenage girls, nothing was more iconic or more heart-melting than the
image of John Cusack standing outside his ex-lover’s window with an anguished
look on his face, hoisting a boombox over his head playing Peter Gabriel’s “In
Your Eyes.” The whole thing lasts all of 80 seconds, but it’s a scene that every
teen movie has copied since, whether it’s Ashton Kutcher singing “I’ll Be There
For You” to Amanda Peet on the guitar, or Heath Ledger singing “Can’t Take My
Eyes Off You” to Julia Styles on the high school bleachers.

While those films may lack in performance and in script, these are the exact
areas where Say Anything shines, separating itself with believable performances
by all involved and a knockout script from former Rolling Stone writer Cameron
Crowe. Shortly after writing the source novel and screenplay for Fast Times at
Ridgemont High (1982), Crowe made his directorial debut with Say Anything. The
result was a film full of warmth, charm and touching honesty, catipulting the
film to the forefront of the genre and launching Crowe to an Oscar nomination
for Jerry Maguire (1996) and an Oscar win for Almost Famous (2000).
Continue reading →

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WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1939)

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Jason Fraley

“The Greatest Actor in the World.” Such was the tag on Laurence Olivier, a man
whom English playwright Charles C. Bennett once praised for his ability to speak
the lines of Shakespeare as if he were “actually thinking them.” (A) Yes,
Olivier was the king of Britain’s National Theatre, but his transition to the
big screen was for a while a struggle.

First under contract at RKO in 1931, he was fired as Greta Garbo’s leading man
in Queen Christina (1933) before returning to England to appear in Hamlet on
stage in 1937. Two years later, he would receive his second chance at Hollywood
stardom in William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights. This was the film that finally
broke him into the business, projecting his talents to the masses worldwide. The
material appealed to his British stage sensibility, and within a year had opened
the door to similar roles, as Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (1940) and Mr. De
Winter in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940).

For a while, Wuthering Heights often ranked among the best of the best,
appearing #73 on AFI’s original Top 100 in 1997, but curiously fell off the list
during its revised list in 2007. Had Wuthering Heights originally appeared
solely as a means of getting Olivier on the list, a need satisfied by the new
list’s addition of Spartacus (1960)? Perhaps. But even if Wuthering Heights is
not AFI Top 100 material, it certainly belongs in the crust just beyond it, a
sentimental favorite and a showcase of true acting talent. Continue reading →

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DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)

Posted on January 30, 2014 by Jason Fraley

“I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn’t get the money, and I didn’t
get the woman.” Never has a line better summed up its genre than Fred
MacMurray’s classic film noir confession in Double Indemnity. The money is a
$100,000 equity on an accident insurance policy. The woman is Barbara Stanwyck’s
beautifully rotten Phyllis Dietrichson, the best example of a femme fatale
that’s ever hit the screen.

Together, these elements of greed and lust fuel a complex murder scheme that
fulfills the film’s fatalistic promise: “It’s a one-way trip and the last stop
is the cemetery.” Film historian Eddie Muller put it best, “If I had one movie
to explain to people what noir is, it’s Double Indemnity.” Continue reading →

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WHITE HEAT (1949)

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Jason Fraley

“The greatest gangster film to me is not The Godfather. It’s White Heat,”
legendary screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid) told
the American Film Institute.

White Heat remains James Cagney’s signature picture, and ironically, it was a
homecoming to the studio that made him. Warner Brothers had turned Cagney into
the archetypal movie gangster throughout the 1930s, from The Public Enemy (1931)
to Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) to The Roaring Twenties (1939), as his “you
dirty rat” persona overshadowed even Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar), Paul
Muni (Scarface) and Humphrey Bogart (The Petrified Forest).

But at the height of this gangster reputation, Cagney began seeking different
roles to prove his versatility, appearing in war films, westerns, romantic
comedies, even musicals, winning an Oscar for his fancy footwork in Yankee
Doodle Dandy (1942). After a failed attempt at launching his own movie studio,
Cagney returned to both Warner Brothers and the crime genre to deliver his
masterpiece, White Heat, a film that remains the greatest gangster picture of
Hollywood’s Golden Age. Continue reading →

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M*A*S*H (1970)

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Jason Fraley

“This isn’t a hospital, it’s an insane asylum!” Ask any TV-loving adult about
the experience of Feb. 28, 1983, and watch them fondly recount how city streets
were emptied by the 105 million people tuning in to watch the finale of M*A*S*H,
an episode that to this day remains the most-watched TV event of all time. Yet
because of the show’s own phenomenon, it’s easy to forget that M*A*S*H actually
started with Robert Altman’s 1970 movie, a film deemed strong enough to merit a
TV spinoff two years later.

The gang’s all here, from Hawkeye to Hot Lips O’Houlihan, from Trapper John to
Major Frank Burns. But before Alan Alda there was Donald Sutherland (Ordinary
People). Before Loretta Swit there was Sally Kellerman (Brewster McCloud).
Before Wayne Rogers there was Elliot Gould (Friends). And before Larry Linville
there was that king of the supporting actors, Robert Duvall (The Godfather). If
you prefer the film version, by all means keep it close to your heart as the
definitive M*A*S*H. If you prefer the TV show, tip your cap to the film that
made it all possible. Continue reading →

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LOVE STORY (1970)

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Jason Fraley

Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Is there a more famous tearjerker
line than that which Ali MacGraw says to Ryan O’Neal in quivering voice, visible
breath and tear-streaked cheeks in Love Story? The quote’s widespread popularity
is impossible to argue, recently voted the AFI’s #13 Greatest Movie Quote of All
Time, right behind “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning.”

Perhaps the better question is how many of us still believe such a thing, that
love is an excuse for unapologetic relationships, that the bond between two
people removes all necessity to admit wrongdoing. It took just two years for us
to call ourselves on the crap, taking a cue from Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up
Doc? (1972) where Barbara Streisand repeats the line to O’Neal, only for him to
look at her square in the eye and say, “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”
In this way, the quote is the epitome of Love Story itself: outdated,
melodramatic, but quintessential in the evolution of the screen romance and our
own cultural understanding of love. Continue reading →

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THE NATURAL (1984)

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Jason Fraley

Bottom of the ninth. Two outs. Two strikes. A baseball smashes through the glass
bulbs of the outfield stadium lights. A short-circuit of electricity sends a
shower of sparks pouring over the outfield grass. And Robert Redford, in slow
motion to the triumphant horns of Randy Newman’s legendary score, rounds the
bases to accept congratulations from his teammates. The iconic culmination of
The Natural made movie myth out of America’s National Pastime, a myth that would
become reality when Kirk Gibson gimped up to the plate as a pinch hitter in the
’88 World Series, belting a game-winning homer off the game’s best closer to set
up Jack Buck’s famous call: “I don’t believe what I just saw!”

Some may say the same about The Natural, that its many mythic moments and
overall story arc are too implausible of ever happening in the real world. After
all, the film begins with a teenage farm boy, Roy Hobbs (Paul Sullivan Jr.),
carving a magical bat out of wood from a lightening-struck tree, the same tree
under which his father had died, and naming the bat “Wonderboy.” From the very
beginning, the film is larger than life, but it ties in plenty of real life
echoes. As Hobbs grows into a adult (Robert Redford), he presents a familiar Ted
Williams aspiration: “When I walk down the street, people will look at me and
say, ‘There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was.'” Continue reading →

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THE PALM BEACH STORY (1942)

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Jason Fraley

If Sullivan’s Travels (1941) is Preston Sturges’ most personal work, and The
Lady Eve (1941) his most character-driven, The Palm Beach Story may be his
funniest. While Sullivan’s Travels makes the AFI’s Top 100 list, TV Guide ranks
The Palm Beach Story in its Top 50 Movies of All Time, a list where Travels is
nowhere to be seen. It also beats out Travels for a spot on the National Society
of Film Critics’ Top 100 and The Village Voice Top 100 (#59), well ahead of such
classics as Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Umbero D (1952) and Battelship Potemkin
(1925).

Named after the mischievious cat and mouse cartoon Tom & Jerry, Tom and Gerry
Jeffers (Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert) are a loving New York couple barely
making each month’s rent. Tom is an architect with a ludicrous idea for an
airport suspended above the city, but he can’t find any takers. So it’s Gerry
who decides that she will divorce Tom and take off for Palm Beach, in order to
land a wealthy new husband and send the money back to Tom to finance his
projects. Continue reading →

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PATHS OF GLORY (1957)

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Jason Fraley

“Patriotism may be old fashioned, but show me a patriot and I’ll show you an
honest man.” “Samuel Johnson had something else to say about patriotism. … He
said it was the last refuge of the scoundrels.” No matter where you fall on the
“hawk and dove” spectrum, we all can recognize that, when you’re in battle, war
is hell. We instantly recall the violent chaos and R. Lee Ermey soundbytes of
Full Metal Jacket (1987). But Jacket was really just the last in Stanley
Kubrick’s continued interest in the horrors of war, of which Paths of Glory was
his first, and arguably better, effort. And yet, Paths of Glory remains somewhat
a hidden treasure compared to Full Metal Jacket, one unknown to the general
population, but one which, when finally seen, is ranked a whopping 8.5 on IMDB,
higher than the 8.4 for Full Metal Jacket.

Such response earns Paths of Glory the title of “best war movie you haven’t
seen,” a film that became the most powerful anti-war statement since Lewis
Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), taking such battlefield
horrors and infusing the genre of court drama, an original concept well before
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), in turn becoming the most stinging indictment of
war crimes in the history of the movies. Continue reading →

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THE WAY WE WERE (1973)

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Jason Fraley

More than anything in plot, script or music, The Way We Were created such
memories due to the collaboration of three key figures: Robert Redford, Barbra
Streisand and the late Sydney Pollack. While George Roy Hill gave Redford a
career in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973), it was
Pollack who molded him into the ultimate movie hunk, forging their careers
alongside one another, from This Property is Condemned (1968) to Jeremiah
Johnson (1972) to Three Days of the Condor (1975) to Out of Africa (1985). While
Out of Africa won them Best Picture, The Way We Were remains their most enduring
romance.

As for Streisand, the film earned her first Oscar nomination outside of a
musical role (though she also sang the film’s memorable theme). As she and
Redford both went on to their own directing careers in the ’80s — Redford with
Ordinary People (1980), Streisand with Yentl (1983) — one can imagine them
looking fondly back on Pollack as their pleasant memory of a true professional,
pathos-packer. Continue reading →

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HOOSIERS (1986)

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Jason Fraley

In 2007, ESPN ran a commercial where the Boston Celtics “Big 3” of Kevin
Garnett, Ray Allen and Paul Pierce watch Hoosiers during a long road trip. At
the conclusion of the film, Garnett turns to his teammates and says, “Now that’s
a great movie,” a claim immediately echoed by head coach Jeff Van Gundy. One
problem: Van Gundy is supposed to be driving the RV, which has since begun
swurving all over the road, all because Hoosiers is so damn captivating. Though
a comic ad, the commercial reveals the deep admiration for this film throughout
the sports community.

When ESPN celebrated its 25th Anniversary in 2004, the network released two
separate lists of the greatest sports movies of all time. One was compiled by
the so-called “experts” at ESPN (the critic side of the film spectrum). The
other was compiled by ESPN’s SportsNation internet users (the public side of the
film spectrum). And guess which film finished first on both lists? Hoosiers. It
was a clean sweep for an uplifting underdog film from the same director, writer
and musical composer who brought you Rudy (1993). Continue reading →

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SOPHIE’S CHOICE (1982)

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Jason Fraley

There’s a reason Diane Keaton called Meryl Streep “my generation’s genius.”
Streep demonstrates an obsessive dedication in preparing for her roles. Her
record number of Oscar nominations can make the argument of greatest actress of
all time. And for the seminal glimpse into this level of preparation and
subsequent adulation, look no further than Sophie’s Choice, the film that won
Streep her second Oscar and provided one of her most challenging, emotionally
draining roles to date, that of a Holocaust survivor living a volatile immigrant
life while hiding the darkest of secrets.

Streep famously spent three months learning the Polish language and additional
time rehearsing a Polish accent in broken English. She also picked up some
German, and dropped off pounds by cutting her fluid intake and eating only
blended foods in order to achieve the frail look needed for her scenes in the
concentration camp. No matter how you slice it — emotional range, challenge
factor — it stands as one of the single greatest performances of all time.
Continue reading →

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WEST SIDE STORY (1961)

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Jason Fraley

“How many can I kill, Chino? How many? And still have one bullet left for me?”
By 1961, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet had been the world’s most
beloved tragic love story for nearly 400 years. Who could have guessed that with
the addition of a few switchblades, syncopated finger snaps and a catchy
songbook that an entirely new cultural landmark would be born?

This is exactly what happened with West Side Story, Arthur Laurents’ novel that
became a 1957 Broadway production, debuting at New York’s Winter Garden Theater,
before becoming a smash success of a movie that won 10 Oscars, including Best
Picture. To say that it has surpassed the pop culture impact of Romeo and Juliet
would be a leap, but it is the American Film Institute’s pick for the second
greatest movie musical of all time, behind only Singin’ in the Rain (1952).
Continue reading →

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BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991)

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Jason Fraley

Many experts have made strong cases that HBO’s The Wire (2002-2008) is arguably
the greatest television drama of all time. Indeed, you won’t find another show
that so brilliantly dissects an American city like this show did for my beloved
Baltimore. Its influence was blatantly apparent in 2013 cinema, as Stringer Bell
starred in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Wallace starred in Fruitvale Station,
Bubbles starred in The Spectacular Now and Omar starred in Twelve Years a Slave.

In fact, it was Omar himself, actor Michael K. Williams, who made this admission
during the 2014 SAG Awards: “I knew I wanted to become an actor the first time I
saw Boyz n the Hood by John Singleton. I wanted to speak to, speak for and touch
people in my community the way that movie touched me.” (A)

Boyz n the Hood is a spirited, realistic and surprisingly sentimental look at
youth growing up in a world of violence in South Central Los Angeles. Looking
back a quarter century later, the plot may feel predictable, where you can guess
which characters are going to die. But this is only because it’s been repeated
by countless imitators: Juice (1992), South Central (1992), Menace II Society
(1993), Poetic Justice (1993), Dangerous Minds (1995), Friday (1995) and the
Wayans Brothers’ spoof, Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your
Juice in the Hood (1996). In order for something to be cliche, it must have been
done time and again. Boyz n the Hood was the trend setter. Continue reading →

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DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Jason Fraley

Is it a coincidence that Barack Obama took Michelle to see Do the Right Thing on
their first movie date? Is it fate that exactly 20 years later, America swore in
its first black president? Or does the moral arc of the universe not only bend
toward justice, as Dr. King said, but also to cinematic influence?

No doubt, the entertainment industry led this shift from 1989 to 2009, with
comedians from Bill Cosby to Dave Chappelle, actors from Will Smith to Denzel
Washington, talk show hosts from Oprah Winfrey to Whoopi Goldberg, athletes from
Jerry Rice to Michael Jordan, and musicians from Michael Jackson to Tupac
Shakur. By the new millennium, the paradigm had shifted such that youngsters
only knew a world where the best rapper was white (Eminem) and the best golfer
was black (Tiger Woods). You want to achieve racial harmony? Mesh the “8 Mile”
beatbox with the “8th Hole” tee box.

But this revolutionary period did not come without the divisive turmoil of
Rodney King, the L.A. Riots, the O.J. Simpson trial, Hurricane Katrina, Reverend
Jeremiah Wright and, on New Year’s Eve 2008, halfway between President Obama’s
election and his inauguration, the shooting of Oscar Grant, which later became
the Sundance winner Fruitvale Station (2013), released the same week as the
Trayvon Martin verdict. As the dust settles from each, we’re reminded of how far
we’ve come and how far we still have to go. Surely just because we’ve elected —
and re-elected — a black president doesn’t mean racial inequality is over.
Simply look at statistics of poverty, education and incarceration. But through
each blood burning moon, we should all continue to find hope in the
extraordinary progress made thus far. Continue reading →

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MANHATTAN (1979)

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Jason Fraley

There’s a moment in Annie Hall where Woody Allen psycho-analyzes himself,
penning Annie’s criticism of Alvy: “You’re incapable of enjoying life, you know
that? I mean you’re like New York City. You’re just this person. You’re like
this island unto yourself.” Two years later, Allen’s obsession with that island
would become his most ambitious project, Manhattan, which Allen sculpts as “a
metaphor for everything wrong with our culture” and a commentary on trying to
live an ethical life while “desensitized by television, drugs, fast food chains,
loud music and feelingless, mechanical sex.”

Manhattan was Woody’s answer to the Oscar success from Annie Hall, both starring
he and Keaton, both set in his beloved New York City, both captured by legendary
cinematographer Gordon Willis, both produced by the team of Jack Rollins and
Charles H. Joffe, both featuring the same title credit font, both written by
Allen and Marshall Brickman, both featuring the same sidewalk walk-and-talk
convos, the same cultural references and the same place in film history by
teaching late 20th century audiences the joys, pains and nuances of dating in
the modern age.

There’s never been a better love note to the city, as Allen chooses to shoot in
black and white to accent Allen’s own romanticized image of it (“He idolized it
all out of proportion”). Perhaps this suggests a certain vain desire by Allen
for artistic expression in his choice of B&W film stock lined with George
Gershwin selections. But the result is a movie only Woody Allen could have done,
existing more as a witty romance than a laugh-out-loud venture like Annie Hall,
a romantic dramedy more than a romantic comedy. Continue reading →

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ANNIE HALL (1977)

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Jason Fraley

Fans of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm should thank their lucky stars every
day for Woody Allen. The phenomenon of Larry David would not have existed
without the Wood Man, who deserves full credit for making neurotic, balding,
opinionated, Jewish intellectuals cool. This was in part thanks to his real-life
fling with the gorgeous Diane Keaton and a black-rimmed persona developed in
both stand-up comedy routines and early film farces like What’s Up, Tiger Lily?
(1966), Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), Play it Again, Sam
(Herbert Ross, 1972), Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975). Who can forget
images like Woody playing a cello amid a marching band, having to pick up his
chair and move forward every few seconds? This was the zany period he later
spoofed in Stardust Memories (1980), as characters routinely came up to him and
said, “We like your movies, particularly the early, funny ones.”

Yet beneath this early incarnation laid one of cinema’s strongest auteurs just
waiting to break out. It finally did with Annie Hall, the birth of the modern
romantic comedy, the high-brow Oscar answer to the year’s blockbuster smash Star
Wars (1977), one of only a handful of comedies ever to win Best Picture. Annie
Hall is his seminal work, his apotheosis, his shift from a series of slapstick
gags to a fully realized comedy of manners. It marked his graduation into the
realm of filmmaker, boasting an unrivaled synergy between Allen the director and
Allen the screenwriter, beginning the very minute the film opens with Allen
speaking directly to the camera. Continue reading →

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SUNRISE (1927)

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Jason Fraley

Question: What was the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture?
Answer: It’s a trick question. During the first year of the Academy Awards
(1927-1928), there were actually two Best Pictures. The first, called Best
Production, went to William Wellman’s war romance Wings (1927), the film most
often credited as the first Oscar-winner. But the second Best Picture category,
Most Unique and Artistic Production, went to F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of
Two Humans in a title as poetic as the cinematic work itself. It was the first
and only time such an award was given, so it’s only fitting that it went to
Murnau’s “unique and artistic” masterpiece. It remains one of the finest love
stories ever told, a watershed moment in direction and visual effects, and the
very pinnacle of the silent era, arriving just weeks before The Jazz Singer
(1927) ushered in talking pictures.

Based on a novella by German playwright Hermann Sudermann, Sunrise was adapted
into a screenplay (or “photo-play” as it was called then) by Australian writer
Carl Mayer, who had just finished work on Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924). It
would tell the story of two lovers, the handsome Anses (George O’Brien) and his
wholesome blonde wife Indre (Janet Gaynor). Their countryside relationship soon
becomes strained by the arrival of a dark-haired temptress from the city
(Margaret Livingston), who begins a lakeside affair with Anses and suggests he
drown his wife so they can run off together to the city. Continue reading →

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AMADEUS (1984)

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Jason Fraley

When one-hit-wonder Falco topped the pop charts with “Rock Me Amadeus” in 1985,
it came just months after Milos Forman’s Amadeus won the Oscar for Best Picture.
The film — and the song — were 20th century revivals of 18th-century genius,
exploring the mind and work of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, perhaps the greatest
musical influence in the history of Western culture. When it came time for
Laurence Olivier to announce the Best Picture result, the acting legend shocked
the Academy by skipping the nominees and immediately saying, “The winner is
Amadeus.” Nothing more needed to be said.

