Everything Else
“When you think about it, the entire history of literature is nothing more than people coming in and out of doors. Whereas science fiction is about EVERYTHING ELSE.” I went looking for this Ken...
View ArticleThe Chicago Way
SCARFACE stars Louis Pasteur; Molly Louvain; Pendola Molloy; the Duc de Richlieu; Surat Khan; Spats Colombo; Fishbone; Hjalmar Poelzig; Count Mancini; Freedonia’s Secretary of War #1; with Kitty...
View ArticleGrail Enquiries
My line on EXCALIBUR has long been that John Boorman decided, boldly but perhaps unwisely, to make an Arthurian epic as if MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL had never happened. I came up with a new line...
View ArticleOutfoxed
For the second installment of Forgotten by Fox, I examine the tattered fragments of Howard Hawks’ THE CRADLE SNATCHERS, maybe his most Hawksian early work outside of A GIRL IN EVERY PORT. There are...
View ArticleGutter Blossom
THE WICKED DARLING (1919) is Tod Browning and Lon Chaney and so it’s of interest, but that interest mainly plays out in the trainspotting exercise of spotting the Browning motifs when they appear, as...
View ArticleDonald Crisp’s Invisible Dog
(Now with FIXED SOUND) Fiona immediately felt, on seeing the above scene from THE DAWN PATROL (1938), that I should excerpt it for Shadowplay. And, obviously, I agreed. When did Donald Crisp go from...
View ArticleForget it, Jack, it’s Chinatown
Kurt Russell IS Jack Burton AS John Wayne in BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA. Long before Johnny Depp hit on the idea if being a leading man character actor and incorporating elements of impersonation —...
View ArticleThe Sunday Intertitle: The Idiot Stick
Afternoon, everybody. Before Charlie meets the blind flower girl in CITY LIGHTS he was at one point going to spend five solid minutes struggling with a stick stuck in a grating outside a department...
View ArticleCox’s Orange Pippins: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Except with Bullets
I knew I’d be looking at a tortilla western or Zapata western in this series — maybe more than one. The Italians visited the Mexican Revolution a fair bit, either because their Spanish locations and...
View ArticleThe Image of Fred
‘And that is the problem with other claims that all thoughts are images. Suppose I try to represent the concept “man” by an image of a prototypical man — say, Fred MacMurray. The problem is, what makes...
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