The film dominated the night with eight Oscars, including Best Actor (F. Murray
Abraham), Director (Forman) and Screenplay (Peter Shaffer from his own play).
Even the least of movie buffs know this, thanks to Last Action Hero (1993),
where a young boy warns Arnold Schwarzenegger that Abraham can not be trusted:
“He killed Mozart! … Amadeus! It won eight Oscars!” Continue reading →

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LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (1948)

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Jason Fraley

“By the time you read this letter, I may be dead.” So begins Max Ophuls’
masterpiece Letter from an Unknown Woman, instantly gripping audiences, but not
by setting up a mystery thriller as some might guess. The letter’s recipient is
not some private eye who must keep reading to find clues to a potential murder.
Instead, it’s a suave playboy who must keep reading to see how his own selfish
actions have led to the heartache of a woman he does not even remember.

This guy is Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan), a former concert pianist in 1900
Vienna, who has developed a reputation for romancing more women than he can
count. The unknown woman, and writer of the letter, is Lisa Berndle (Joan
Fontaine), an ailing woman wanting to get a few important things off her chest.
Just as intrigued as viewers, Stefan dives into the letter over some coffee and
cognac, and the narrative shifts to Lisa’s story, signaled by a blurry flashback
and Fontaine’s narration. Continue reading →

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SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959)

Posted on January 12, 2014 by Jason Fraley

Naming the funniest film of all time is like naming your favorite sibling. While
both are in the same room. Staring right at you. Eagerly awaiting your response.
It’s just too damn hard to choose. Yet most academics, when faced with such a
question, will turn to the film that’s become the default answer: Billy Wilder’s
Some Like it Hot (1959). The film has all the ingredients to please the most
strict of judges — witty jokes coming at break-neck speed, endless comic
situations, memorable buddy comedy by Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, the iconic
gorgeousness of Marilyn Monroe, a keen director at the helm, and a real
historical importance, shattering gender barriers by introducing cross-dressing
to American film, paving the way for Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie (1982), Robin
Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and Martin Lawrence in Big Momma’s House
(2000).

Still, it’s important to point out that while the film was named the AFI’s No. 1
Comedy of All Time, it did not even place on BRAVO’s 100 Funniest Films. The
latter list appealed to a younger, more lowbrow audience, to which much of Some
Like it Hot will soar over heads. Let’s face it, we as a people have sadly grown
accustomed to comedy whacking us across the face, either with physical gags or
gross-out intentions. We have become frighteningly unable to laugh at something
this subtle, this clever, this refined. Hopefully, Wilder’s brand of comedy is
something future generations will continue to appreciate, if not doubling over
in laughter like so many have for decades. Some Like it Hot is a special little
film. The more you see it, the funnier it gets. Most comedies work the other way
around. Continue reading →

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SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957)

Posted on January 12, 2014 by Jason Fraley

When director Alexander Mackendrick came over from Scotland to do his first
American picture in 1957, he decided to break from the light, comedic expertise
he brought to films like Whiskey Galore! (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955). He
instead entered the dark world of film noir, a movement that effectively
concluded the following year with Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). The
project was Sweet Smell of Success, the first film produced by the legendary
team of James Hill, Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster (HHL) and a directorial job
that only opened up when writer/director Ernest Lehman fell ill. Mackendrick
stepped in gallantly, providing superb, atmospheric control over one of noir’s
final masterpieces, bolstered by each crack of Lehman’s hardboiled script.

Building off such films as The Front Page (1931), His Girl Friday (1940), All
About Eve (1950) and Ace in the Hole (1951), Sweet Smell of Success provides a
satirical look at celebrity culture and the writers who themselves become
celebrities simply by covering. The film explores two equally sleazy figures on
opposite ends of the spectrum: (a) the big-shot newspaper columnists who control
lives with their typewriters, and (b) the slimy press agents who dig up dirt in
the trenches of New York City’s night life, where, as critic Kim Newman put it,
“the desperate pay court to the demented and souls are sold for column inches.”
Continue reading →

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WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)

Posted on January 11, 2014 by Jason Fraley

“Truth and illusion. Who knows the difference?” So says Richard Burton’s
character in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, summing up a film that is so
thematically complex that one will likely need to see it more than once to
experience the true extent of its power. Casual viewers may have a tough time
grasping the depth that pervades the film’s every element, right down to a title
that will cause them to say, “Hey, there’s no one in this film named Virginia
Woolf…”

Such a question should force viewers to look into the meaning, but alas, most
casual viewers will not. So here’s the quick answer: The title actually comes
from a piece of graffiti that playwright Edward Albee saw on a bar mirror while
he was trying to brainstorm a title for his upcoming play. To Albee, the
graffiti was perfect, evoking the memory of famous writer Virginia Woolf, a
psychologically-complex life that ended in suicide. He combined it with the Walt
Disney song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” to create a catchy jingle that
begs the question, “Who’s afraid of living life without false illusions?” Martha
replies, “I am.” Continue reading →

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THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (1971)

Posted on January 11, 2014 by Jason Fraley

In 2007, Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show finally cracked the AFI Top
100, overcoming its initial snubbing in 1997 to finally place Bogdanovich in
that elite filmmaking class where he belongs. The film’s reception in AFI
listology mirrors its mixed initial reaction with audiences, critically
acclaimed with eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, while a turn-off
to mainstream moviegoers as old-fashioned and obsolete, as the first film to be
shot in black-and-white since the early ’60s.

Indisputable is the film’s reputation for launching the careers of unknown
actors who would go on to do big things — Jeff Bridges (The Big Lebowski),
Cybill Shepherd (Taxi Driver), Timothy Bottoms (The Man in the Iron Mask),
Cloris Leachman (The Mary Tyler Moore Show), Randy Quaid (National Lampoon’s
Vacation), Ellen Burstyn (The Exorcist), Sam Bottoms (Apocalypse Now) and Eileen
Brennan (Private Benjamin). What a lasting legacy to this superb work of art.
Continue reading →

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VACATION (1983) / CHRISTMAS VACATION (1989)

Posted on January 10, 2014 by Jason Fraley

Most comedies will never show up on serious critics’ all-time best lists with
the likes of Citizen Kane (1941), Vertigo (1958) or 8 1/2 (1963). Yet these same
films remain seen, and beloved, by the majority of the population. National
Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) are
two of those films. Perhaps comedies like this are so over the top that they’re
deemed too ridiculous to be considered in a serious assessment of cinema’s
greats. After all, there is no way that this many terrible things can occur on
one family vacation, or one family Christmas get together.

But those who assess films in this myopic way are missing out on a key
ingredient in the cinematic lexicon. You know, “fun.” If a genre film becomes a
pop sensation and remains as such over time, some level of recognition is due.
Vacation and Christmas Vacation are vulgar riots on their own — boasting the
comic genius of Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day) and John Hughes (Ferris Bueller’s
Day Off) — while their censored TV versions have played an integral part in the
family comedy experience for the last 40 years. As the original 1983 fans have
passed their admiration on to their children, it’s become an American right of
passage for families to laugh at the ultimate doomed vacationers, the Griswolds,
if only because it secretly makes their own dysfunctional family look that much
more functional. Continue reading →

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L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997)

Posted on January 4, 2014 by Jason Fraley

“Life is good in Los Angeles. It’s paradise on earth. He he he. That’s what they
tell ya anyway. Because they’re selling an image. They’re sellin’ it through
movies, radio and television. In the hit show, Badge of Honor, the L.A. cops
walk on water as they keep the city clean of crooks. Yep, you’d think this place
was the Garden of Eden. But there’s trouble in paradise. … Remember, dear
readers, you heard it here first, off the record, on the QT and very hush-hush.”

If any film ever dared the impossible task of equaling Chinatown as a complex
mystery of corruption in 20th Century Los Angeles, it was L.A. Confidential.
Perhaps this is because Confidential gets its Oscar-nominated score from Jerry
Goldsmith, who gave Chinatown so much of its atmosphere. Or, perhaps it’s
because director Curtis Hanson, former editor of Cinema magazine, had directed
his first major film, The Bedroom Window (1987), under Chinatown writer turned
executive producer Robert Towne. The influences of Chinatown are all over
Confidential — private dicks leading investigations at odds with the LAPD;
dark-clad dames offering as much danger as they do delight; and an overarching
shadow of high-end corruption, gorgeously rendered in Technicolor period
visuals.

But like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) a decade before it, L.A. Confidential
does enough to distinguish itself as its own animal, a formidable heir to the
Chinatown throne, rather than an attempt at overthrowing the king altogether.
And had it not arrived months before one of the most successful movie in
history, James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), it would have probably won the title of
Best Picture 1997, as many still believe it should have. Continue reading →

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TROUBLE IN PARADISE (1932)

Posted on January 4, 2014 by Jason Fraley

Throughout film history, few directors have earned their own phraseology, be it
“Hitchcockian” to denote Alfred Hitchcock’s penchant for character-driven
suspense, “Fellinian” to define Federico Fellini’s bizarre surrealism, or
“Capra-corn” to describe Frank Capra’s feel-good formula. Just as renowned among
critics, yet lesser known to the mainstream public, is “The Lubitsch Touch,”
classifying the genius of director Ernst Lubitsch, who single-handedly invented
the romantic comedy, first in his native Germany, then during the dawn of the
Hollywood sound era.

Legendary French director Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game) goes as far as
crediting Lubitsch with inventing modern Hollywood. (A) Equal credit belongs to
Lubitsch’s first and favorite American collaborator, writer Samson Raphaelson,
with whom he worked on nine occasions, most famously the two they adapted from
Hungarian Laszlo plays, Trouble in Paradise (1932), Lubitsch’s first in America,
and The Shop Around the Corner (1940), which would be remade by Nora Ephron as
You’ve Got Mail (1998). Continue reading →

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MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1935)

Posted on January 4, 2014 by Jason Fraley

While Errol Flynn may be considered the greatest of all high-seas swashbucklers,
Mutiny on the Bounty has led its own mutiny against him. A remake of Flynn’s In
the Wake of the Bounty two years earlier, director Frank Lloyd’s Mutiny on the
Bounty was not only more successful — the highest grossing film of 1935 at $4.5
million — it was also the first remake to win Best Picture, beating Flynn’s
famous pirate film Captain Blood. (A) Though both Blood and Bounty today carry
strong support amongst scholars, Bounty’s brutal Captain Bligh is more acclaimed
than Flynn’s Captain Blood. Likewise, Mutiny on the Bounty has assumed the role
of the quintessential high-seas adventure, arriving a full two decades before
Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny (1954).

Based on the 1932 novel The Bounty Trilogy by Charles Nordoff and James Norman
Hall, Mutiny on the Bounty follows the infamous mutiny led by Fletcher Christian
(Clark Gable) against Captain William Bligh (Charles Laughton) aboard the
British Navy Ship, the H.M.S. Bounty. The film begins with the ship’s 1787
journey from Plymouth, England, to procure breadfruit trees from Tahiti. From
the very beginning, the film builds a distinct dread for Captain Bligh, with one
man trying to run when he hears that Bligh will be the ship’s captain. Continue
reading →

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FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

Posted on January 4, 2014 by Jason Fraley

If American Graffiti invented the “teen movie” in 1973, Fast Times at Ridgemont
High brought the genre to what we recognize today, a smooth combination of
touching and hilarious, heart and belly laughs. Three decades later, it’s
amazing the range of influence that’s come from Fast Times: The Breakfast Club,
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink, Dazed and Confused, American Pie, Mean
Girls, Superbad.

Arriving the same year as Barry Levinson’s Diner and Bob Clark’s Porky’s, the
film represented a new take on the transition from carefree youth into
adulthood, documenting the fleeting wild times in between. It’s all covered here
— teenage pregnancy, cafeteria convos, after-school jobs at the local mall,
football games under Friday night lights, first cars, class clowns, pep rallies,
school dances and the ever-present allure of driving your girl up to The Point.
More than most contrived Hollywood fare, it all passes as real here, a credit to
director Amy Heckerling, who juggles multiple plotlines without a hitch and
shows the kind of comic sensibility she would later bring to Look Who’s Talking
(1989) and Clueless (1995), another high school classic in debt to Fast Times.
Continue reading →

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YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (1942)

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“It seems it always happens. Whenever we get too high-hat and too sophisticated
for flag-waving, some thug nation decides we’re a push-over all ready to be
blackjacked. And it isn’t long before we’re looking up, mighty anxiously, to be
sure the flag’s still waving over us.”

Released on Memorial Day, 1942, just months after America’s entrance into WWII,
Yankee Doodle Dandy was at once a patriotic statement, rallying cry and steady
reminder of a nation’s principles. This is precisely what Dandy did, providing
the most red, white and blue the silver screen had ever seen, topping the year’s
box office charts and winning three Oscars along the way (for the first time,
the statues were made of plaster to aid the war effort). The film ultimately
lost Best Picture to another flag-waver in Mrs. Miniver (1942), which was such a
hit that FDR ordered its closing dialogue to be printed onto leaflets and
dropped over Nazi-occupied Europe. Today, the significance of Miniver has faded,
moving from declarations as the “Greatest Movie Ever Made” to dropping off many
a best list all together. Such a fate might have been Yankee Doodle Dandy’s were
it not for a magnificent, timeless lead performance from a one-of-a-kind James
Cagney. Continue reading →

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SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Jason Fraley

There’s John Travolta, strutting down that Brooklyn street, camera starting at
his shoes and tilting up to his unbuttoned red shirt, collar sticking out over
his black leather jacket, met by a gold medalion around his neck, a dimpled
chin, horse smile and slicked hair, a rare configuration of movie heartthrob
bobbin’ to the Bee Gee’s catchy “Stayin’ Alive.”

There’s Travolta, on the wooden floor of that dance studio, layin’ down the
tango hustle with a ballet dancer, drawing her close and sending her away in
front of a wall of mirrors.

And there he is once more, in the middle of that disco crowd, tearing up the
dancefloor in those platform shoes, tight pants and Qiana shirt, knees bent,
body cocked to the side, hips thrusting and finger pointing from waist to sky in
a movement that define a generation of music and dance. “Can you dig it? I knew
that you could.” Continue reading →

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CADDYSHACK (1980)

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“He’s the Cinderella boyyy, uh, tears in his eyes I guess, as he lines up this
last shot. He’s got about 195 yards left and he’s gonna, looks like he’s got
about an eight-iron. This crowd has gone deadly silent. Cinderella story, out of
nowhere, a former greenskeeper, about to become the Masters champion. It looks
like a mirac…It’s in the hole!”

Bill Murray’s Caddyshack rant is not only one of the AFI’s Top 100 Movie Quotes,
the film itself has become an institution to anyone who came of age during its
1980 release. Each time this age group comes together to compile comedy best
lists, Caddyshack is a given, ranking #71 on the AFI Top 100 Laughs and #2 on
BRAVO’s 100 Funniest Films, behind only Animal House (1978). George Clooney goes
beyond just the comedy genre and claims it to be his own favorite movie of all
time. So what is the best way to convince today’s Happy Gilmore generation to
appreciate Caddyshack? Continue reading →

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THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955)

Posted on December 17, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Allow me to introduce a term I like to call “the disclaimer film,” invented to
classify the type of film where you need to give modern audiences a disclaimer
before they watch it. To a certain extent, many classic films require some bit
of a setup, but this is particularly so with The Night of the Hunter. For
despite its critical acclaim — a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and No. 34 on the AFI’s
100 Thrills — young viewers laughed it off the screen during a college film
course of mine, particularly at Robert Mitchum’s animated howl after a gunshot
by Lillian Gish. “Dated” and “corny” was their reaction, but there’s a
difference between actual datedness and an intentionally stylized approach from
the start.

It was the vision of one-time-only director Charles Laughton, the legendary
actor who had already won an Oscar in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933),
earned another nomination as Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and
played history’s best Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). When it
came time to make his directorial debut, he proposed “a nightmarish sort of
Mother Goose tale.” (A) Laughton wanted his film to appear exaggerated,
over-the-top and incredibly dreamlike, as if a story told through the eyes of
children. Thus, the film remains more a fable than it is a traditional work of
realism, a visual allegory for good and evil, and a world where, as the haunting
opening song suggests, “Fear is only a dream, so dream, little one, dream.”
Continue reading →

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THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES (1942)

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Is it three strikes, doc?” “It’s three strikes.” “Doc, I’ve learned one thing.
All the arguing in the world can’t change the decision of the umpire. How much
time have I got?”

That’s Gary Cooper’s Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees, using baseball
metaphor to digest his diagnosis with an unknown disease. Today we know it as
ALS — Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis — a tragic disease that atrophies muscles
until the body shuts down. It’s a disease that’s affected many, including
Stephen Hawking, but carries the name of only one. Lou Gehrig’s Disease came as
a shock to 1940s America, a different time when baseball still had a firm grip
on the title of National Pastime.

Try imagining today, a seven-time All-Star, six-time World Series Champion and
two-time MVP, struck down and deteriorating right before our very eyes. That was
Gehrig when he was diagnosed in 1939. He died two years later, and just like
that, we were robbed of one of our great heroes. But oh, the quality of time we
got to share: 37 years, 16 seasons and a then-record 2,130 consecutive games.
Continue reading →

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THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Based on Richard Condon’s best-selling novel, The Manchurian Candidate instantly
became one of the most controversial films of all time. Before its release,
Frank Sinatra had to ask President John F. Kennedy for permission to make a film
about a political assassination. When that very president was assassinated in
Dallas the following year, Sinatra pulled the film from circulation for the next
25 years, haunted at the similarities of life imitating art.

Indeed, it was a film for its time; an equal opportunity offender released
during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was both banned in the
Communist bloc for what the Soviet press called “the most vicious attempt yet
made to cash in on Soviet-American tensions,” and condemned by a branch of the
American Legion, who called it “a vivid example of an attempt to undermine
Congressional committees.” Whatever your political take, the film is so
entrancing that you will walk out with sweaty palms, a stunned face, haunted
eyes and lips barely curling to state in monotone voice, “Raymond Shaw is the
kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my
life.” Continue reading →

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MARY POPPINS (1964)

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Jason Fraley

With a name so synonomous with animation, Walt Disney rarely receives the credit
he deserves for his company’s mid-20th Century collection of live action
classics — films like Davy Crockett (1955), Old Yeller (1957), The Shaggy Dog
(1959), Swiss Family Robinson (1960), The Parent Trap (1961) and The Love Bug
(1968). These are all well known and widely beloved films, but certainly none
was better, or more successful, than Mary Poppins.

With five Oscars and a total 13 nominations, some critics, like Leonard Maltin,
go as far as calling Poppins the high point of Disney’s entire career: “If he
had made no other film in his lifetime, Mary Poppins would have earned Walt
Disney the gratitude of the world — and the envy of his Hollywood colleagues.
Instead, this was the pinnacle of an already fantastic career.” Continue reading
→

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DIE HARD (1988)

Posted on December 12, 2013 by Jason Fraley

For action movie fans, Die Hard is a sacred textbook of the best the genre has
to offer. It stands as the birth of the action film as we know it today, a
dubious title to hold, considering all the junk that’s followed. But Die Hard
did it first and did it better, a true credit to director John McTiernan, who
cut his chops on the Schwarzenegger action flick Predator (1987) and went on to
make The Hunt for Red October (1990) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1999).

Die Hard has it all — a trailer-made title, renegade cop spitting catchphrases
and taking names, a pack of killer terrorists with fingers firmly on their
triggers, dozens of hostages, a 40-floor skyscraper, SWAT teams, RVs, missles,
machine guns and “enough plastic explosives to orbit Arnold Swarzenegger.” In
2007, Entertainment Weekly voted Die Hard the greatest action movie ever made.
Continue reading →

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FULL METAL JACKET (1987)

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“How can you shoot women and children?” “Easy, you just don’t lead ’em so much.”
Few lines sum up a film better than those from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal
Jacket. It’s a stinging take on familiar territory, following a similar plot as
Sidney Furie’s The Boys in Company C (1978) and borrowing much from Kubrick’s
own work: the battle scenes of Paths of Glory (1957), the training sequence of
Spartacus (1960), the absurd war commentary of Dr. Strangelove (1964), the
evolution of man to machine of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the brainwashing
effect of A Clockwork Orange (1971) and the possessed death stare of The Shining
(1980). By the time Full Metal Jacket arrived, audiences had seen a decade of
anti-Vietnam films: Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), Hal Ashby’s Coming
Home (1978), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Oliver Stone’s
Platoon (1986). Still, Kubrick’s gem entered further into our pop culture with
each passing reference, particularly the rifle creeds, blanket parties and
night-burning fires of Sam Mendes’ Jarhead (2005). Continue reading →

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A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951)

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

That mournful cry from Marlon Brando in his soaked, torn t-shirt, standing alone
in the street, both hands on his head, wailing up to an upstairs apartment to
his abused wife, stands as one of the most iconic moments in all of movie
history. Ironically, the film A Streetcar Named Desire much more resembles a
stage production than it does a film. This is due to Tennessee Williams’
transition from playwright to screenwriter and Elia Kazan’s ongoing shift from
stage director to filmmaker. With him, Kazan brought his entire cast from the
original Broadway production, save for Tony-winning lead Jessica Tandy (The
Birds, Driving Miss Daisy), whom the studio replaced with Vivien Leigh, an
actress of bigger box office potential just a decade after playing Scarlett O in
Gone With the Wind (1939). This collection of players, both old and new, would
combine for a dazzling display of ensemble acting, making Streetcar one of the
best stage-to-film adaptations of all time with pop culture echoes for decades
to come. Continue reading →

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WITNESS (1985)

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

So many Hollywood flicks are based in New York or Los Angeles, that it feels
wonderfully refreshing when a film explores an unexplored American setting (i.e.
“Fargo”). With “Witness,” two one-time-only screenwriters, William Kelley and
Earl W. Wallace, wrote such a good script that they not only drew Harrison Ford
and Kelly McGillis to Lancaster, Pa., they walked off with Oscars in the end.

This is the true legacy of Witness, as a textbook for budding screenwriters on
how to balance atmosphere and action, story and theme, thriller and romance,
unraveling plot with complex character development. If you want to learn how to
write screenplays, check this one out, ranking No. 80 on the WGA’s Top 101
Screenplays of All Time. Continue reading →

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ENTER THE DRAGON (1973)

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“A good fight should be like a small play, but played seriously,” Bruce Lee once
said. “A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready, not thinking, yet
not dreaming, ready for whatever may come. When the opponent expands, I
contract. When he contracts, I expand. And when there is an opportunity, I do
not hit. [My fist] hits all by itself.”

Is there a performer more tied to a specific art form or athletic discipline
than Bruce Lee and martial arts? Is he not equal to Pele, Ali, Jordan, Elvis,
Mozart, Fosse, Pavarotti, Liberace, Picasso, Dickens and Houdini in this regard?
And just like Jordan, hand hanging in mid-air after hitting the game winner in
the NBA Finals, Lee’s last film was his greatest.

Enter the Dragon was billed as “the first American produced martial arts
spectacular,” introducing The States to the “chop-sockie” phenomenon that made
Lee a superstar in Hong Kong, starting at age six with The Birth of Mankind
(1946) and exploding with action hits like Fists of Fury (1971). Continue
reading →

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RAGING BULL (1980)

Posted on December 10, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Certain filmographies wouldn’t be the same if not in tandem. Capra and Stewart.
Ford and Wayne. Fellini and Mastroianni. Bergman and Von Sydow. And for 22
glorious years, Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro. Mean Streets (1973) put them
both on the map. Taxi Driver (1976) cemented them as geniuses. And GoodFellas
(1990) made them legends. But of all of the Scorsese-De Niro collaborations,
Raging Bull is, in the words of Steven Spielberg, “Marty’s masterpiece.” Not
only is it the greatest sports biopic ever made, it quite literally saved
Scorsese’s life.

In 1973, De Niro read the book Raging Bull: My Story, the autobiography of
legendary middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta, while in Sicily playing Young Vito
Corleone in The Godfather Part II (1974). (A) How fitting that when Adult Vito
later arrived in New York’s Little Italy, he was shot at the fruit market with a
sign of LaMotta in the background (talk about divine mise-en-scene). DeNiro
immediately suggested the book to Scorsese, who like LaMotta, had seen success
in his profession but was now battling personal demons. Not only was he
depressed after the flop of New York, New York (1977), starring De Niro, Liza
Minnelli and Sinatra’s legendary title song, he was also battling a cocaine
addiction that hospitalized him after a near overdose. It was at this very rock
bottom that De Niro visited him and insisted that he clean up his life and make
Raging Bull. Upon reading the book, Scorsese felt a spiritual connection to
LaMotta and decided he would make one last film. Continue reading →

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GOODFELLAS (1990)

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Jason Fraley

The gangster picture has undergone quite the transformation in its storied place
in American cinema. It was pioneered in the 1910s with Edwin S. Porter’s The
Great Train Robbery (1903) and D.W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley
(1910). It exploded in the ’30s and early ’40s, as Edward G. Robinson, James
Cagney, Paul Muni and Humphrey Bogart played rags-to-riches anti-heroes in
Little Caesar (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), Scarface: The Shame of a Nation
(1932) and High Sierra (1941). Over the next few decades, the genre turned more
violent and sexy with Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949), Joseph Lewis’ Gun Crazy
(1950) and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). By the ’70s, Francis Ford
Coppola elevated it to the high-class opera of family dynasty in The Godfather
(1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974). And by the ’80s, Brian De Palma made it
both deliciously over-the-top in Scarface (1983) and nostalgically throwback in
The Untouchables (1987).

By 1990, you may have thought the genre had been done to death, left lying in
the gutter, riddled with bullet holes. But there emerged a film that, for the
first time, let us in on the “inside baseball” of the mob, replacing operatic
styles with a focus on gritty realism. Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas was a game
changer, less a “gangster picture” and more a “how to be a gangster” picture.
Rather than merely show the gangster life, the film narrates the details
directly to the viewer, an approach adopted by countless subsequent films, from
Scorsese’s own Casino (1995) to Johnny Depp’s Blow (2001), while inspiring
arguably the greatest television show of all time in The Sopranos (1999).
Continue reading →

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TAXI DRIVER (1976)

Posted on December 8, 2013 by Jason Fraley

While Mean Streets (1973), Raging Bull (1980), GoodFellas (1990) and The
Departed (2006) all dealt with some form of institutionalized American violence
— organized by a community of mobsters and fight bookies — Martin Scrosese used
Taxi Driver to explore the opposite: the violence made possible by the lack of
community, extreme isolation and a dangerous loneliness. In this case, it’s a
1970s New York City cab driver, a man who gives rides to countless people each
night, but who remains utterly alone.

The taxi proved a career vehicle for Robert DeNiro, who was fresh off a
Supporting Actor Oscar win for The Godfather Part II (1974), the same year
Scorsese directed Ellen Burstyn to her own Oscar for Alice Doesn’t Live Here
Anymore (1974) — a follow-up to her lead role in The Exorcist (1973). And so,
three years after collaborating on Mean Streets, Scorsese and DeNiro reunited
for DeNiro’s most harrowing performance: that of alienated Vietnam veteran
Travis Bickle, whose cab meter might as well be a ticking time bomb.

In just four improvised words — “You talkin’ to me?” — DeNiro was an instant
legend, inventing a standard phrase in the English language and capturing the
feeling of isolation crucial to Scorsese’s film. As Bickle stares into his
apartment wall mirror, mumbling to himself and whipping out a newly-purchased
handgun, we get a look at just what this character has become — a lonely
creature lost in his own mind and in the claustrophobia of his own cramped
existence. Are his urban surroundings the root of the problem, or is it the
social outcast status offered to many a military vet? One thing is for certain:
Bickle is one mentally disturbed individual, and Scorsese’s two-hour
investigation into his life is one of the most fascinating, most complex
character studies ever done. Continue reading →

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MEAN STREETS (1973)

Posted on December 7, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Throughout the arc of movie history, a certain few filmmakers step in with their
own voice, telling their own personal tales, from the streets of their own
neighborhoods, and enrich the rest of our culture in the process. Martin
Scorsese’s flickering film projector is a flickering flame we long to touch,
knowing we’ll get burnt, yet one that attracts us like movie moths, eternally
mesmerized by its dancing flame.

Our fascination with film violence has never been in short supply, but without
Scorsese, we could have never truly grasped crime’s contradiction with our
better angels, the human quest for redemption in the face of immoral deeds and
the eternal struggle between faith and doubt. We would never have learned the
thrilling realization that traditional notions of plot could be cast aside in
favor of compelling character studies. The streets of New York would seem a
little darker, duller. The faces of DeNiro, Keitel and Pesci would be
non-existent. And God knows The Rolling Stones wouldn’t sound the same.

Thankfully for us, the man’s brash new voice, his gift, could no longer be
contained by the early ’70s. Cult director Roger Corman had noticed Scorsese’s
NYU student films and agreed to produce Scorsese’s B-picture Boxcar Bertha
(1972). The rest is history. Where would the movies be without Martin Scorsese?
And where would he be without Mean Streets? Continue reading →

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ALL THAT JAZZ (1979)

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“To be on the wire is life. The rest is waiting.” Until Charlie Kaufman’s
directorial debut Synecdoche, New York (2008), which Roger Ebert called the film
of the decade, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz was the only American film that even
came close to matching the brilliance of Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963). Fosse’s work
mirrors Fellini’s masterpiece in premise — a struggling director trying to make
a hit — and personal inspiration — Fellini was dealing with a crisis of
creativity, while Fosse was just off open-heart surgery. (A)

Though Fellini’s masterpiece deals with a film director and Fosse’s a stage
director, both feature the same driving force: an artist’s agonizing and
potentially fatal journey of creating a perfectionist work of art. All That Jazz
is a semi-autobiographical work for Fosse, with many of his own doubts,
struggles, fears, highs and lows played out through his lead character. Continue
reading →

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THE MALTESE FALCON (1941)

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Jason Fraley

In examining the impact of Humphrey Bogart, scholar David Thomson looks to the
French New Wave masterpiece Breathless (1959), directed by Jean-Luc Godard and
co-written by Francois Truffaut, in which lead actor Jean-Paul Belmondo first
sighs the name “Bogie.” (A) Such male fascination with Bogart is a telling time
capsule of when the nostalgic romanticization of the actor first took effect. No
doubt he was a superstar throughout the ’40s, from Casablanca (1942) to The Big
Sleep (1946). But Bogart’s claim on legendary status took hold shortly after his
death in 1957, when a whole new generation latched onto his work and has not yet
let go.

That’s because “Bogie” is everything they want to be, a figure who demonstrates
sure control and sound judgment in times of chaos, traits that would have come
in handy in their own lives during the increasingly-chaotic ’60s and ’70s. Hence
the adoration of guys like Woody Allen, who paid Bogart the ultimate respect in
Play it Again, Sam (1972), where the protagonist has Bogart for an imaginary
friend, one that gives him pointers on impressing the ladies with those classic
hardboiled lines.

Of course, all of this had an origin, a moment when a streaking Hollywood comet
could no longer be ignored, a moment that came in John Huston’s The Maltese
Falcon (1941), when Bogart was cast as Dashiell Hammett’s famous detective Sam
Spade. It’s important to remember that the source novel was written by Hammett
in 1930, at the height of the Great Depression. Two screen adaptations pre-dated
Bogie, first in 1931 with Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez, then a looser-based
version Satan Met a Lady (1936), starring Bette Davis and Warren William. But
while Huston’s Maltese Falcon lacks an originality of story, it is entirely
original in atmosphere, considered by many the birth of the film noir movement,
establishing countless archetypes from the hard-boiled detective to the femme
fatale. How fitting that the very term “noir” was coined by the same French that
first sighed, “Ah, Bogie.” Continue reading →

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ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953)

Posted on November 26, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Aside from its stunning on-location visuals, fascinating love story and sharp
William Wyler direction, Roman Holiday fills one true purpose in film history —
the film that introduced the world to Audrey Hepburn. It offered the
Belgium-born British actress her American debut, giving her the part over
Elizabeth Taylor (A Place in the Sun) and Jean Simmons (Great Expectations).
Ironically, Hepburn’s on-screen coronation into Hollywood royalty came the same
year as Queen Elizabeth II’s actual coronation, not to mention a time when the
public was fascinated with Princess Margaret’s much-publicized relationship with
commoner Peter Townsend. (E) For all this, the timing was right, and the rest,
as they say, is history. Continue reading →

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BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1961)

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Jason Fraley

On multiple debate fronts — greatest chick flicks, landmarks in fashion history,
Hollywood’s most beloved leading ladies — all discussion must pass through one
iconic actress in one equally iconic film: Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at
Tiffany’s. This is the true test of a movie classic, to be deemed important in
such a wide array of historical influence. Sure, Breakfast at Tiffany’s delves
unashamedly into melodrama and suffers from certain stereotypes and censorship
restraints of its time. But the film, drawing from a source novel by Truman
Capote, struck a chord in 1961 that hasn’t let up since.

Partial credit must be given to Capote, whose childhood became the Dill
character in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962); whose career novel became Richard
Brooks’ courtroom drama In Cold Blood (1967); and whose life became an
Oscar-winning performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote (2005). Still, you
could argue that Breakfast at Tiffany’s remains his most popular screen
adaptation. The rest of the credit belongs to the storied team of Hepburn and
costume designer Hubert de Givenchy, who also crafted her outfits in Sabrina
(1954), Funny Face (1957), Love in the Afternoon (1957), Paris – When it Sizzles
(1964) and culminating in the Best Picture winner My Fair Lady (1964). Continue
reading →

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ED WOOD (1994)

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Jason Fraley

What is Tim Burton’s definitive work? AMC Filmsite chose The Nightmare Before
Christmas (1993) for its Top 300. A former professor of mine swore by Big Fish
(2003). And the Academy has only ever nominated Burton for two Oscars, for
Corpse Bride (2005) and Frankenweenie (2013). Perhaps such varied opinions come
from the fact that most folks aren’t sure exactly what to do with Mr. Burton. Is
he a groundbreaking genius of cinematic language? Or is he just a guy with a
great imagination and a keen eye for commercial success?

I contend the answer lies in what I like to call Ed Wood Scissorhands. The two
films teamed Burton with consistent collaborators — producer Denise Di Novi,
star Johnny Depp, casting director Victoria Thomas, cinematographer Stefan
Czapsky, art department guru Tom Duffield and costume designer Colleen Atwood —
and both arrived after smash hit Batman films. It’s helpful to compare the two
as inverses of each other, as Scissorhands was a commercial approach to a
serious subject, while Ed Wood was a serious approach to a commercial subject:
the business of Hollywood. At times, Burton has mastered both realms, and it
seems historians are eagerly waiting to see which side wins out. Continue
reading →

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EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990)

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Few directors in our history, let alone the last 25 years, have such a distinct
style that you can look at any of their films and within seconds identify who
must be directing it. But after just one opening credit sequence, one Danny
Elfman musical note, one off-kilter Johnny Depp performance or one dark or
candy-colored land of imagination, and you can instantly say, “This is a Tim
Burton film.” In this way, Burton may be one of the few auteurs we have going
today (along with Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese), whose visual cues seem
backed by a consistent world view, in Burton’s case, that of the neglected
child.

Scholar David Thomson asks us to consider all the tortured childhood souls in
Burton’s pictures: his debut animated short Vincent (1982) shows the
“nightmarish inner life of an outwardly ordinary child;” Pee Wee’s Big Adventure
(1985) follows an immature man who never grew up; Beetlejuice (1988) is “a rogue
sprite, a kind of Peter Pan;” Edward Scissorhands is left incomplete by his
Inventor father figure; and Batman Returns (1992) features a Penguin who was
born so ugly, his parents sent him adrift in a basket through the sewers, a
regular “Moses in Harry Lime Land.” (A) To Thomson’s list, I will add Batman
(1989), whose hero is orphaned by the smoking gun of Nicholson’s Joker; Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory (2005), where Willy Wonka has created for himself a
children’s fantasyland; and Sweeney Todd (2007), whose title character’s rough
childhood has led to a life of London crime. Continue reading →

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PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES (1987)

Posted on November 24, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Certain movies just surprise you, not simply in terms of plot, but in their
sheer heart, their blinding truth, and how good they make you feel. Planes,
Trains and Automobiles is one of those movies. Though it does feature its own
special twist, the real surprise comes in what is left after the revelation — a
movie with more perspective on life than anything viewers have come to expect is
possible from a road trip buddy comedy of its kind. Then again, should we expect
anything less from writer/director John Hughes?

Two days before Thanksgiving, over-stressed workaholic Neal Page (Steve Martin)
tries to get from his business trip in New York City back home to Chicago so he
can be with his family for the holidays. The trip can’t start soon enough, as
Neal endures an excruciatingly slow day at the office, then loses a mad dash for
a cab to Kevin Bacon. The rest of the film is six degrees of “are we there yet?”
Continue reading →

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FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF (1986)

Posted on November 24, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Bueller?…..Bueller?…..Bueller?….Bueller?” Ben Stein’s monotone teacher, calling
roll for a title character not at his desk, is one of those instantly imitable
moments from perhaps the best-loved of all John Hughes teen comedies. Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off feels like the grand finale after Sixteen Candles (1984),
Weird Science (1985), The Breakfast Club (1985) and Pretty in Pink (1986),
marking the end of the teenage innocence before Hughes moved onto Planes, Trains
and Automobiles (1987), Christmas Vacation (1989) and Home Alone (1990). It also
stands out from the Brat Pack crowd, casting fresh faces other than Molly
Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall, with the closest thing being Emilio Estevez’s
brother, Charlie Sheen, in a bit role as a juvenile delinquent. But different is
good, earning the title of #1 Teen Movie of All Time in a 2005 ranking by Empire
magazine. Continue reading →

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THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985)

Posted on November 24, 2013 by Jason Fraley

When it came to cranking out instant classics on the teenage scene, nobody did
it better than John Hughes. In just 25 months between the summers of ’84 and
’86, Hughes wrote and directed an unrivaled string of teen movies — Sixteen
Candles (1984), Weird Science (1985), The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off (1986), not to mention writing Pretty in Pink (1986) for
director Howard Deutch. Together, these films both captured and defined what it
meant to be a youth in the 1980s. Invariably, everyone has a different personal
favorite (mine is Ferris Bueller), but looking back a quarter-century later, the
most important may just be The Breakfast Club.

Recently voted by Entertainment Weekly as the #1 Greatest High School Movie of
All Time, The Breakfast Club explores a theme of popularity divides that rings
all the more true in today’s Mean Girls world of cyber bullying. It does so with
a simple, yet effective premise where five teenagers, each of a different social
stereotype, must share a room for Saturday detention and spend time with peers
they otherwise never would. Continue reading →

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MEMENTO (2000)

Posted on November 24, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Memory is unreliable. Memory’s not perfect. It’s not even that good. Ask the
police. Eye-witness testimony is unreliable. Cops don’t catch a killer by
sitting around remembering stuff. They collect facts, make notes and draw
conclusions. Facts, not memories. That’s how you investigate. Look, memory can
change the shape of a room, it can change the color of a car. And memories can
be distorted. They’re just an interpretation; they’re not a record. And they’re
irrelevant if you have the facts.”

There’s a point in Memento where the lead character asks his wife why she enjoys
reading a particular novel more than once. “I always thought the pleasure of a
book was wanting to know what happens next,” he says. Such is the very secret of
Christopher Nolan’s master puzzle of a film, its ability to have us guessing
what’s coming next narratively while already knowing what’s coming
chronologically. We are kept simultaneously informed and uninformed, at the
mercy of a film that moves largely in reverse order, drawing suspense out of
discovering the truth of the past, rather than revelations of the future.
Continue reading →

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THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946)

Posted on November 23, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Every Thanksgiving night, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) airs on
national television, deserving a place in our hearts as an American classic.
Ironically, far fewer people have seen the movie that beat it for Best Picture,
The Best Years of Our Lives. This fact would sadden the film’s sole producer,
Samuel Goldwyn, who said, “I don’t care if it doesn’t make a nickel. I just want
every man, woman and child in America to see it.”

Indeed, it was crucial for a nation to collectively watch this 1946 post-war
epic after the shared experience of returning from World War II, as the
flickering light of a film projector helped Americans work through their fears,
memories and permanent life changes. It could provide the same therapy for
today’s veterans — if more people knew about it.

So to borrow a phrase from today’s kiddies, Goldwyn was a “G.” In fact, he was
the “G” in MGM, and Best Years was his last with director William Wyler
(Ben-Hur, Roman Holiday), who often fought with him over whose name would be
placed higher on the billing. It was also their most successful together,
winning seven Oscars, including Best Director for Wyler and Best Picture for
Goldwyn, who that same year accepted the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award, which
Wyler would himself win 20 years later. Continue reading →

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DELIVERANCE (1972)

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Deliverance is a film that punches you in the gut early and doesn’t let the
feeling go away. It’s the kind of movie that makes you want to take a shower
afterward — unless you’re watching it as a Psycho double feature. Indeed, the
cultural reaction to Deliverance in the early ’70s was similar to the reaction
to Psycho in the early ’60s, only this time our squeamishness stemmed from a
horrific “squeal like a pig” sodomy rape scene that, along with the film’s
“Dueling Banjos” theme, entered straight into pop culture lore.

Yet for all the film’s cultural impact, I’ve showed it to younger folks who left
scratching their heads. How can ’70s viewers deem it a masterpiece by British
director John Boorman, while younger viewers deem it simply a “bore man?” This
reaction only proves the point that most modern adventure films lack Boorman’s
level of theme and craftsmanship. When you get down to it, Deliverance is really
an art film disguised as an adventure flick. So for those who remember
Deliverance as that cheap river movie with the weird redneck rape scene, look
again. You’ll come to realize — from the opening voiceover to the final shot —
that you missed a much more involved film than you first thought, a film that
carries a depth of theme to match its pop culture reputation. Continue reading →

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MILDRED PIERCE (1945)

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Everybody has a mother.” Unfortunately for Joan Crawford, her most memorable
image is now one that surfaced after her death, one played by Faye Dunaway in
the biopic Mommie Dearest (1981). Based on the best-selling memoirs of
Crawford’s adopted daughter, Christina, the film painted her mother as an
abusive monster and soiled the reputation of one the legends of Hollywood’s
Golden Age. Film buffs know Dunaway’s chilling role all too well, screaming “No
wire hangers!” as one of the AFI’s 50 Greatest Villains.

These revelations, however accurate or exaggerated, only underscore the motherly
obsession that Crawford brought to her career role in Mildred Pierce, playing a
woman who will do anything for her children, perhaps even murder, in Michael
Curtiz’s noir classic. Continue reading →

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THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (1972)

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Jason Fraley

It’s safe to say that Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is
unlike any other film I’ve seen. Plotless, surreal and quite funny, the film
ignores the bounds of a traditional narrative. If you thought “French cinema”
was too highbrow or pretentious, pop this one in and watch Bunuel take his own
culture down a peg. Except, Bunuel does so in a way that also champions his
brand of intelligent French filmmaking. The characters and tone may mock the
culture, but the form exemplifies it.

Financially, it was Bunuel’s most successful. Critically, it won the Oscar for
Best Foreign Language Film, as well as Best Film and Best Director by the
National Society of Film Critics — a major feat in the year of Coppola’s The
Godfather (1972). Continue reading →

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ROME, OPEN CITY (1945)

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Jason Fraley

How can I take a negative and turn it into a positive? That’s the question that
faced Roberto Rossellini in 1945 when he set out to make the anti-Fascist,
anti-Nazi, pro-resistance film Rome, Open City. At the time, the titular city
was still occupied by the Germans, who would certainly not approve of such a
film. Even more problematic, raw film stock was scarce, actors were hard to
find, money for building sets was almost non-existent and a polished product was
impossible without controlled studio lighting. So, Rossellini did what any
innovative filmmaker would do – he started a movement.

Italian Neorealism was founded on the ideal of urgent authenticity, taking a
mobile camera out into the streets, trading phony sets for actual locations,
making the most of natural lighting and casting real-life laborers instead of
professional actors. The result was an entirely fresh filmmaking style that
would later evolve into the Dogme 95 and cinema verite styles. Adding to the
authenticity was the constant threat of German oppression. For this, the “making
of” Rome, Open City became the stuff of movie legend, with Rossellini and crew
hiding cameras and shooting their film undercover. Continue reading →

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THE CROWD (1928)

Posted on November 16, 2013 by Jason Fraley

After directing the highest grossing silent movie ever in The Big Parade (1925),
King Vidor inked a long-term deal with MGM, where producer Irving Thalberg
allowed him enormous artistic freedom for his next project. According to Vidor’s
1954 autobiography, Thalberg came to him asking what his big follow-up would be,
and Vidor described a film about the common struggles of an ordinary man.
Thalberg asked, “Well, what are you going to try next? It’s going to be hard to
top The Big Parade.” Vidor replied, “Well, I suppose the average fellow walks
through life and sees quite a lot of drama taking place around him. Objectively,
life is like a battle isn’t it?”

Originally titled One of the Mob, the project eventually became The Crowd, a
film detailing the lost promise of the American Dream that so many face, often
in urban dwellings. In this atmosphere, it’s not man vs. nature, but man vs.
man-made circumstances, both socially — with limited class mobility — and
physically — trapped in the proverbial “concrete jungle.” It was his most
personal work, far less successful at the box office, but far more renowned by
academics decades later. Thus, The Crowd stands as the art masterpiece that got
its chance off the success of The Big Parade blockbuster, the expression of the
one after the cheers of the mob, epitomizing the very notion of The Film
Spectrum. Continue reading →

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THE BIG PARADE (1925)

Posted on November 16, 2013 by Jason Fraley

The debate over history’s greatest silent film no doubt includes Griffith’s
Intolerance (1915), Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Keaton’s The
General (1927), Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) and Chaplin’s
City Lights (1931). But in sheer box office dollars, King Vidor reigns supreme
with The Big Parade, the highest grossing silent movie ever at $22 million, the
equivalent of $285 million today.

It was this success that enabled Vidor’s most personal work, The Crowd, which
remains his undisputed masterpiece. The two are tied together in movie history,
the art film that got its chance off the success of the blockbuster, both filmed
at MGM under the flexibility of producer Irving Thalberg, edited by Hugh Wynn,
starring young leading men who tragically died within the next decade, and
directed by the man who fittingly went by the name “King.” Continue reading →

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HANNAH AND HER SISTERS (1986)

Posted on November 10, 2013 by Jason Fraley

There’s a scene in Manhattan (1979) where Woody Allen’s character is embarrassed
by a tell-all book by his ex-wife (Meryl Streep), detailing all his personal
flaws. Since Allen was also the film’s writer, these critiques serve as Allen’s
own honest admissions of his real-life insecurities, including, “In his most
private moments, he spoke of his fear of death, which he elevated to tragic
heights.”

It’s this idea that is expanded upon in Hannah and Her Sisters, as Allen focuses
on his own existential crisis, a personal battle with the meaning of life and
the prospect of death, and how our many relationships with others help to shape
the time we are here. As such, Hannah and Her Sisters may simultaneously be the
most profound and bare-boned of all of Allen’s films, taking the many themes he
had built up to that point in his career and combining them in blatant
self-expression in a 1986 Best Picture nominee that Roger Ebert called “the best
movie [Woody Allen] has ever made.” Continue reading →

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MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946)

Posted on November 10, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“That’s a sucker game, Doc. There’s probably 50 fellas around town just waitin’
to see you get liquored up so they can fill you full of holes, build themselves
up a great reputation: the man that killed Doc Holliday.” Is there a more famous
story of the Old West than that of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and their famous
showdown with the Clanton Gang at the O.K. Corral?

It’s a story that’s graced Hollywood screens too many times to count, be it Burt
Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), James Garner
and Jason Robards in Hour of the Gun (1967), Harris Yulin and Stacy Keach in Doc
(1971), Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer in Tombstone (1993) or Kevin Costner and
Dennis Quaid in Wyatt Earp (1994). But ask any film historian to name the
definitive version of the story and you will get a resounding cheer for Henry
Fonda and Victor Mature in My Darling Clementine, which Roger Ebert called “John
Ford’s greatest western.” I personally think that’s an overstatement,
considering the brilliance of Stagecoach (1939), The Searchers (1956) and The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). But fourth place in that wild bunch isn’t
bad. Continue reading →

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WRITTEN ON THE WIND (1956)

Posted on November 10, 2013 by Jason Fraley

When Douglas Sirk introduced his brand of “women’s weepies” in the ’50s, they
were instantly regarded as trash, by critics and audiences alike. It wasn’t
until the early ’70s that his work was rediscovered at various film festivals,
and it wasn’t long until academics were citing his films as overlooked works of
lyrical genius. Like Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), Sirk’s work was
expressionistic, stylized, surreal. With such words, an instant red flag should
jump up, warning that only a select group of viewers will enjoy this film. Many
will find it corny, even laughable to a degree. But for each of these, there is
a film professor somewhere, pleading audiences to give Sirk his due.

Along with Max Ophuls (Letter from an Unknown Woman), Sirk deserves full credit
for pioneering melodrama and inventing the modern soap opera, through a string
of films like All I Desire (1953), Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven
Allows (1955), The Tarnished Angels (1957) and Imitation of Life (1959). Of all
his work, I keep coming back to Written on the Wind. If you look closer at the
lurid melodrama, you’ll find some real, serious filmmaking going on between the
lines. Continue reading →

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THE GOLD DIGGERS TRILOGY (1933)

Posted on November 9, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Money? You? Say, with all the hits you’ve had, you oughta be worth plenty.”
“Yeah, I oughta be, but I’m not. Did you ever hear of Wall Street?” Six years
into the era of talking pictures, the cold front of the Great Depression had
swept all the way from Wall Street to Hollywood, with several studios teetering
on the verge of bankruptcy. While King Kong (1933) proved the savior of RKO
Pictures, Warner Bros. climbed out of financial ruin with a most unique creative
process that produced the first landmark moment in the timeline of movie
musicals.

Mervyn LeRoy, future studio head of MGM, was then a hot director for the
Warners, helming such hits as Little Caesar (1930) and I’m a Fugitive from a
Chain Gang (1932), when he developed the idea of a grand backstage musical, but
upon falling ill, he would have to defer the project to fellow contract director
Lloyd Bacon. That project was 42nd Street, such a huge spring success for Warner
Bros. that the studio would rush to release two more by the fall, Gold Diggers
of 1933, directed by LeRoy, and Bacon’s own follow-up Footlight Parade, forming
the so-called Gold Diggers Trilogy. Continue reading →

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MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another,”
Roger Ebert wrote. “But only one can be called perfect, and that’s McCabe and
Mrs. Miller.” In today’s aftermath of Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), the
anti-western seems very much like a familiar friend. But imagine the freshness,
the jolt, when Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller pioneered the idea 21
years earlier. This was the real west, with the myth stripped away. Gone was the
moral John Wayne figure set against the spread of impressive frontier
formations. In its place was a dreary world, full of wet browns and greens,
gritty, dirty and covered in snow. Gone also was the adventure subject matter of
Cowboys and Indians, and in its place stood a tale of greed and prostitution.
Continue reading →

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PSYCHO (1960)

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Jason Fraley

If you live long enough, you hope to have that rare experience of sitting in a
theater when a movie comes along that changes everything. This may happen once
or twice in a lifetime, if you’re lucky. After all, you never know when such a
zeitgeist is going to strike. So wouldn’t I give anything to have been sitting
there during that initial screening of Psycho. To stand in the long lines
outside New York’s Radio City Music Hall, anticipating the new film from
Hollywood’s most famous director and one of television’s most famous
personalities. To see advertisements of Alfred Hitchcock forbidding us to arrive
after the film’s start (a historical first), locking the doors after the
projector rolled, and begging us not to share the film’s secret afterwards (a
virtual impossibility in today’s internet age).

What I wouldn’t give to have been sitting there, watching one of Hollywood’s
sexiest leading ladies, Janet Leigh, derobe and step into that shower. To share
in her naivety as to how culturally significant that shower was about to become.
To hold my breath as a shadowy figure approached that shower curtain. And to
scream as those shower rings ripped open and a knife blade chopped to Bernard
Herrmann’s screeching strings! Continue reading →

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THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO (1985)

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Woody Allen remains the most prolific writer/director of the last 30 years. When
scholars sit down to examine his work, they cannot single out any one
masterpiece. I dare you to choose between ’70s classics like Sleeper (1973),
Annie Hall (1977) or Manhattan (1979); ’80s masterpieces like Hannah and Her
Sisters (1986), Radio Days (1987) and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989); ’90s gems
like Bullets Over Broadway (1994) and Deconstructing Harry (1997); and new
millennium hits like Match Point (2005), Midnight in Paris (2011) and Blue
Jasmine (2013).

Yet of all his masterworks, Allen claims his own personal favorite is The Purple
Rose of Cairo, probably because it represents everything he loves about the
movies to begin with, the power of this “world of celluloid and flickering
shadows” to give a necessary escape from the harshness of the real world.
Because, after all, Allen is first and foremost a movie lover, finding his
ultimate expression of that love here in this underrated gem. Continue reading →

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TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944)

Posted on October 27, 2013 by Jason Fraley

The story behind To Have and Have Not — the legendary first pairing of on- and
off-screen lovers Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall — is one of those stories
that’s been told so many times, who cares how much of it is actually true? As
the story goes, the whole thing began as a bet between two of history’s finest
storytellers — director Howard Hawks and author Ernest Hemingway. Hawks says he
bet his good friend Hemingway that he could make a successful picture out of his
worst novel, 1937’s To Have and Have Not, which Hawks called a “piece of junk.”
(A) Hawks felt the story about a boat captain smuggling goods between Cuba and
Florida would be — aw, hell, it’s best to just let Hawks tell it:

“We were fishing and I said, ‘Ernest, why don’t you do some stories with me?’ He
said, ‘Oh, I’m good at what I’m doing. I don’t want to go to Hollywood.’ I said,
‘You don’t have to go to Hollywood. We’ll go fishing and write a story while
we’re fishing. Look, I can make a picture out of your worst story.’ He said,
‘What’s my worst story?’ I said, ‘That piece of junk called To Have and Have
Not.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I need some money. … But you can’t make a picture out of
that.’ And for about ten days while we were fishing we sat around and talked,
and we decided that the story was no good but the characters of the girl and
Morgan … were good, and we started to think about how they met. So I went back
and I bought the story for $80,000, and he got $10,000. I did awfully good by
the making of the thing; I made close to a million. When I told him how much I
got paid, he wouldn’t talk to me for six months.” Continue reading →

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STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984)

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Jason Fraley

After John Cassavetes invented modern independent cinema in late the ’60s, there
was no more important figure in the movement’s growth than Jim Jarmusch, a
pioneer who rose to cult fame during the ’80s and the infancy of Sundance.
Jarmusch got his start as an assistant under the invaluable mentors Nicholas Ray
and Wim Wenders, at which point he decided to forgo his NYU film school
graduation and put the rest of his scholarship money toward his first film,
Permanent Vaction (1980). With great reviews, Jarmusch went onto his next
project, taking leftover stock footage from Wenders’ Der Stand der Dinge (1982)
and creating his own 30-minute short subject film, Stranger Than Paradise.

When the film hit the festival circuit, including the 1983 International Film
Festival Rotterdam, Jarmusch used its warm reception to raise money to turn it
into a full-length feature. The result was a piece of film history, playing at
the first annual Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize but
lost the Grand Jury Prize to the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984). Jarmusch
got a measure of retribution at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, where Paradise
won the Camera D’Or on the same night his mentor, Wenders, won the top prize,
the Golden Palm, for Paris, Texas (1984). For the rest of the ’80s, there were
few more internationally renowned “art” filmmakers than Wenders and Jarmusch.
Continue reading →

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CHINATOWN (1974)

Posted on September 2, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“In the middle of a drought and the water commissioner drowns! Only in L.A.”
Movies don’t get much better, or better written, than Chinatown. Roman
Polanski’s masterpiece joined Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) in
reviving the Hollywood detective story for the next 25 years, bringing films
like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), Dick Tracy (1990), L.A. Confidential
(1997) and the Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes (1990).

This “neo noir” trend resurrected a genre that was left for dead after a stretch
from 1941-1958, bringing us masterpieces like The Maltese Falcon, Double
Indemnity, Laura, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past and Touch of Evil. Back were
the the private dicks, femme fatales, venetian blinds and smoky silhouettes, but
they were now infused with a modern style reflecting the corruption of the
modern age.

If you like happy endings where the good guys triumph and the bad guys get their
comeuppance, don’t enter Chinatown. But if you like the hand of fate leading
twisted folks to tragic conclusions, Chinatown will snip your nose and wash you
away. The film dominated the Golden Globes, winning Best Picture, Actor (Jack
Nicholson), Director (Polanski) and Screenplay (Robert Towne), and it would have
repeated at the Oscars if it weren’t for The Godfather: Part II (1974). Instead,
the film’s only Oscar went to Towne’s script, which peels back its layers like a
ripe onion voted the AFI’s No. 2 Mystery of All Time, behind only Vertigo
(1958). Continue reading →

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THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001)

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Jason Fraley

In 1994, two students at the University of Texas at Austin got together and
wrote a script. The students? Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson. The film? Bottle
Rocket, a 13-minute comedy short, starring first-time actors Wilson (Wedding
Crashers) and his younger brother Luke (Old School). The young filmmakers sent
the film to a family friend, screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson, who forwarded it to
producer Polly Platt, who forwarded it to James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment),
who offered them $5 million to turn it into a feature film. It was released by
Columbia Pictures in 1996, recasting the Wilson brothers and scoring a casting
coup with James Caan. Though a film with “rookie” written all over it, Bottle
Rocket was their foot in the door, a foot we all owe a great deal, because it
opened the door to these guys’ next two films, Rushmore and The Royal
Tenenbaums, two masterpieces of modern cinema.

The quirky dramedies are both directed by Anderson, written by Anderson and
Wilson, produced by Barry Mendel for American Empirical and Touchstone and
feature music by Mark Mothersbaugh, photography by Robert D. Yeoman and
performances by several repeat cast members, most notably Bill Murray. Continue
reading →

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THE HUSTLER (1961)

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Jason Fraley

There’s something almost lyrical in the whole concept of pool: that crack of a
clean break, balls clanking into the pockets and rumbling down the return
chutes, the smell of chalk wafting into a cloud of smoke, rising above the
low-hanging table lamps, a pile of cigarette butts collecting at the feet of an
eager watcher with money on the line, and two tested sharks, with oil in their
arms and nerves in their cues, matching eachother ball for ball, straddling that
thin line between winner and loser, greatness and goat, the poolhall as both a
quiet sanctuary and a gambler’s morgue where “those tables are the slabs they
lay the stiffs on.” Director Robert Rossen had always liked the game as dramatic
material, penning the play Corner Pocket. But when Walter Tevis published his
novel The Hustler 20 years later, Rossen bought it right up and took it to Fox,
where a young Paul Newman got his breakthrough in the type of role that used to
go to Brando, the type that would have gone to James Dean if he were still
living then, the role of a self-destructive, anti-hero pool hustler, “Fast”
Eddie Felson. Continue reading →

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SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952)

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Now you could study Shakespeare and be quite elite / And you can charm the
critics and have nothin’ to eat / Just slip on a banana peel, the world’s at
your feet / Make ’em laugh, Make ’em laugh, Make ’em laugh!”

These lyrics prove exactly why Singin’ in the Rain is one of the most revered
movies of all time – across both sides of the film spectrum. It at once charms
the most elite critics, voted No. 20 all-time on the Sight & Sound critics poll
and the AFI’s #1 Greatest Movie Musical of All-Time, while equally entertaining
the masses, voted No. 85 on the IMDB Top 250. You don’t know how many times I’ve
heard colleagues say, “I can’t stand musicals, but you know, that Singin’ in the
Rain is alright.” Imagine what those of us who love musicals think. Continue
reading →

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IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967)

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“They call me MISTER Tibbs!” With those five words, Sidney Poitier shook up the
world, creating a watershed moment in racial commentary and showing just how
powerful an impact that film could have on society, and vice versa. You know a
film is cutting edge when its setting (Sparta, Mississippi) had to be shot
further north (Sparta, Illinois) because its themes made it too dangerous to
actually shoot in the Deep South.

Released during the height of the Civil Rights Movement — just two years after
the Watts Riots and the murder of Malcom X, and only a year prior to the
assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy — In the Heat of
the Night addressed the racial tensions that were already boiling over in a
divided United States, and it did so with a simple premise — place two men
together, one black and one white, and let them overcome their prejudices while
striving for a common goal. Continue reading →

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APOLLO 13 (1995)

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“This could be the worst disaster NASA’s ever experienced.” “With all due
respect, sir, I believe this is going to be our finest hour.” Is Apollo 13 the
best movie on space ever done? Fans of Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983)
would disagree, citing that film’s heavy influences on Ron Howard’s film. The
earth-based bios of real-life astronauts. The triumphant runway walk in space
suits. A mission made possible (in vastly different ways) by Alan Shepard. The
awe-inspiring shots of breaking into space. Ed Harris. If any film were to
deserve a spot as a runner-up — a nice, shorter, less epic, more entertaining
runner-up — Apollo 13 is that film. Like Titanic (1997) and United 93 (2006)
after it, the film succeeds in pulling drama from story where we already know
the ending. And as inspirational as it is seeing such an on-screen display of
human will and ingenuity, it’s all that much more inspiring knowing that the
“successful failure” of Apollo 13 actually happened. It’s in this vein of
emotional effect that Apollo 13 succeeds most, placing #12 on AFI’s 100 Most
Inspirational Films, a list where its father film, The Right Stuff, came in at
#19. Continue reading →

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ANIMAL HOUSE (1978)

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“OK, don’t write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find
Milton,” says Donald Sutherland’s Prof. Jennings while teaching poet John Milton
to his class. “He’s a little bit long-winded, he doesn’t translate very well
into our generation and his jokes are terrible.”

Roughly the same thing could be said for many classic comedies, today’s youth
finding them slow, unfunny and out of touch with their current generation.
Thankfully, the exact opposite is true for Animal House, a comedy that remains
as funny and relevant today as it was in 1978. Even in the 21st century, one can
take a tour of any college and still find Animal House DVDs on the dorm shelves,
John Belushi posters on the apartment walls and “C-O-L-L-E-G-E” sweatshirts
parading around campus.

This kind of lasting appeal is largely because the film presents a timeless
subject, in that as long as there is college, there will always be frat parties.
And no party will ever compare to those thrown by the fictional Faber College’s
1962 Delta fraternity in John Landis’ beloved comedy. Continue reading →

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A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974)

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Jason Fraley

In 1996, the staff of Filmmaker Magazine got together to vote on the Most
Important Independent Films in history, of which there could only be one most
important. No doubt the list-topper would require several criteria to take the
title. It would have to be pioneering, influencing every aspect of the modern
independent movement. It would have to be unconventional, using film techniques
that break all the standard rules of Hollywood studio filmmaking. And it would
have to have a sexy financing story, using shoe-string means of funding and the
distribution. Considering all this, it seems Filmmaker Magazine got it right.
John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence deserves its spot atop that list.

In terms of influence, the film helped inspire the so-called “Dogme 95”
movement. It’s an ideology that argues for a more authentic form of filmmaking,
claiming that “new video technology will democratize the filmmaking process and
deliver the masses from their oppression by evil, formulaic, speical
effects-laden studio fare.” Subscribers adhere to a “Vow of Chastity,” which
includes such commandments as “The camera must be handheld” and “The film must
not contain superficial action (murders, weapons, etc.).” (A) In other words,
every part of the filmmaking process — the tools, the techniques, the story —
should be organic and true to life. In this very way, Cassavetes turned the role
of storytelling on its head, and thus redefined the rules of “acceptable”
filmmaking. Continue reading →

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A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935)

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Jason Fraley

On most every best list, the default Marx Brothers selection is Duck Soup
(1933). And rightfully so; it’s hands down their funniest film. So when the AFI
named its Top 100 Films of All Time in 1997, Duck Soup was an obvious shoe-in.
Then, in 2007, when it came time for a 10th Anniversary List, the AFI again
tapped Duck Soup for the list, only now there was an exciting new addition, yet
another Marx Brothers film, the always entertaining and yet odd pairing of music
and madcap, A Night at the Opera.

Made just two years after Duck Soup, it came at a rough time for the Marx Bros.
Duck Soup had just flopped at the box office and, as a result, Paramount had
just terminated their contract. On top of that, the fourth Marx Brother and
youngest of the bunch, Zeppo, was out of the gang, leaving just Groucho, Harpo
and Chico, which was OK by practically everyone. Enter producer Irving Thalberg,
who approached Groucho with the idea of switching to MGM, telling him, “I can
make a film with you that would have half as many laughs as your Paramount
films, but they will be more effective because the audience will be in sympathy
with you.” (A) And so A Night at the Opera was born, a comeback of sorts for
history’s most talented group of comedians. Continue reading →

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MY FAIR LADY (1964)

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Jason Fraley

In the decade between 1958 and 1968, five of the Academy Award winners for Best
Picture were musicals, including Gigi (1958), West Side Story (1961), The Sound
of Music (1965) and Oliver! (1968), a feat that will likely never happen again.
This should give some indication as to the mindset of Jack L. Warner when he
paid $5.5 million for the rights to My Fair Lady (A), material that had helped
George Bernard Shaw become history’s only Nobel and Oscar winner, with the 1913
play and 1938 film Pygmalion, and that had been successfully adapted into a
Tony-winning Broadway production in 1956. Producing the first movie musical
version of the tale, Warner full expected to be next in line for the honors when
the Academy showered his film with eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best
Director (George Cukor). Continue reading →

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A STAR IS BORN (1954)

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Jason Fraley

I’ve always felt one of the great ironies in all of movie buff-dom was the fact
that Judy Garland’s comeback came in A Star is Born. As we all know, her star
had been born a full 15 years earlier with a pair of 1939 MGM hits, iconically
as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and across screen from favorite collaborator
Mickey Rooney in Busby Berkley’s Babes in Arms. The irony thickens when you
consider that such a comeback, featuring Garland’s greatest performance and one
where she grasps an Oscar statuette mid-way through the picture, did not nab
Garland the award in real life.

Historians write of her devastation at having lost to Grace Kelly for The
Country Girl (1954), ending her last best chance at an Oscar — she was later
nominated for Judgement at Nuremburg (1961), but the performance was hardly
worthy. Tragically fitting, Garland’s life only last 15 years after A Star is
Born, stamping the film as the midway point of a 30 year career that ended in
showing off that powerful voice of hers in concert halls across the country. Not
far off from the final scene of A Star is Born, Garland stepping out on stage
for a benefit concert, and famously addressing the audience: “Hello, everybody.
This is Mrs. Norman Maine.” Continue reading →

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THE LITTLE TRAMP (1914-1936)

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Legendary figures make for legendary trivia. And my favorite of all movie
anecdotes will always be this: Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin
lookalike contest…and finished third. Not only is that great irony, but it’s a
tribute to Chaplin’s iconic status. His “Little Tramp” creation, complete with
bowler hat, cane and toothbrush mustache, was so well-known that countless
people worldwide could do dead-on imitations. Even today, the character remains
our most famous fictional human figure, and its most cherished silhoutte. Can
you imagine a modern comedian, say, Will Ferrell, being so recognizable a
century from now? No way. But that is exactly what Chaplin did. His comic
ingenuity made his screen persona universally recognizable some 95 years after
its creation. Continue reading →

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PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953)

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“It’s been said that if you don’t like the Rolling Stones, then you just don’t
like rock and roll. By the same token, I think that if you don’t like the films
of Sam Fuller, then you just don’t like cinema. Or at least you don’t understand
it.” So says Martin Scorsese, a filmmaker profoundly and admittedly influenced
by Fuller since he first experienced his work at age seven. The in-your-face
violence told with equally violent camera movements has become a renowned staple
of the Scorsese style, but Scorsese will be the first to acknowledge Fuller as
the patriarch of such an approach. Only recently has Fuller begun to receive the
kind of adulation he deserves, yet still not enough due to the B-picture mask of
his movies. Throughout his impressively authentic body of work, one masterpiece
stands out above the rest: Pickup on South Street. Continue reading →

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BLAZING SADDLES (1974)

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Jason Fraley

On the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Films: 10th Anniversary broadcast, Mel Brooks was
asked to discuss the Marx Brothers, and he deservedly praised them as his idols.
“They were genius,” Brooks says. “I’m honored to be someone in their shadow.” No
doubt this was a heartfelt statement, but one can still detect an air of
disappointment that this shadow looms so large. Not one of Brooks’ comedy
classics made the same list. This is a listology travesty, to have a list of 100
American films without even one by Mel Brooks, who owned three of the Top 13 in
AFI’s 100 Laughs. Perhaps this is why he was awarded the 2013 AFI Lifetime
Achievement Award: to set the record straight.

Indeed, comedies unfairly struggle in such discussions of history’s greatest
films. Due to varying comedic tastes and differing funny bones, it’s hard for
people to agree on the greatness of a comedy, even near impossible to get one
voted out of the 7-range on IMDB. Still, when the conversation narrows
specifically to the realm of comedy, Brooks is a given, and Blazing Saddles is
often the standard bearer. The film makes lists compiled by both high-brow (#6
on AFI’s 100 Laughs) and low-brow (#9 BRAVO’s 100 Funniest Movies). Can you
imagine a comedy world without the contribution of Blazing Saddles? Continue
reading →

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OUT OF THE PAST (1947)

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Is there a way to win?” “There’s a way to lose more slowly.” Chock-full of such
lines, Out of the Past is a perfect example of fatalism, the idea that death is
inevitable and that all one can hope for is to delay it as long as possible. As
star Robert Mitchum says, “If I have to [die], I’m gonna die last.” This tone
makes Out of the Past the epitome of film noir, and a must-see for viewers
claiming at least slight interest in the genre. There’s the hardboiled detective
in trenchcoast and voice-over, who despite claims that he is “time and weather
proof” can’t seem to outrun the shadowy forces of nature and his past. There’s
the knockout femme fetale, who sucks the hero into a doomed passion and almost
willful self-destruction. And, of course, there’s that special brand of
screenplay with enough biting one-liners you’ll have to order a new set of
teeth. Continue reading →

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BEN-HUR (1959)

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the AFI’s 100 Movies: 10th Anniversary countdown
came right out of the gate, the fact that Ben-Hur would open the show, having
dropped from #72 all the way down to #100. Many could make a good case that the
drastic drop was either (a) liberal Hollywood’s rebuttal of Charlton Heston’s
NRA ties, or (b) AFI members’ denunciation of old-fashioned religious films.
Either way, I think the AFI got this one wrong, as Ben-Hur is certainly a much
more important film than #100.

While Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (France/Italy) may remain
the greatest Christ film ever made, William Wyler’s Ben-Hur is certainly the
most acclaimed, winning a record 11 Oscars, including Best Picture, beginning a
reign of dominance that’s yet to be bested, equaled only recently by Titanic
(1997) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). Continue
reading →

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THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Jason Fraley

In 1965, famed film critic Pauline Kael was fired by McCall’s magazine for a
single negative review. The movie: The Sound of Music. The reason: publications
don’t like when their critics bash a movie which the market has deemed a
phenomenon. After all, the film was nominated for a whopping 10 Academy Awards,
winning five, including Best Picture. And at $158 million, it became history’s
biggest box office draw (a title it held until The Godfather), with a modern
equivolent of $979 million today, making it the third highest grossing
(adjusted) movie all time, behind only Star Wars (1977) and Gone With the Wind
(1939). One can see why such success would turn off a counter-culturist like
Kael, who called the film “the sugar-coated lie people seem to want to eat.” She
challenged the movie-going public’s intelligence, writing, “we have been turned
into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the
sickly, goody-goody songs.” Continue reading →

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SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS (1941)

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Second to the king, Ernst Lubistch, there was only ever one man as skilled,
tender, hilarious and influential in pioneering the romantic comedy — Preston
Sturges. Few directors’ films are as joyous to watch, and every buff has his or
her favorite, from The Lady Eve (1941), with Henry Fonda as the gullible doop
for disgusied ex-lover Barbara Stanwyck, to The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
(1944), where Betty Hutton wakes up after a WWII send-off party to find herself
pregnant and married, with no memory of how it happened.

But for my money, there’s no finer stretch of the filmmaker’s career than the 11
months between Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story, both written and
directed by Sturges, produced by Paul Jones at Paramount, dangling Joel McCrea
as the understated, likable lead and featuring Sturges’ usual cast of characters
— Robert Warwick, William Demarest, Robert Greig, Torben Meyer, Victor Potel and
the gang. The films are wonders to behold, masterfully directed, socially
conscious, yet highly hilarious, and they’ve influenced countless filmmakers to
follow, namely the Coen Brothers, who’ve homaged Sturges honorably throughout
their careers, from Raising Arizona (1987) to Barton Fink (1991), and most
obviously in their selecting a title for O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000).
Continue reading →

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REPULSION (1965)

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Jason Fraley

You could sense the menace lurking just beneath the surface in his debut film,
Knife in the Water (1962). But Roman Polanski would elevate that ominous feeling
to all-out horror in his next film, Repulsion, his first in English and his
first collaboration with screenwriter Gerard Brach. If you think a $300,000
movie from 1965 can’t disturb the hell out of you, pop this one into the DVD
player. It remains every bit the creeper it was back then and serves as a great
introduction to the twisted mind of Polanski.

The film kicked off Polanski’s “apartment trilogy” about the dangers of urban
dwelling, followed by Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976). In many
ways, Repulsion is the organic, unpolished version of Rosemary’s Baby, planting
the seed for many of its elements: peephole shots, voices through walls, raw
meat, rape hallucinations and an unsettling Krzysztof Komeda score. Continue
reading →

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THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN (2005)

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Jason Fraley

In reviewing Knocked Up (2007), the second film from writer/director Judd
Apatow, a Philly critic made a bold statement: “2007, the year Judd Apatow and
Seth Rogen saved movie comedy.” The jist of the claim was true, as Apatow and
Rogen had scored a huge hit, both with the critics (90% rottentomatoes) and the
masses (grossing $148.7 million). But I prefer to think the genre was saved two
years earlier, in the first film Apatow directed, The 40-Year-Old Virgin,
arriving at a crucial time, the summer of 2005. The reigning kings of comedy,
the so-called Frat Pack, had just released their last great effort, Wedding
Crashers (2005), a comedy that swept the country. Exactly a month later, they
would pass the torch to their heir apparents, the Apatow-Rogen crowd, using
common links forged back on Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2003) —
producer Apatow, bit actor Rogen and supporting actor Steve Carell. Continue
reading →

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THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (1938)

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Jason Fraley

When most average movie fans thinks of the origin of color cinema, they probably
think back to The Wizard of Oz (1939) and that glorious moment where a sepia
Dorothy opens the door to a world of color. Few actually realize color existed
from the very beginning. In fact, Thomas Edison used hand-painted frames on the
first films ever shown to the public, The Strong Man (1894) and Annabelle
Butterfly Dance (1894), while D.W. Griffith tinted scenes in The Birth of a
Nation (1915). In 1920, Herbert and Natalie Kalmus founded Technicolor, shooting
through red and green filters on two strips of film that were then glued
together, and created the first color feature in Hollywood, Toll of the Sea
(1922). When Douglas Fairbanks invested $1 million with them, they found their
first succes in The Black Pirate (1926).

Jack Warner took the next big step by combining the novelties of color and sound
in Show of Shows (1929), where two dyed strips were transfered onto a single
piece of film. In 1932, Technicolor announced a new three-strip process (red,
blue, green), ushering in the first feature length live action all color film,
La Cucaracha (1934). Meanwhile, Walt Disney applied color to animation with his
short Flowers and Trees (1932) and then the monster hit Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs (1937), which arrived the same year as Selznick’s color triumph A Star is
Born (1937). By 1938, Technicolor had 25 films in production, and the process
was becoming more and more viable. Continue reading →

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THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957)

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Internationally, 1957 may be remembered as the year of Federico Fellini’s The
Nights of Cabria (It./Fr.) or the year Ingmar Bergman brought both The Seventh
Seal and Wild Strawberries (Sw.). But in American film history, 1957 was the
year of The Bridge on the River Kwai, British director David Lean’s second
American collaboration and the smash hit that would prove the turning point in
Lean’s career. It was the one that convinced him to think big and never look
back, infecting him with what scholar David Thomson called “The Selznick
Syndrome” and leading to such grand-scale pictures as Lawrence of Arabia (1962),
Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Passage to India (1984). It was a formula for both a
decade of dominance and a gradual slip into full-blown excess.

In Lean’s defense, the hardware Kwai received was more than enough to convince
anyone that big was the way to go. The film totaled seven Oscars, including Best
Picture (Sam Spiegel), Director (Lean), Actor (Sir Alec Guinness) and Screenplay
(Carl Foreman, Michael Wilson), a sweep of all the major categories except Best
Actress, and that only because there were no lead actresses in the film. Another
convincer for Lean was the film’s extraordinary box office showing, to the tune
of $30 million on initial release, the equivalent of $385 million today, making
it the #1 film of the year. In fact, the film was so popular that its ABC
television debut on Sept. 25, 1966, was dubbed “Black Sunday” because of all the
lost business it created for movie theaters (A). An exceptional hit indeed.
Continue reading →

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QUIZ SHOW (1994)

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Jason Fraley

In the wave of stud actors-turned-directors in the ’80s and ’90s, none hit the
ball out of the park farther than Robert Redford in Quiz Show. Nominated for
four Oscars, including Best Picture, Redford’s depiction of the 1950s quiz show
scandals went under the radar in the year of Forrest Gump (1994), Pulp Fiction
(1994) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994). But make no mistake about it: Quiz
Show could very well be the best fourth-best-movie-of-the-year of all time,
right up there with Ninotchka (1939) and All the President’s Men (1976). That is
if it’s even fourth best. In many ways, it’s better directed than Pulp, with
characters just as strong as Shawshank and with just as good an eye for history
as Gump. Above all, it is undoubtedly Redford’s best from the director’s chair,
a true forgotten gem of the last 25 years. Continue reading →

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SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (1937)

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Walt Disney occupied his own space, both literally and figuratively in
Hollywood,” film critic Leonard Maltin said. “I think of him as a visionary,
truly a visionary, and I think of him more in a league with Thomas Edison than
with Louis B. Mayer.” Indeed, Walt Disney’s legacy has become one of such
nostalgia and family entertainment that we often forget just how important he
was toward the overall advancement of the film medium. From the beginning, Walt
relied on technological advancement as his niche claim to fame, carving a
reputation for ambition and ingenuity that would sustain his considerable
talents as a storyteller.

His first big break, the silent Alice pictures, played on the gimmick of
combining live action with animation, long before Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
(1988). His second, Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie (1928), marked another
technological breakthrough as the first animated cartoon with sound. Always
forward looking, Walt continued to push the limits of how he could make his
product unique, signing an exclusive contract with Technicolor in 1932, and
creating some of the first cartoons in color, from his Silly Symphony shorts, to
his massive hit The Three Little Pigs (1933), which had Depression era
Americans, young and old, defiantly humming “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”
Continue reading →

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BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Jason Fraley

In 1969, American moviegoers were shown plenty of dark, honest looks into
American society — the tragedy of poverty and confused faith in Midnight Cowboy,
the acid trips and failed freedom movement of Easy Rider, and the ultra-violence
and threat of aging in The Wild Bunch. But somewhere in that mix, viewers needed
something that was both aesthetically pleasing and a hell of a good time, and
that’s precisely what Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid brought, with a tagline
that read, “Just for the fun of it!”

Viewers flocked to theaters to make Butch and Sundance the #1 movie of 1969. The
success, of course, rested upon the film’s freshness in creating the modern
buddy flick, and to this day, it remains the best buddy picture of all time. I
dare you to find better chemistry than that between Paul Newman and Robert
Redford in their respective title roles, a chemistry so good that four years
later director George Roy Hill reunited them for The Sting (1973) to win the
Oscar for Best Picture. Continue reading →

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Kid (1969)


SCARFACE: THE SHAME OF A NATION (1932)

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Half a century separated Tony Camonte and Tony Montana; Paul Muni’s tommy gun
and Al Pacino’s grenade launcher; “Get outta my way, Johnny, I’m gonna spit” and
“Say hello to my little friend!” And in the time between the two Scarface films
came ample room for debate, difference in taste, cinema knowledge, appreciation
of history, and thus preference for one or the other.

Academics mostly favor the 1932 original, produced by Howard Hughes, written by
Ben Hecht and directed by Howard Hawks. On the other hand, the hip hop
generation unanimously prefers the 1983 remake, written by Oliver Stone and
directed by Brian De Palma. No matter where you stand, it’s telling that both
films were named to AFI’s Top 10 Gangster Films of All Time. Each was
undoubtedly the most graphic film at its respective release date and faced tough
censorship. Today it’s hard to imagine one without the other. DePalma and Stone
owe their entire story to Hawks, Hughes and Hecht. And Hawks, Hughes and Hecht
now owe their film’s entire pop culture recognition to De Palma and Stone. To
know both is to love both. Continue reading →

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HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971)

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Jason Fraley

In the Farrelly Brothers’ hit comedy There’s Something About Mary (1998), the
title character, played by Cameron Diaz, calls Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude “the
greatest love story of our time.” The line clearly shows how much Bobby and
Peter Farrelly think of Ashby’s work. The irony, of course, is that most fans of
the Farrelleys’ movies — Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, Shallow Hal — will not know
what to make of a beast like Harold and Maude. For while the Farrellys crank out
fodder for the mainstream, Ashby does none of the sort. He lives in the cult,
where films try to break the rules, and Harold and Maude is no exception.
Storytelling conventions need not apply, as Ashby explores existential themes of
life, love and death set to Cat Stevens’ carefree soundtrack in Entertainment
Weekly’s choice for the #4 Cult Film of All Time. It’s easily one of the most
unique films you’ll ever see. Continue reading →

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IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934)

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Romantic comedies don’t go around sweeping the Academy Awards. They just don’t.
They usually carry the chick flick stigma and are lucky to get even one Oscar
nomination. But in 1934, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night got more than
nominations. It got wins, and in all five major categories: Best Picture (Capra,
Harry Cohn), Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Claudette Colbert), Best
Director (Capra) and Best Screenplay (Robert Riskin).

Such a Big Five Oscar sweep has only been matched twice, by One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991), proving it a tough
task for any genre, let alone a comedy. But a comedy it was, making It Happened
One Night a truly groundbreaking moment in cinema history and an underdog
triumph that no one, except Capra and Riskin, saw coming. Continue reading →

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THE GENERAL (1927)

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Close your eyes. Picture a silent film. You’re probably imagining a mustached,
bowling-hat-wearing, cane-wielding, penguin-waddling Little Tramp named Charlie
Chaplin. That’s because for many years, Chaplin was the icon, the Golden Boy,
the star of the history books. But sometime around 1960, a fascinating seachange
happened in a large chunk of the academic community. Critical opinion began to
shift away from Chaplin and toward another silent comedian. Oh, the scholars of
the Hollywood Renaissance still admired Chaplin, sure. But slowly, one by one,
they were increasingly drawn to his peer, the so-called “Great Stone Face,” the
man who never once showed emotion, and in doing so, became the funniest of them
all — Buster Keaton.

Like Chaplin, Keaton wrote, directed, produced and starred in his own films. He
directed and starred in his first films in 1917, and was soon creating masterful
shorts, like One Week (1920) and The Scarecrow (1920), before graduating to
longer works, gems like Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The
Navigator (1924) and Go West (1925). Throughout, he perfected his craft, his
comic timing, his understanding of camera, until finally he was ready to make
his masterpiece, The General. Continue reading →

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BRINGING UP BABY (1938)

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Susan, when a man is wrestling a leopard in the middle of a pond, he’s in no
position to run!” When it comes to the screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby
certainly cannot claim it invented it. In fact, it wasn’t even the first for
director Howard Hawks, who had previously explored the territory with John
Barrymore and Carole Lombard in Twentieth Century (1934). No, Baby was just
another in a blooming trend of the new subgenre, following films like W.S. Van
Dyke’s The Thin Man (1934), Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) and Mr.
Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937).

Preston Sturges may have laid the genre’s biggest claim in the period
immediately following Baby, in films like Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Lady
Eve (1941) and The Palm Beach Story (1942). But for if you’re looking for the
genre’s definitive piece, look no further. There’s a reason the National Film
Registry in Washington D.C. selected Bringing Up Baby as its first screwball
comedy to archive forever (A). Does it honestly get any screwier than Katharine
Hepburn with a pet leopard or Cary Grant as a paleontologist looking for his
lost dinosaur bone? Continue reading →

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DRACULA (1931)

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Karloff does not deserve to smell my shit! That limey cocksucker can rot in
hell for all I care!” So says Martin Landau in his Oscar-winning portrayal of
Dracula legend Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994). Like the real Lugosi,
the character cannot hide his jealousy over the success of Boris Karloff as
Frankenstein: “You think it takes talent to play Frankenstein? It’s all makeup
and grunting.”

Indeed, his jealousy is rooted in the pains of missed opportunity. For after the
success of Dracula in 1931, its Universal producers E.M. Asher and Carl Laemmle
Jr. offered Lugosi the title role in Frakenstein (1931). But he turned it down,
saying the part was too degrading for a big star like him. The rest is history.
Frankenstein became an even bigger success than Dracula, and Karloff launched to
superstardom. Meanwhile, Lugosi settled for 103 lesser films, saw his work turn
into parody, and ended his life a penniless drug-addict. Still, the fact that
Lugosi never escaped Dracula underscores his effectiveness in the role. As
Thomson writes of Lugosi, “‘I am Dracula’—his first words were less introduction
than assertion.” (B) In the end, it’s better to be remembered for one thing than
none at all. Continue reading →

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THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940)

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Part of the power of movies is their ability to provide reference points to
various historical events. Rather than read it in a textbook alone, one can
forever relate pieces of history to a particular movie, recalling the film’s
images and mood each time the historical subject comes up. As for the Great
Depression, and the accompanying Dust Bowl of the 1930s, no film is more
definitive, or more accurate, than The Grapes of Wrath.

The 1939 source novel by John Steinbeck was an enormous hit, as people read the
plight of the Joad family as therapy for their own everyday hardship. When it
came to the movies, though, lighter, escapist films were all the rage, and it
wasn’t certain how the public would react to such a film about the salt of the
earth. Famed producer Darryl F. Zanuck took a chance and bought the rights to
the novel for $75,000, and 20th Century Fox released the film the same year the
novel won the Pulitzer Prize. It would be Hollywood’s first real attempt to
address the Great Depression, and Zanuck wanted to make sure he got it right.
Continue reading →

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GIANT (1956)

Posted on August 13, 2013 by Jason Fraley

The look and feel of George Stevens’ Giant beckons instant comparisons to Gone
With the Wind (1939). Like the latter, Giant was an epic tale of life in the
deep south, based off a famous book by a female author, this time Edna Ferber
instead of Margaret Mitchell. Its Texas homestead Reata is Tara reimagined, with
Rock Hudson a sturdy Rhett Butler, Elizabeth Taylor a less bratty Scarlett, and
the films’ scope just as big. Stevens admitted he hardly noticed GWTW’s
four-hour length, saying, “I was caught up in it and could have watched even
more.” (A) Thankfully, he spared audiences the “more” on Giant, but at some
three hours and change, the film lives up to its title. It wasn’t nearly as
successful as GWTW — how could it be? But it still was Warner Bros. most
successful film up to that point, earning 10 Oscar nominations and
correcting GWTW’s most glaring flaw — its racist undertones. Continue reading →

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SEX, LIES & VIDEOTAPE (1989)

Posted on August 13, 2013 by Jason Fraley

No doubt tired of hearing how he was “the other Steven S-berg”, director Steven
Soderbergh decided in the fall of 1987 to pack up and head for California,
leaving Baton Rouge with only an LSU film degree, a few short films, TV
commercials and a concert-doc to his name. Two weeks before the cross-country
trip he devised the concept for sex, lies, and videotape, of which he wrote the
final draft during the eight-day drive to L.A. Shooting on location in Baton
Rouge for just five-weeks on a $1.2 million budget, the film scored
exponentially, grossing $25 million domestically on its way to becoming one of
the most successful independent films of all time.

Cracking the $100 million barrier worldwide, the film not only gave Miramax its
first big financial success, but it more importantly revived the four-year-old
annual Sundance Film Festival, which at the time was struggling to keep afloat.
Soderbergh’s film came in and tore the roof off, winning the award for Most
Popular Film and launching a period of prosperity for the festival to the point
of entering the TV market in 1996 with The Sundance Channel, an outlet for sex,
lies, and videotape to play in a loop for all channel surfers to see. Continue
reading →

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THE FLY (1986)

Posted on August 13, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Be afraid. Be very afraid.” Aside from being the most famous tagline in movie
history, Geena Davis’s quote sums up everything one needs to know about The Fly,
except for the much needed warning, “And also be ready to grab your vomit bag.”
Indeed, David Cronenberg’s 1986 masterpiece is not for the faint of heart, nor
the weak of stomach, living up to the director’s reputation for well-placed
gore. It’s as if Cronenberg deserves the title of “gore auteur,” carrying his
same fascination with mutated human minds and body parts throughout his work.
Look at Rabid (1977), which cast porn star Marilyn Chambers as a vampire with an
impaling device in her armpit; The Brood (1979), documenting the attacks of
mutated children; Stephen King’s The Dead Zone (1983), on the subject of psychic
powers; and the masterpiece Videodrome (1983), where a human body comes complete
with a virtual reality outlet, not so different from The Matrix (1999). The Fly
was a natural next step in this filmography, and lucky for us, it is so much
more than its stomach-turning premise. Continue reading →

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THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963)

Posted on August 13, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Pop in any MGM DVD these days and you’ll see a quick collection of some of
history’s most famous movie images — Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lectar in a
straight jacket, Sylvester Stallone running the Rocky steps, Marilyn Monroe
blowing a kiss. And right there in their midst, catching your eye is a
spectacular stunt in the most famous scene of The Great Escape — Steve McQueen
jumping his motorcycle over a barbed wire fence.

Needless to say McQueen rode that bike into immortality. How fitting that Escape
be directed by John Sturges, whose name evokes the famed Sturgis bike rally, for
these are the people who love his movies. If George Cukor was the proud maker of
women’s pictures, Sturges made them for men. Not that women don’t enjoy them (I
know some who love them), but these are films about macho camaraderie — Gunfight
at the OK Corral (1957), The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape. All
three are great pictures sporting the chiseled faces of Lancasters, Bronsons and
McQueens. But if one were to choose the emblem of Sturges’ career, it’s gotta be
Escape, ranking #40 on Men’s Journal’s 50 Best Guy Movies and #27 on Maxim
Magazine’s 100 Greatest Guy Movies Ever Made. Continue reading →

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THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)

Posted on August 13, 2013 by Jason Fraley

How is a piece of pop culture born? Man writes novel in 1927. Director adapts
novel to film in 1948. A young Mel Brooks sees that film, considers it his
favorite of all time, and homages it in Blazing Saddles (1974). All of a sudden,
characters in everything from The Simpsons to Friends, UHF to the WWF, are all
repeating the same defiant line: “Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need
no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!”

One of the most fun-to-quote lines in pop culture history, “badges” fittingly
comes from one of the most fun-to-watch films in cinema history. With The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre, director John Huston was able to take the
monumental themes of Von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) and Chaplin’s The Gold Rush
(1925) and create something that was both thrilling and profound. Few films have
so successfully combined such adventure, humor and fable all into one. Even
fewer have had such an impact on future filmmakers, like Paul Thomas Anderson,
who watched it every night while writing There Will Be Blood (2007). The
reclusive and mysterious novelist B. Travers, who wrote the source material,
would have been proud to see the legacy of Huston’s faithful adaptation.
Continue reading →

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THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931)

Posted on August 13, 2013 by Jason Fraley

1931 was the year of the “genre film” in American cinema. It was a time when the
silent era was folding and in its place emerged a new studio system full of
specialization. Just as studios broke down production into a series of
categories (writers, editors, directors), so they also did their product,
finding genre niches to appeal to very targeted audiences. The most famous of
these were the horror film at Universal, riding the success of Dracula (1931)
and Frankenstein (1931), and the gangster picture over at Warner Bros., building
a brand of fast-talkers, dirty coppers and bullet-riddled set pieces.

It was in this environment that producer Daryl F. Zanuck brought us two gangster
classics at roughly the same time, Little Caesar (1930) and The Public Enemy.
Both were huge successes in their day and would become seminal films in the
gangster canon, eventually placed back to back on AFI’s Top 10 Gangster Films.
But The Public Enemy carries its own unique reputation, simply for its
establishment of the studio most identified with the genre, and the man most
synonymous with the genre, who with one smash of a grapefruit went from unknown
to gangster superstar.
Continue reading →

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LITTLE CAESAR (1930)

Posted on August 13, 2013 by Jason Fraley

It’s 1930. American morale has been crushed by the Great Depression. People are
out of jobs, deflated, flat. Yet onto the movie screen walks this gangster — an
ambitious, proactive, fast-talking son of a bitch, and he electrifies the
viewing public. Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar was more than just a fine
performance. It marked a seachange in American film, making room for edgier
presentations and defining a new genre in the gangster picture. From then on,
American film culture would include the anti-hero, chasing an American Dream
represented by a big desk and modern architecture, usurping the power of those
who’ve come before but gone soft, and following a tragic career path “starting
in the gutter and ending there.” Continue reading →

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DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (1965)

Posted on August 13, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“In a land of guns and ice, there is the great sound of battle and the greater
silence of lovers.”

For a good thirty years, David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago was unanimously hailed as
one of the biggest and best British productions ever made. Its box office
release remains the No. 8 highest grossing in history (adjusted for inflation).
At the 1988 People’s Choice Awards, its theme song, Maurice Jarre’s “My Love
(Lara’s Theme),” was voted Favorite All-Time Motion Picture Score. And in 1997,
the film ranked a powerful No. 39 on the AFI’s original Top 100 list.

But around the turn of the millennium, and interesting phenomenon occurred, as
Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), a similar romantic epic set against a Bolshevik
Revolution backdrop, began swapping places with Zhivago on most every best list.
Today, Zhivago has completely dropped off the AFI Top 100 and does not even
place in the AFI’s Top 10 Epics, where Reds ranks No. 9. It does, however, still
carry weight with the romantics out there, who voted the film No. 7 on AFI’s 100
Passions. And in that realm, the film will never go away. Continue reading →

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REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

In that new crop of promising young filmmakers, from Christopher Nolan to David
Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson to Wes Anderson, there’s a special spot reserved
for Darren Aronofsky. He broke onto the scene with his theological sci-fi
thriller Pi (1998), baffled critics with his overly-ambitious The Fountain
(2006), resurrected the career of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler (2008) and, if
you ask me, should have been awarded the Best Director Oscar for the harrowing
Black Swan (2011). But no matter what else Aronofsky does from here, it’s going
to be pretty hard to top Requiem for a Dream, a film so intense it hits you like
a mack truck, wrecks you for days and makes you want to go curl up in the fetal
position like so many of its tragic characters. Continue reading →

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REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.” Survey any
college dorm and you’ll find those words written on a poster, superimposed over
an image of James Dean, his red coat with popped collar, white t-shirt
underneath, greased-up hair, cigarette in hand. The irony of this, of course, is
that most of these people have probably never seen a James Dean movie. So how
does such pop culture thrive?

Youth continue to follow Dean for what he stood for, this definition of teen
angst, confusion and unbottled rebellion. He represented a new type of male, a
guy who could pull off toughness with quirky, feminine mannerisms, who could be
innately sexy but entirely mysterious. A man who just by gazing into his sad
eyes, spoke volumes about a disenchanted youth. And yes, a man who would become
a martyr for all this, dying in that tragic road accident at age 24, just five
months after the release of his debut film. For that, Elia Kazan’s adaptation of
John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1955), Dean earned the first posthumous Oscar
nomination in Academy Awards history. And the first Dean film to be released
after his death, a month after his death actually, was Nicholas Ray’s Rebel
Without a Cause, the film that would become the most synonymous with Dean
himself for its classic images — Dean writhing in anguish at a police station
desk; making mischievous “moo” sounds during a class field trip; exploding in
anger at his parents: “You’re tearin’ me apart!”; softly asking Natalie Wood if
she wants to “explore the other rooms” and crying “no bullets” at the tragic
conclusion. Continue reading →

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SHANE (1953)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

When people speak of heroes riding off into the sunset, Shane is exactly the
stuff they’re talking about, the stuff icons are made of, that echoing,
teary-eyed call of young Brandon de Wilde to his parting hero on horseback
headed for the horizon: “Shaaaaaaane! Come baaaaaaack!” Beyond an unforgetatble
quote of affection (voted #47 all-time by AFI), the call echoes a yearning
within us viewers for the lost age of heroes, for the freedom and promise of the
frontier, for those heroes who could ride into the picture, solve great moral
problems in two hours, and then ride out again. George Stevens’ Shane represents
the very best of its kind. It’s a fable of a film, embedding a strong moral
message that “a gun is only as good or as bad as the man using it,” all the
while shaping movie icon out of western myth. Continue reading →

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THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

The Coen Brothers wrote The Big Lebowski about the same time as their Golden
Palm winner Barton Fink (1991), and though they wanted to film it before Fargo
(1996), they had to hold off because Jeff Bridges was tied up in Walter Hill’s
Wild Bill and John Goodman was busy taping episodes for TV’s Roseanne. Instead,
they went ahead on Fargo, an ultimate Oscar-winning success that legitimized the
Coens as Hollywood power players. As a result, Lebowski became their much
anticipated follow-up, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in Jan. 1998 to
critics’ underwhelment. Peter Howell of the Toronto Star wrote, “It’s hard to
believe that this is the work of a team that won an Oscar last year for the
original screenplay of Fargo,” and true to such reviews, Lebowski earned not a
single Oscar nomination.

To this day, it has not yet caught on in the scholarly community of “important”
best lists, partly because it was released in 1998 when most of these lists just
started coming out. But a changing of the guard is underway, and the next
generation (voices like USA Today Pop Candy blogger Whitney Matheson) is
beginning to claim this one as a classic. The Big Lebowski has been called “the
first cult film of the internet era,” and rightfully so. Voters have voted the
film into the IMDB Top 250, and ranked it as high as #25 in the Empire readers
poll, exactly one spot ahead of Citizen Kane (1941). Further proof lies in The
Lebowski Fest, which began in Louisville, Ky., in 2002, and has since expanded
to other cities, where cult fanatics celebrate the film by dressing up like The
Dude, The Jesus and the rest of the gang (a la Rocky Horror). In this light, the
book by Bill Green, Ben Peskoe, Will Russell and Scott Shuffitt, I’m a Lebowski,
You’re a Lebowski (2007), seems a must-own generational handbook. Continue
reading →

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RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

When the fourth installment of Indiana Jones “nuked the fridge,” many claimed
that Steven Spielberg had jumped his own Jaws shark. Then again, the Raiders
films always walked that line. Look no further than The Temple of Doom (1984),
where Harrison Ford, Spielberg’s future wife, and that shrimp from The Goonies
safely parachuted thousands of feet in an inflatable raft. Yet the real trick of
these films was always the ability to push that envelope just far enough, then
rein it in with a popcorn concoction of compelling characters, self-deprecating
humor, and action quests of childlike wonder.

The older I get, the more I realize how ridiculous the Raiders films are, but
the more I’m convinced they work. Perhaps it’s just the kid in me who never got
over his whip-cracking, boyhood desires. But the real reason is Spielberg’s own
ability to view the world through a child’s eyes. Along with Star Wars and Back
to the Future, Raiders is the ultimate franchise to watch as children — or with
your children. For every dose of implausible action to dazzle the kids, there’s
an equal bit of tongue-in-cheek humor to enthrall adults. The minute Indy stops
a sword-wielding goon by casually shooting him, or a Nazi enforcer folds a
potential weapon into a clothes hanger, we realize Spielberg is in on the joke.
Action done straight is often unbelievable, but action with a twist of humor is
a damn good time. Continue reading →

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NASHVILLE (1975)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Picture a movie that runs nearly three hours, has no conventional plotline and
24 different major characters and you have Nashville. Robert Altman’s
masterpiece may be the most ambitious movie ever made and it’s one that’s
admittedly hard to “get,” and intentionally made that way. First viewings may
bring calls of “rambling,” “pointless” or “boring,” mirroring quite accurately
the initial reactions of many in 1975. Nashville was not a box office success by
any means, making a measly $9 million, and even the most distinguished of
critics admitted to falling asleep during it on the first go-round.

But the film always had its fighters — Siskel and Ebert both called it the best
film of 1975 — and over the years Nashville’s reputation has grown thanks to the
admiration of such supporters. Most telling is the film’s rise from no spot on
the AFI’s original Top 100 in 1997, all the way to #59 in 2007. A similar
phenomenon can be said about Altman himself, who did not receive a single Oscar
until his Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. Together, Altman and Nashville are
made for eachother, by eachother, both initially off-putting, unashamedly
maverick, and gradually more appreciated the more they are studied. Few films
capture their era better, and even fewer have had the power to ring true over
the years. Continue reading →

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NOTORIOUS (1946)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Alfred Hitchcock was the best of the best, a shoe-in for MovieMaker Magazine’s
Most Influential Director of All Time. So it’s no wonder that Roger Ebert, in
selecting his own All Time Top 10, would include a Hitchcock film. Contrary to
what you might expect, it was not Psycho (1960). Nor was it Vertigo (1958), Rear
Window (1954), North By Northwest (1959), Frenzy (1972), Rebecca (1940), or The
Birds (1963). No, for Ebert it was Notorious, the very same film that Turner
Classic Movies host Robert Osbourne calls his favorite Hitchcock.

What is it about the magic of this film? Is it because it’s the first time Hitch
realized the benefit of major stars, bringing us the Oscar-nominated support of
Claude Rains and the dream pairing of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman? Is it
because it’s the first time Hitch discovered the benefit of great dialogue,
thanks to an Oscar-nominated script by Ben Hecht? Or is it because it marks the
moment Hitchcock began financing his own pictures for the rest of his career? I
say it’s all these at once, a perfect storm for Hitchcock’s first major
masterpiece, building off his work in The 39 Steps (1939), Rebecca (1940) and
his personal favorite, Shadow of a Doubt (1942), to assemble his first major
flourish of auteur iconography (those elements which we recognize as undeniably
Hitchcock). Continue reading →

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CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS (1989)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Throughout history, the very greatest filmmakers, each of a different niche,
always seem to attempt at least one master tragedy. For Alfred Hitchcock, it was
Vertigo (1958). For Orson Welles, it was Citizen Kane (1941). And for Woody
Allen, it was the unique Crimes and Misdemeanors. The film is tragedy in the
real sense of the word, not its common use to describe a disaster or
catastrophe. This is tragedy like the Greeks meant it, where a character has a
choice between impulse (what he wants to do) and imperative (what he should do),
and after that choice, realizes that all suffering caused is his own doing. And
in each case, the tragedy provides the most frutiful ground for the filmmaker’s
deepest dive into his own subconscious.

The fact that Allen is a far more comedic filmmaker than either of the
aforementioned directors only adds to the mystique of Crimes and Misdemeanors.
The film remains a comedy of manners in the truest Allen form, featuring themes
consistent to his career, several afflicted relationships and a number of
trademark one-liners — Cliff’s Statue of Liberty joke, or his sister describing
a disgustingly-kinky encounter. But beneath the laughs lies Allen’s darkest
movie, and also his deepest. If by the auteur theory, one can follow a
filmmaker’s career with an almost narrative arc, Crimes and Misdemeanors would
be Allen’s crescendo, achieving the height of his expression of his deepest
concerns — the uncertain nature of relationships, the mind-body complex and its
ability to warp morals, and the somewhat answerless quest for the meaning of
life. Continue reading →

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SWING TIME (1936)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

When many of us think Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, we think of them dancing
“Cheek to Cheek” across that Art Deco set in Top Hat (1935). But while that
flick may be more famous, the only Astaire-Rogers picture to make the AFI’s Top
100 list is Swing Time. And upon further review, the latter may very well
contain the best collection of dances in the entire series.

Released just a year after Top Hat, Swing Time follows a generally similar
plotline. This time, talented “hoofer” Lucky Garnett (Astaire) is set to marry
Margaret Watson (Betty Furness), but is deemed too poor by her father, Judge
Watson (Landers Stevens, father of the film’s director, George Stevens). The
father’s challenge: Lucky will go to New York City and, through a little
tapdancing and a lot of gambling, win the necessary $25,000 to pay the dowry.
Continue reading →

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TOP HAT (1935)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

He gave her class, she gave him sex appeal. He got most of the clout, and she
did everything he did, only backwards in high heels. As long as there are
movies, there will never be a better dancing duo than Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rogers. Of the nine films they did together between 1933-1949, two have risen to
masterpiece status: Swing Time (1936), recently claiming a spot on the AFI’s Top
100 Films, and their most iconic of all, Top Hat, ranked #15 on the AFI’s 25
Greatest Musicals of All Time. Together, they are masterworks in the realm of
romantic comedy musicals, released by RKO a year apart, produced by Pandro S.
Berman, co-written by Allan Scott, photographed by David Abel and touched by the
Oscar-nominated genius of Hermes Pan, choreographer on Top Hat and dance
director on Swing Time. Even if you don’t like musicals or know a thing about
dance, these are two pieces of American culture that you must experience in your
short time on this earth. And if you’ve never seen any, start with Top Hat.
Continue reading →

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TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

When it comes to the history of film noir, most scholars will put the period
roughly between 1941-1958. There is some discrepency as to the true start of
noir — does a detective story like The Maltese Falcon (1941) immediately
constitute noir? Or does it not have more to do with femme fatales, shadows and
night journeys? Is Double Indemnity (1944) not a more accurate starting point?
The debate can linger on the starting point, but there is no dispute about the
other bookend — Orson Welles’ masterpiece Touch of Evil.

It’s fitting that Welles be the one to cap the movement, as it was he who
pioneered many elements critical to noir expression. As Alain Silver and
Elizabeth Ward write in Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American
Style (2003), “The seminal impact of the Welles/Gregg Toland collaboration on
Citizen Kane (1941) gave later directors, cinematographers, and designers access
to a wide range of previously unproven visual methods.” Welles’ memorable
performance in Carol Reed’s noir masterpiece The Third Man (1949) continued his
hand in the movement, and nearly a decade later, he would close the era with his
own, highly-stylized “touch of noir.” Continue reading →

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PATTON (1970)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Many biopics are good (i.e. Ray; Walk the Line), but few become great (i.e.
Lawrence of Arabia; Schindler’s List). The real-life human story is almost
always spectacular — why else would Hollywood turn it into a movie? — but
something usually lacks, either in a script that can’t keep up with the true
story, or in a performance that can’t keep up with the real-life popular figure.
In Patton, it’s safe to say that all these things are spot on, the screenplay
masterfully co-written by Francis Ford Coppolla and the lead part played by a
never-better George C. Scott, who in his career performance actually becomes
four-star General George Patton, the “only Allied general truly feared by the
Nazis” during WWII.

Producer Frank McCarthy, former Secretary of the War Department General Staff,
actually knew Patton during the war, after which it took him 19 years to get the
film made. He had first tried in 1951, six years after Patton’s freak car
accident death in Germany, but Patton’s widow nixed the idea, carrying a grudge
against the media, whom she felt was the cause of many of Patton’s career
problems. Indeed, throughout the movie, newspapers are depicted as printing many
controversial things Patton said “off the record.” After she died, the children
also blocked the project, pushing it all the way until 1970 before the picture
could be made. In the end, McCarthy’s production battle brought him complete
vindication, earning seven Oscars, including one for himself — Best Picture.
Continue reading →

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AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

In the discussion of strong vs. transparent filmmakers, the conventional wisdom
seems to be that the strong have become a relic of the past. Sam Mendes is one
of those rare exceptions, or at least he thus far appears to be. With a string
of efforts including Road to Perdition (2002), Jarhead (2005) and Revolutionary
Road (2008), Mendes has made quite the name for himself. And yet, it’s hard to
imagine how he will ever top his debut, American Beauty, which beckoned today’s
audiences to “look closer” in a way they are not asked often enough.

As a result, the film dominated the Academy Awards in a way first-time directors
can only dream, winning five — Best Actor (Kevin Spacey), Best Director
(Mendes), Best Original Screenplay (Alan Ball), Best Cinematography (Conrad L.
Hall) and Best Picture (Bruch Cohen, Dan Jinks). It was the first non-historical
epic to win Best Picture in eight years, (A) and it’s easy to see why. Has there
been another film in recent years that has inspired such simultaneous hope and
lament for a self-critical America? Continue reading →

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2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Stanley Kubrick was a wizard among men. He always sought to portray himself as
larger-than-life, relocating to a secluded estate in Britain after 1961, and
fancying himself as uniquely endowed, able to see life truths and spiritual
connections that others could not. Maybe he could, and this would be his biggest
asset. Or, maybe he couldn’t, his own pretentiousness ultimately becoming his
fatal flaw. Most scholars want to believe the former, placing his crowning
achievement, 2001: A Space Odyssey, as high as #15 on AFI’s Top 100 Films and #6
on BFI’s Sight & Sound Critics Poll, the mother of all “serious” lists. It’s
these forces that wish to crown Kubrick as a visionary, who not only thought out
of the box, but lived outside of it.

But there is a divide, even if a small one, in the scholarly community as to
Kubrick’s merits. It’s unanimous that he has produced some of history’s biggest
films, from The Killing (1956) to Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1960) to Dr.
Strangelove (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1971) to Barry Lyndon (1975), The
Shining (1980) to Full Metal Jacket (1987). But some academics resent Kubrick’s
self-righteous suggestion that he was himself levels above everyone else, that
he could in two-plus hours explain to us not only the origins and destination of
the human race, but indeed also the very meaning of life. Continue reading →

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THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Forget the cultural staples, the straightjackets, the lotion in the basket, the
fava beans and the nice Chianti. From a purely historical standpoint, The
Silence of the Lambs will forever stand out for two amazing achievements.

The first is its place as one of only three films to ever sweep the “Big Five”
Oscar categories — Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster),
Best Screenplay (Ted Tally), Best Director (Jonathan Demme) and Best Picture
(Edward Saxon, Kenneth Utt, Ronald Bozman). The only other two to have
accomplished that feat are Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) and Milos
Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). At the current rate, it won’t
be repeated for another 20 years.

Still, Lambs’ other historical accomplishment may be the more impressive of the
two — its place as the first and last horror film to win Best Picture. Okay, so
you could argue that it’s not technically horror. Every so often, a scary crime
thriller will come along like The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en (1995) that
blurs the line. Is Halloween (1978) not also a crime thriller in its own way?
Aren’t all slasher movies with a police component crime thrillers? Maybe the
phrase should be that Lambs is the first and last horror-related film to win
Best Picture. Just because it’s more well-rounded doesn’t mean it is any less of
a horror film. Perhaps the true description should then be: a horror movie done
right. Continue reading →

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DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

After storming onto the scene with Badlands (1973), writer-director Terrence
Malick made his second feature — Days of Heaven — and then disappeared for 20
years. The hiatus only served to heighten the myth behind the film and its
mysterious director.

Imagine the buzz around a maverick filmmaker who makes two masterpieces then
goes unheard of for decades. This was Malick’s elusive M.O. for the rest of the
’70s, the entire ’80s, and most of the ’90s — a master of his medium who answers
to no one.

For a long time, Days of Heaven remained the only recent work his fans could
turn to, and thus deserves much of the credit for Malick finally getting an
Oscar nomination for The Thin Red Line (1998) and winning the Palme d’Or for The
Tree of Life (2011). It was the build-up of respect. Continue reading →

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DON’T LOOK NOW (1973)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

How many movies can simultaneously turn you on, move you to tears and scare you
to death? Don’t Look Now excels on all three fronts, featuring one of cinema’s
most famous sex scenes, one of its most touching family tragedies and one of its
most horrific climaxes. To juggle all three is the work of a master, Nicolas
Roeg, a 23-year veteran of the British film industry by the time he made his
debut film, the Mick Jagger vehicle Performance (1970).

In that time, Roeg trained under some of Britain’s best, working up from second
unit photography for David Lean on Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to lead
cinematographer for Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Francois
Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), John Schlesinger’s Far From the Maddening
Crowd (1967) and Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968). It was all practice for the
moment where he would leave his own mark on film history, Don’t Look Now, using
his title to warn audiences not to look, yet creating a story so gripping we’re
forced to watch through parted fingers. Continue reading →

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AMELIE (2001)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Luck is like the Tour de France. You wait, and it flashes past you. You have to
catch it while you can.” So says Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s tour-de-force “Amelie,” a
film for which the timing couldn’t have been better. The film was already a hit
in Europe, but didn’t arrive in the U.S. until just after 9/11. Critic Joshua
Klein called it, “The right movie at the right time” and the film’s quirky
optimism was received “not as mindless escapism but as a fantastic and idealized
respite from the horrors and rigors of the real world.” (A) As a result, every
magazine went nuts over it, until nearly a decade later, Amelie ranked #2 in
Empire’s 100 Best Films of World Cinema, nudging past Bicycle Thieves (1948) and
Battleship Potemkin (1925), and landing behind only The Seven Samurai (1954).
Continue reading →

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AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD (1972)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

There may be no more fascinating personality in the history of movies than
Werner Herzog. To watch an interview with him is to tilt your head to the side
and grin in complete amusement. I am constantly amazed by the stuff he says and
the stories he tells – shooting on a 35mm film camera he stole from his film
school; directing actors at gunpoint behind the camera; hauling an actual ship
up a mountainside because it looks more realistic than special effects; and
getting shot at during an interview, only to continue the interview as if
nothing happened.

For all of this, Herzog the personality may overshadow Herzog the filmmaker, but
his body of work stands with the best of ‘em. Be it narratives like Woyzeck
(1979) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) or documentaries like Grizzly Man (2005) and
Encounters at the End of the World (2007), Herzog has proven one of history’s
most prolific filmmakers with a career now in its sixth decade since founding
his own production company in 1963. If you had to pick out one of his films as
his most powerful, his most accomplished, his most important, it has to be
Aguirre: The Wrath of God, his first international success and a landmark of the
New German Cinema. Continue reading →

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THE LAST LAUGH (1924)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

After scholar Gerald Mast’s overwhelming praise in A Short History of the
Movies, I decided to check out The Last Laugh (1924) for myself. I must say,
it’s everything Mast said it was, and more. The film assembles the best
filmmakers that ‘20s Germany had to offer – director F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu),
producer Erich Pommer (Metropolis), screenwriter Carl Mayer (The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari), cinematographer Karl Freund (Metropolis), production designers Walter
Rohrig and Robert Herlth (Destiny) and lead actor Emil Jannings (The Blue
Angel). It also comes just two years after Murnau’s first big success, Nosferatu
(1922), so some might read the opening title card as Murnau’s own fear that his
sudden fame could be temporary – “One day you are preeminent, respected by all.
… But what will you be tomorrow?”

While these words provide the theme for the rest of the film, the title card
itself is the last until the epilogue. What bravery by Murnau to make a silent
film without title cards! The decision reflects his desire to show rather than
tell, which should be the goal of all filmmakers. It was this decision that
forced Murnau to push the limits of both the moving and subjective camera —
techniques that fit perfectly into the Kammerspiel subset of the German
Expressionist movement. Rather than the more visually expressionistic style
often equated with the movement (hard shadows, distorted sets, exaggerated
furniture), the Kammerspiel films were more psychologically expressionistic and
geared toward fewer characters. Continue reading →

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THE GRAND ILLUSION (1937)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

When it comes to American audiences embracing international cinema, Jean
Renoir’s La Grand Illusion (1937) may have been more important than any other
film to date. It was the first foreign film ever to be nominated for the Academy
Award for Best Picture — and should have won over Capra’s You Can’t Take It With
You (1938). Even to this day, the film carries a certain allure, leaving traces
in everything from The Great Escape (1963) to Hogan’s Heroes (1965) to The
Shawshank Redemption (1994) and joining Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) as the only foreign
language films to make the WGA’s list of the 101 Greatest Screenplays (2005).
Indeed, The Grand Illusion is a masterpiece most filmmakers be proud to hang
their hats on as their crowning achievement. What a testament that for Renoir,
who followed two years later with The Rules of the Game (1939), it’s just a
close second. Continue reading →

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BLOW-UP (1966)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

We’ve all seen those segments in Austin Powers where Mike Myers holds swinging
‘60s photo sessions, spitting out “fab” instructions almost as fast as he snaps
photos of his beautiful female subjects. If you’ve ever laughed at these scenes,
or understand them as part of our collective culture, you’ve felt the
long-lasting affect of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up.

Already a respected auteur of masterpieces like L’Aventurra (1960), Antonioni
was signed by producer Carlo Ponti to make three English-language films for MGM,
the first of which would become an international classic. Made on a budget of
$1.8 million, Blow-Up wound up grossing $20 million (about $120 million today),
introducing the world to Antonioni’s signature style and helping open
Hollywood’s bedroom door. As Time magazine wrote, Blow-Up “helped liberate
Hollywood from its puritanical prurience” , becoming the first British feature
film to show full frontal female nudity and containing Premiere magazine’s
“sexiest cinematic moment in history.” Continue reading →

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MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1929)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) has got to be one of the most
endlessly fascinating films ever made. Where else can you find such a textbook
example of Soviet montage, experimental narrative and raw documentary all rolled
into one? The combination forms the epitome of the “city symphony”, capturing
the ongoing dance between the modern man and his machines. How fitting, then,
that the film begins with a composite image of a man standing on top of a
camera, as if to say mankind has finally achieved the ultimate in technology —
the cinema –humanity’s most powerful instrument at capturing its own existence.

Vertov seems determined to strip down the film medium and show how it works from
the inside out. From start to finish, the film casts a self-reflective eye on
the cinematic process, making us entirely aware of its apparatus (the camera),
while exposing a number of filmmaking elements in a sort of cinematic crash
course. Continue reading →

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PERSONA (1966)

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jason Fraley

“Don’t you think I understand? The hopeless dream of being. Not seeming, but
being. In every waking moment aware, alert. The tug of war — what you are with
others and who you really are. A feeling of vertigo and a constant hunger to
finally be exposed. To be seen through, cut down, even obliterated.”

Such is said of the protagonist in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, yet it may also be
said of the film itself. For while Bergman had been considered a “serious”
filmmaker since his pair of 1957 classics The Seventh Seal and Wild
Strawberries, those films were still entirely accessible. Allegorical, yes, but
still fairly tidy.

It wasn’t until Persona that Bergman fully satisfied the “hunger to be exposed.”
That is, to expose cinema in a self-reflexive way. He saw through it, cut it
down, obliterated it. And as Bergman himself wrote in his book Images, “Today I
feel that in Persona — and later in Cries and Whispers – I had gone as far as I
could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I
touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.” Continue reading →

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SUNSET BLVD. (1950)

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Jason Fraley

Call it Billy Wilder’s best; a cautionary tale of celebrity’s dangerous price;
and Hollywood’s most daring, cynical and honest look at itself. “Sunset Blvd.”
held such a controversial mirror up to the film industry that the original
script had to be printed under the code name “A Can of Beans.” When MGM chief
Louis B. Mayer saw the picture, he stormed out of the screening and screamed at
Wilder, “You bastard! You have disgraced the industry that made you and fed you!
You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!” (A)

Perhaps Wilder had bitten the hand that fed him, but they were necessary bite
marks. So often we see a glorified Hollywood with glamorous red carpets, deep
wallets and adoring fans. Rarely do we get a glimpse into the price of fame,
until that price has tragically been paid, marked by blood and the flashbulbs of
a media circus.

What lies between the glory and the fall? What happens mentally and emotionally
to movie stars once they pass their prime and are rejected by the business that
created them? What do they do as they’re relegated to spending day after day in
the wide-open loneliness of their huge Beverly Hills mansions? This is precisely
what Wilder captures in “Sunset Blvd.,” the quintessential Hollywood movie and
the quintessential anti-Hollywood movie, poignantly arriving at the tail-end of
Hollywood’s Golden Age. Continue reading →

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KING KONG (1933)

Posted on December 8, 2012 by Jason Fraley

In the entire history of movies, only a select few are so famous, so engrained
in our culture, that we feel as if we’ve seen them, even if many of us haven’t.
“King Kong,” directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, is one of
those movies. Perhaps it’s because every one of us, somewhere or other, has seen
a remake, like Peter Jackson’s in 2005, or heard a reference, like Jeff
Goldblum’s comment as his car approaches the giant gate of “Jurassic Park”
(1993): “What do they got in there, King Kong?”

There is no greater tribute to Kong than the fact that Spielberg paid homage as
he rebuilt visual effects in “Jurassic Park” (1993) and Jackson chose it to
follow his groundbreaking CGI in “The Lord of the Rings” (2001-2003). But “Kong”
is more than just the origin of effects; it’s a cultural staple and legend of
Hollywood; the godfather of blockbusters; the birthplace of movie scores; and
the standard bearer of adventure, fantasy, horror and romance. Remove it, and
movies veer in a vastly different direction.

“I think as a film, [“Kong”] inspired more people to become filmmakers than any
other film ever made,” said Peter Jackson, no doubt speaking for himself. “I’m
absolutely certain of that fact.” In this light, one can view “Kong” in one of
two ways. It opened Pandora’s box to a special effects mindset of years of movie
magic, but which, left in the wrong hands, has threatened to kill it. Continue
reading →

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THE GRADUATE (1967)

Posted on December 3, 2012 by Jason Fraley

“I’ve had this feeling ever since I’ve graduated, this kind of compulsion that I
have to be rude all the time, you know what I mean? It’s like I’ve been playing
some kind of game but the rules don’t make any sense to me. They’re being made
up by all the wrong people.”

The power of “The Graduate” can be summed up in two images. The first is
Benjamin lying in the pool, post-graduation, trying to decide what to do in
life. We’ve all been there, that coming-of-age feeling of a “quarter-life
crisis,” uncertain about our future.

The second is the famous shot under Mrs. Robinson’s leg. In one shot, “The
Graduate” opened Hollywood’s bedroom door, planting the seeds for phrases like
“MILF” and “cougar” and paving the way for so many sex comedies to come, from
“American Pie” to “Desperate Housewives.” If you think such material shocks
audiences today, imagine the impact in 1967.

Together, this combo of coming-of-age politics and groundbreaking sexual
revolution changed the course of movie — and American — history. “The Graduate”
taught studio heads that great success could be had by making hipper films
targeting younger audiences, marking a demarcation point from the “sword and
sandal” epics of the ’50s and early ’60s. Director Mike Nichols played upon the
generation gap, flattering youth by depicting adults as materialistic
hypocrites, while leading Hollywood down a more socially-relevant path. Continue
reading →

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CASABLANCA (1942)

Posted on November 27, 2012 by Jason Fraley

Watch most any Warner Bros. movie, from “Blazing Saddles” (1974) to “The
Shawshank Redemption” (1994), and you’ll see a golden “WB” logo over nostalgic
piano notes. These are the notes of “As Time Goes By,” the recurring theme from
the film that has made Warner Bros. and all of Hollywood the most proud after 70
years.

“Casablanca” not only won Best Picture upon release, it remains the undisputed
champion of Hollywood’s Golden Age and, according to film critic Leonard Maltin,
“The best Hollywood movie of all time.” What a magnificent feat for a film that
was just one of dozens cranked out by Warner Bros. in 1942, and one of three
shot by Warner director Michael Curtiz that year.

Amidst the height of this studio assembly line, somehow all the stars aligned –
a powerful cast, an “exotic” soundstage locale, one of the great love songs in
music history, the single greatest script ever written, and current-events
subject matter pitting romance against the Nazi attempt to take over the world.
Continue reading →

Posted in Masterpieces, Reviews | Tagged casablanca, claude rains, conreid
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WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? (1988)

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Jason Fraley

“I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.” Few lines sum up a movie better than
this confession by Jessica Rabbit in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” Not that the
film is drawn poorly. Quite the contrary. The “bad” she speaks of is a delicious
naughtiness, a cleverness that emanates from every pore of this wholly original
film.

Its presentation may be safe for viewers of all ages, but the idea of combining
live action with animation for an entire feature length film was just as
dangerous as Jessica’s curves. The technique dates all the way back to the 1920s
when it was popularized by Walt Disney’s “Alice” cartoons. Disney revisited it
in films like “Song of the South” (1946), “Mary Poppins” (1964) and, after
Walt’s death, “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” (1971). Aside from Disney, you may also
remember a real-life boy befriending an animated dragon in the children’s
favorite “Pete’s Dragon” (1977) and Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry (of Tom and
Jerry) in the Oscar-winning “Anchors Aweigh” (1945). But it was Robert Zemeckis
and company who redefined the idea with “Roger Rabbit.” Not only did they
sustain the technique for the entire feature length, they also designed
increasingly complex ways of showcasing their mastery of it, all the while
supported by a solid story and noir style that amounts to more than just
gimmick. Continue reading →

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(1988)


LAURA (1944)

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Jason Fraley

If you’re a fan of film noir, you should get down on your knees and thank God
every day for 1944. The year produced three staples of this most atmospheric of
film styles — Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” from a novel by James M. Cain,
Edward Dmytryk’s “Murder, My Sweet (Farewell My Lovely)” from a novel by Raymond
Chandler, and, of course, Otto Preminger’s haunting whodunit “Laura,” from a
novel by Vera Caspary. Of the three, “Double Indemnity” clearly takes the title
of “Best Noir of ‘44.” But Preminger’s “Laura” at least gives it a run for its
murder-mystery money.

Voted the No. 4 Greatest Mystery of All Time by the AFI, “Laura” features all
the classic elements of both the mystery genre and the noir style: shadows,
mirrors, a murder investigation, a string of suspects insisting they’re
innocence, competing hearts, muddled morality, the looming threat of a femme
fatale and a smoking detective who lives by the motto: “Dames are always pulling
a switch on you.” Continue reading →

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DUCK SOUP (1933)

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Jason Fraley

Their careers began over a century ago, as a family vaudeville act in New York.
Yet the very mention of the phrase “Marx Brothers” has become cultural shorthand
for comic genius and a reminder that good comedy never stales. Yes, they were
all actual brothers, and yes, there were as many as five: Groucho, Harpo, Chico,
Zeppo and Gummo, though the lattermost left the act before the group started
making films in 1926.

In all, the siblings made 16 pictures together through 1957, and as the
wisecracking standout, Groucho enjoyed a solo career that stretched into the
’60s. But of all the films they made, none was more influential or more
hilarious than their 1933 flop “Duck Soup,” their last at Paramount, and last
with Zeppo, a film grossly under-appreciated in its day, but quite simply one of
the finest comedies ever made. Continue reading →

Posted in Masterpieces, Reviews | Comments Off on Duck Soup (1933)


A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951)

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Jason Fraley

I was 20 when I fell for Elizabeth Taylor. It was during one of my first
internships at The Baltimore Sun, when we heard the actress was on her death
bed. Film critic Michael Sragow and multimedia editor Jo Parker had me compile a
tribute video, filled with the cheesy transitions of a first-time editor. Thus
my first explorations of classic Hollywood came with my first explorations of
Taylor. I was a sucker for those breathless lines and purple eyes, and I quickly
realized there was so much more to Taylor than the diamonds and celebrity
home-wrecking I’d heard about.

She wound up living for six more years, and it became a running joke at The Sun
that my montage was still sitting on the shelf. By the time it finally ran in
2011, giving her “A Place in the (Baltimore) Sun,” I had hoped the day would
never come. I had grown totally endeared to her work, such that her passing
recalled her teary-eyed farewell to Monty Clift: “It seems like we always spend
the best part of our time, just saying goodbye.” Continue reading →

Posted in Masterpieces, Reviews | Comments Off on A Place in the Sun (1951)


THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007)

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Jason Fraley

In trying to pin down a masterwork by writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson, how
does one choose between the crude originality of Boogie Nights (1997), the
high-concept complexity of Magnolia (1999) or the lyrical power of There Will Be
Blood? The answer: Daniel Day-Lewis.

All three deserve to go down as great films, but There Will Be Blood seems even
greater, like the collision of two of modern cinema’s brightest forces, Anderson
and Day-Lewis, the impact of which has left us with a sprawling masterpiece. The
film is Anderson’s best attempt at social commentary, expanding upon his
explorations of modern suburban Los Angeles in Boogie Nights and Magnolia to
explore California’s frontier origins and what those roots say about American
ideals.

The film is mind-blowingly unique. Time called it “one of the most wholly
original American movies ever made.” And once you’ve taken the time to truly
digest what you’ve just seen, there’s only one logical conclusion: that Anderson
is one of the best, if not the best, young filmmaker out there today. Continue
reading →

Posted in Masterpieces, Reviews | Comments Off on There Will Be Blood (2007)


THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Jason Fraley

When “The Wild Bunch” arrived in 1969, even the most respected critics were torn
over whether Sam Peckinpah had created a masterpiece or an abomination. I fondly
recall a story Baltimore Sun critic Michael Sragow told me about the summer of
’69, when he saw “The Wild Bunch” six times in two weeks and wrote a piece to
his teacher insisting it was the greatest film ever made. Impressed, the teacher
helped Sragow get into NYU film school and become the first regular movie critic
for Rolling Stone magazine. Thirty six years later, I discovered the film at
Sragow’s behest in 2005, and my affection for it has only grown with multiple
viewings.

On the one hand, I envy Sragow and others’ ability to experience “The Wild
Bunch” in its full shocking debut, before the world became desensitized to
violence. On the other hand, it’s been a privilege to bypass years of
controversy over the film’s merits, and view it with the certainty that what I’m
witnessing is a masterpiece. How lucky I am not to have seen the Oscar snubbing
in 1969. Continue reading →

Posted in Masterpieces, Reviews | Leave a comment


GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Jason Fraley

The tale of “Gone With the Wind” starts and ends with one man, producer David O.
Selznick. From the very start, he set the highest of standards — to create the
biggest, most expensive, most glamorous Hollywood production that history had
ever seen. A toxic mixture of genius, megalomaniac, showman and perfectionist,
Selznick followed the now controversial advice of his father, a jeweler who had
failed at the movie business: “Live beyond your means. It gives you confidence.”

It paid off. Historians estimate that more people have seen “Gone With the Wind”
than any other movie in history. That is not to say only living people, but
overall people throughout the course of history. “‘Gone With the Wind’ is still
the reigning champion as far as all-time most popular movie,” said box office
analyst Paul Dergarabedian, who estimates the film has sold 200 million tickets
throughout history. “In other words, there have been more butts in movies seats
for that movie than any other film in history.” Continue reading →

Posted in Masterpieces, Reviews | 1 Comment


BLUE VELVET (1986)

Posted on January 15, 2012 by Jason Fraley

In the 2002 Sight & Sound critics poll, David Thomson voted Blue Velvet not just
his favorite movie of the ’80s, but his favorite film of all time. Thomson sang
the highest of praises, saying, “It would be as hard to advance on Blue Velvet
as it must have been to work after Citizen Kane.” (A) That sentiment was echoed
by Peter Travers, who called Blue Velvet a “perverse masterwork” and ranked it
#9 in Rolling Stone‘s 100 Maverick Movies.

Why, then, is there a backlash from mainstream viewers, who gave higher box
office receipts to 76 other movies that year? Why does the public rate it a 7.8
on IMDB? Why did Roger Ebert give it just one star in 1986? And why does it
still only get two stars on my Comcast cable box, compared to the 92% rating on
rottentomatoes?

The answer: Blue Velvet is not only odd, but it goes for something that
transcends cinema. As a first-time viewer, you share in the main character’s
uncomfortable departure from your safe movie-going existence. You go along with
it, because you’re intrigued, but by the time the velvet curtain drops, you
aren’t sure what to make of it. Wasn’t half the movie campy, corny, even poorly
written? And how does that compute with the other half, which is the exact
opposite — a brutally real underworld? Finally, you contemplate it long enough
and you realize the corniness and brutality are both there for a reason: two
contrasting views on the world around us, presented in two contrasting styles by
a director daring enough to challenge us and to comment on the film medium
itself. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment


FORREST GUMP (1994)

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Jason Fraley

“The way our great director Bob Zemeckis would describe it,” said Gary Sinise,
“sometimes we thought we were making Citizen Kane and other times we thought
Roger Rabbit.” Is Forrest Gump a profound commentary like Kane, or an
effects-driven romp like Roger Rabbit? Such a broad spectrum makes for a most
fascinating discussion about the critics and the mainstream.

While the public made Gump the highest grossing movie of 1994 and votes it an
8.7 on IMDB today, the experts remain splintered. They simultaneously shower it
with Oscars (six including Best Picture) and snub it entirely at Cannes, Venice
and Berlin. They vote it into the AFI Top 100, but give it zero votes on the
Sight & Sound critics poll. Most of all, they give it mixed reviews with a 72%
on rottentomatoes, some echoing Pauline Kael — “I hated it thoroughly” — and
others echoing Roger Ebert – “Forrest Gump is not only a great and magical
entertainment, but the more you think about it, the more it reveals itself as
actually sort of profound.” Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Forrest Gump (1994)


THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Jason Fraley

There may be no greater testament to The Wizard of Oz than the vast demographics
it covers, from theater types who adore Broadway’s Wicked to stoners who watch
the film in sync with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. After nearly 75 years,
the film has transformed itself from mild box office showing to must-see annual
TV event to timeless pop culture legend. It’s hard to think that the movie
started as just that — a movie.

It’s almost impossible to look objectively at a film that’s so burned into our
collective conscious that every song seems our own, every word feels part of our
vocabulary and every touch appears as if fate intended it to be there. The film
has become so mythical that many fans can no longer separate fact from fiction.
Didn’t a Munchkin hang himself on screen? Aren’t there hidden metaphors for
government policies? Wasn’t there some on-screen accident? Some off-screen
illness? Some of these myths have been busted; others embraced. But one thing is
for certain — a film that spawns so many legends must indeed be a legend itself.
Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment


IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946)

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Jason Fraley

For a film that’s become such a fixture in our homes each holiday season, it’s
amazing how much Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life still has the ability to
shock viewers with the same reaction: “I forgot how dark it is. How serious. How
little it actually focuses on Christmas.” Indeed, Capra uses the holidays as a
mere framing device for an in-depth character study into one man’s life of
disappointment — a kind of film noir with a second chance, a human tragedy with
revisionist fantasies.

“Happiness here was pursued by the hounds of living hell; the American Dream was
so close to the nightmare,” critic David Thomson writes. “The film that had
failed in 1947 had become a token of uplifting fellowship, yet it was a film
noir full of regret, self-pity and the temptation of suicide. How could so many
people convince themselves that it was cheery?” Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Comments Off on It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)


THE GODFATHER (1972) / THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Jason Fraley

Considering their spots atop just about every best list in existence, the idea
that “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” are the greatest films ever
made may seem more like a sacred truth than something still up for debate. To
this day, they remain the only original and sequel to both win the Oscar for
Best Picture. And yet, I have still heard an unfortunate few say they don’t get
the hype. Too long. Too slow. Too depressing. If you fall into this category, I
beg you to reconsider. If you like movies, and their potential to explain the
world around us, I promise this is a bandwagon worth joining.

How’s this for an offer you can’t refuse: my promise that by the end of this
review, if you truly take the time to read the litany of Coppola’s genius
directing techniques and powerful themes, you will finally understand why these
movies are so famous, so beloved and so revered. As the late Sidney Lumet said,
“They are as close to perfect movies as I think exists.” Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged al pacino, corleone, diane keaton, francis ford
coppola, gordon willis, james caan, lee strasberg, mario puzo, marlon brando,
nino rota, robert deniro, robert duvall, talia shire, the godfather, the
godfather part II | Comments Off on The Godfather (1972) / The Godfather Part II
(1974)


ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Jason Fraley

Bette Davis was Hollywood royalty, so respected that she was named the very
first female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She
was also so independent that she resigned when the Academy wouldn’t let her open
the 1942 Oscars to the public and donate the proceeds to British war relief.
After her resignation, studio head Darryl F. Zanuck said she would never work in
Hollywood again. But there he was, eight years later, signing her to play the
lead role of Margo Channing in All About Eve. It was a risky project, untouched
for years by studios who were uneasy about its unflattering presentation of
showbiz as a world of lying, opportunistic, backstabbing scum. No business like
it, indeed.

The film was fittingly released the same year as Sunset Blvd., where Billy
Wilder cast just as cynical a lens on the film industry. Thus 1950 will forever
stand as the year that show business was its most self-reflexive and its most
self-critical. While Sunset Blvd. usually ranks slightly higher on best lists
today, it was All About Eve that dominated in 1950, garnering a record 14
Academy Award nominations (tied with Titanic for the most in history) and
winning six, including Best Picture (Zanuck), Best Director (Joseph L.
Mankiewicz), Best Screenplay (Mankiewicz) and Best Actor (George Sanders).
Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged all about eve, anne baxter, bette davis, celeste
home, gary merrill, george sanders, hugh marlowe, marilyn monroe, thelma ritter
| Leave a comment


ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Jason Fraley

How brilliant a writer is Charlie Kaufman? Brilliant enough to earn three Oscar
nominations and contribute three scripts to the Writers Guilds’ 101 Greatest
Screenplays of All-Time — all in a span of six years. From 1999-2004, Kaufman
single-handedly gave us some of the most imaginative screenplays in the history
of movies, from Being John Malkovich (1999), about a puppeteer finding a hidden
doorway into the head of actor John Malkovich, to Adaptation. (2002), about
twin-brother screenwriters.

Yet as good as those scripts are — and they are phenomenal — Kaufman’s most
inventive and touching work has to be Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a
film about ex-lovers who undergo a procedure to erase eachother from their
respective memories. If only Jimmy Stewart had that luxury in Vertigo. And yet,
Eternal Sunshine is so much more than its original, bittersweet premise. Kaufman
layers his gimmick with deep characterization, beautiful themes and wondrous
science fiction. Of the three aformentioned scripts to land on the WGA list,
Eternal Sunshine ranks the highest at #24, and while the other two did not win
Kaufman Oscars, Eternal Sunshine finally did the trick. Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Comments Off on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)


ROCKY (1976)

Posted on November 12, 2011 by Jason Fraley

To argue the merits of Rocky as a popular phenomenon seems almost unnecessary,
and any plot summary is merely a formality. Everyone and his mother knows the
story of Philadelphia down-and-outer Rocky Balboa and his miracle long-shot at
boxing’s heavyweight crown. Few films can claim to have been seen, and beloved,
by so many. Even those who haven’t seen the film feel as if they have, and
everyone, fans and non-fans alike, can instantly call to mind the film’s
characters, quotes, music and images. It’s a part of the American experience, an
inspiration to millions and the blueprint for so many sports movies to follow.

Unfortunately, the film has become so diluted by pop culture references and
endless sequels that watching it today almost feels like an exercise in
self-parody. It’s so easy to forget that Rocky, the original, is actually a
solid film, however calculated. It’s the source of all our subconscious training
montages, an accessible commentary on the working class, the romanticized
epitome of the American Dream, a record setter at the box office, the Best
Picture of 1976, one of the finest love stories in movie history and the
greatest underdog story ever told. Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged adrian, apollo creed, balboa, burgess meredith, burt
young, carl weathers, italian stallion, john g. avildsen, mickey, philadelphia,
rocky, sylvester stallone, talia shire | Comments Off on Rocky (1976)


THE SEARCHERS (1956)

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Jason Fraley

“When I first saw The Searchers it was a terrific cowboy and Indian picture,”
said Steven Spielberg. “But as I got older and saw The Searchers numerous times,
I realized that it had much deeper meanings than that.”

I couldn’t agree more. For me, The Searchers was my “epiphany movie,” where the
veil of “normal” movie-watching was lifted to reveal another way of “seeing.” I
came to realize why director John Ford is so respected among filmmakers. Why in
2002, MovieMaker Magazine called him one of the Top 5 Most Influential Directors
of All Time. Why Entertainment Weekly voted him the #3 greatest of all time. And
why Orson Welles always maintained that his Top 3 favorite directors were “John
Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.”

What better way for average folks to have their own film theory awakening than a
deceptively simple John Wayne western, the type of “Cowboy and Indian” flick
your grandfather watched many a Saturday, not knowing that an entirely different
language — the language of cinema — was masterfully at work? Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged jeffrey hunter, john ford, john wayne, monument
valley, natalie wood, the searchers, vera miles | Leave a comment


REAR WINDOW (1954)

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Jason Fraley

By the late ’40s, Alfred Hitchcock had made roughly 40 films, and like many
great artists, he had become restless in his work. Yearning to stretch the
boundaries of a medium he had so clearly mastered, he began what some would call
his “experimental phase,” a creative flourish that produced Rope (1948), a film
shot in ten long “single takes” to create the illusion of one continuous shot;
Dial M for Murder (1954), which dabbled in a 3D technology that allowed Grace
Kelly to lift a pair of scissors off the screen; even The Man Who Knew Too Much
(1955), where he inserted a Doris Day musical number.

The greatest in this experimental period was, of course, Rear Window. Here,
Hitchcock concocted his most original, most challenging concept yet: to create
an entire film from one vantage point, the rear window of a Greenwich Village
apartment, and in turn, symbolize the very movie-watching experience and
director-viewer relationship that made him a legend. Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged alfred hitchcock, grace kelly, jimmy stewart, rear
window | Leave a comment


VERTIGO (1958)

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Jason Fraley

There’s a reason Alfred Hitchcock is history’s most respected director among
both the critics and the public. It’s because his career epitomizes the essence
of this site. The rotund man nimbly walked the tightrope between the academic
and the mainstream better than anyone — while so many others looked down and got
the spins. He was both a showman and a visionary, making films that celebrate
the nail-biting entertainment we love about the movies, yet ones that, upon
closer inspection, reveal a deeper understanding of how cinesthetic techniques
work wonders on the subconscious. That’s the mark of a true genius.

Now that the dust has settled from all the masterworks — from Psycho to The
Birds, Rear Window to Notorious — Hitchcock’s cream has finally risen to the
top. When Universal released its “Hitchcock Masterpiece DVD Collection,” Vertigo
was the only film to feature the word “Masterpiece” on the cover. When the AFI
updated its Top 100 list in 2007, Vertigo leaped 52 spots ahead to No. 9. And
when Sight & Sound conducted its latest international critics poll in 2012,
Vertigo finally ended Citizen Kane’s 50-year reign as the greatest film of all
time. Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged hitchcock, jimmy stewart, kim novak, vertigo | Leave
a comment


CITIZEN KANE (1941)

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Jason Fraley

“[‘Citizen Kane’] may be more fun than any other great movie,” wrote Pauline
Kael, godmother of all film critics. I have a hunch, however, that your average
viewer will agree more with Peter Griffin of “Family Guy:” “It’s a sled. There,
I just saved you two long, boobless hours.” Indeed, so many in the mainstream
reflect Joey and Rachel in “Friends:” “Have you ever tried to sit through
‘Citizen Kane?'” “I know. It’s really boring, but it’s like a big deal.”

Trust me. “Citizen Kane” is the single most important film for you to
understand, because it carries the very DNA required of every film critic, the
blueprint for any serious filmmaker and the standard by which scholars judge the
“great movies.” Understand this one, and you’ll have unlocked the most
challenging end of the film spectrum. You’ll be well on your way to
understanding the rest of the listology kings, the art masterpieces and the
critical favorites that have mystified you for so long. Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged citizen kane, gregg toland, herman mankiewicz, joseph
cotten, orson welles | Comments Off on Citizen Kane (1941)


THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994)

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Jason Fraley

Only a select few films have been called “the most beloved of all time.” Annual
TV airings earned the title for “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) and “It’s a Wonderful
Life” (1946), while box office receipts have made strong cases for “Gone With
the Wind” (1939), “The Godfather” (1972) and “Star Wars” (1977). But in the
internet age, a new generation of Millenials holds up a new contender: “The
Shawshank Redemption.”

Only in today’s culture of rapid film consumption and instant web response could
a film like “Shawshank” rise the ranks of reverence to do battle with the
listology kings of academic glory. This is why I’m choosing to launch The Film
Spectrum with “Shawshank” alongside “Citizen Kane.” In many ways, “Shawshank”
has become the “Citizen Kane” of IMDb, with more than half a million viewers
flocking to the site to rank the film No. 1. Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged frank darabont, morgan freeman, the shawshank
redemption, tim robbins | Leave a comment
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