Screen Savers Movies » Fantasy and Horror

Portrait of Jennie (1948)

Jon Hansen, Publisher — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:01:02 +0000

In late 1948, producer David O. Selznick released Portrait of Jennie, a romantic fantasy that defied the conventions and, not surprisingly, died at the box-office. Audiences were asked to accept a “serious” romance between a man and a female ghost in a time-curving story in which the past and the present come together. It’s easy to see why ticket buyers resisted its ahead-of-its-time metaphysics: there’s nothing comic about the way its fairy-tale elements intermingle with its reality; the film retains an aura of mystery, choosing not to go out of its way to explain its necessarily inexplicable plot, including its ending. Nowadays, we’re overly familiar with all manner of time-travel stories and nothing in Portrait of Jennie should confuse a modern moviegoer. Call it a mood piece, a film that communicates with an emphasis on visual inventiveness, the key to its enthralling power. (How many other Hollywood films of the era could conceivably be described as mood pieces?) It’s an exquisite, meticulously wrought production, a haunting, cosmic tale of the quests for true love and artistic inspiration beyond the boundaries of time.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
© 2008 Hansen Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved.

Learn more about Portrait of Jennie

The Iron Giant (1999)

John DiLeo — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 04:01:01 +0000

It’s rare for an animated film to have such a strong social context in recent history. The Iron Giant is a children’s film about the Cold War, and it deals explicitly with the fear of other, yet it does so without becoming a didactic finger-wagger. With humor and the emotional bonding between boy and giant, the points are made in the right way, through dramatic action and character development. It’s a comic-book style entertainment rooted to a very real, and nervous, time and sensibility. The movie has some satiric fun with the period by including two black-and-white sequences that scream the 1950s: scenes from a stiffly acted, science-fiction movie about a square-jawed scientist, his curvy nurse, and a hungry brain, that Hogarth watches on television; and a schoolroom educational short about how to survive “atomic holocaust.” Both scenes induce smiles for their innocent quaintness. Just because Rockwell, Maine is an idyllic America, with a sun-baked wharf and autumnal colors brightening the landscape, doesn’t mean that its citizens aren’t expecting invaders from Mars, or at least Russia.

Learn more about The Iron Giant

The Man Who Laughs (1928)

Jon Hansen, Publisher — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 04:01:53 +0000

Not many would dispute that Hollywood horror movies had their heyday at Universal in the 1930s, the location and period that produced, among others, Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Invisible Man (1933). But Universal’s prowess in the genre had already been well established before the sound era immortalized Bela Lugosi’s accent and Boris Karloff’s grunts. The studio had made The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the two films for which the incredible Lon Chaney is most revered. Universal produced another horror milestone in the silent era, after Chaney had moved over to MGM. The Man Who Laughs is not nearly as well known as the two Chaney classics, nor was it famously remade, but it’s the most terrifying of the three, all of which found horror in the human rather than the supernatural. Since it was made during Hollywood’s transition to sound, The Man Who Laughs is one of those silents with a soundtrack of music and aural effects but no spoken dialogue. Because it marked silent film’s last hurrah, some would argue that 1928—move over, 1939—was Hollywood’s greatest year. That year’s roster, boasting The Crowd, Street Angel, The Wind, A Woman of Affairs, The Circus, Show People, and The Last Command, proved that visual storytelling had reached an apex of sophistication and mobility. A year later, cameras would be playing second-fiddle to microphones, resulting in a blessedly short-lived era of hopelessly stagnant movies. The Man Who Laughs is one of 1928’s best films, a macabre marvel whose biggest claim to fame is that it was Batman creator Bob Kane’s acknowledged inspiration for the look of the Joker, Batman’s flamboyant nemesis.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
© 2008 Hansen Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved

Learn more about The Man Who Laughs

Time after Time (1979)

John DiLeo — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 04:01:01 +0000

In Time after Time, traveling through time is accomplished by the nuts and bolts of science, specifically a helicopter-like machine that converts sun rays into electricity. This is time travel as H. G. Wells envisioned it in his novel The Time Machine (1895), and that’s no coincidence: Time after Time is an ingenious, grown-up fantasy thriller that puts Wells himself inside the machine of his imagination and sends him hurtling into the future. That’s a fresh, clever concept of make-believe, but the film’s creators go a step further by adding another historical figure to their magical revisionism: Jack the Ripper. Written and directed by Nicholas Meyer (with a story by Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes), Time after Time is smart and inventive, an accomplished amalgam of social satire, serial-killer horrors, offbeat romance, fish-out-of-water comedy, and historical conjecture. These ambitious elements congeal so sensibly, and plausibly, that Time after Time whizzes by, a witty entertainment made of equal parts charm, scares, and laughs. And it does all this with a minimum of special effects.

Learn more about Time after Time

Isle of the Dead (1945)

Jon Hansen, Publisher — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 04:01:04 +0000

Set in Greece during the 1912 Balkan War, Isle of the Dead receives its grotesqueness partly from its setting and partly from its director, Mark Robson, whose resumé boasted other horror flicks of the time. The story that unwinds on the island of quarantined plague victims is more disturbing than even its superficial impression would hint at, as the unknowing General Pherides (Boris Karloff) and Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer) discover the truth behind an old village woman’s suspects of vampires and demons.

Learn more about Isle of the Dead

Mann of the West

John DiLeo — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 03:05:53 +0000

Well, we can cross one movie off our list of hoped-for DVDs! The Criterion Collection has had the good sense and taste to release director Anthony Mann’s magnificent western THE FURIES (1950). Whether you are a collector or a Netflix user, it’s one you should not miss. In my book SCREEN SAVERS, I focus on 40 under-appreciated movies. If I had added just one more movie, it’s quite likely that THE FURIES would have been next in line. The Mann western that I did include in the book is the outstanding and equally overlooked DEVIL’S DOORWAY (1950), which will be screened on TCM’s night devoted to SCREEN SAVERS on September 22nd. THE FURIES, made earlier that year, is a western noted for its volatility, the suddenness of its violence, and its unmistakable strain of incest. Operatically extravagant, it’s a film in which love and hate are so closely allied that they are barley distinguishable. It’s certainly the best of Barbara Stanwyck’s eleven western features and also the final top-notch movie of her extraordinary career. She plays the daughter of widower Walter Huston, one of the most powerful men in the New Mexico territory of the 1870s. His cattle ranch, The Furies, is a vast empire. The closeness shared by father and daughter turns ugly and violent, mainly due to the effects of their outside romantic entanglements, with Stanwyck eventually vowing to destroy daddy and claim the ranch for herself.

This is the movie with the electrifying scene in which Stanwyck flings a pair of scissors at Judith Anderson’s face. Anderson plays a marriage-minded widow set on nabbing Huston, but she’s a threat to Stanwyck who instantly detests her. Stanwyck was past forty when she starred in this movie, yet she’s remarkably convincing playing much younger. She’s a blonde here, looking far more attractive than she did when she blonded herself for DOUBLE INDEMNITY six years earlier.

Stanwyck has a brief yet memorable run-in with a tart who says, “I’m new in town, honey.” To which Stanwyck replies, “Honey, you wouldn’t be new anyplace.”

This was Walter Huston’s final film, and it was released four months after his death. He and Stanwyck are sensational together, bringing out the sizzling best in each other. Two great stars, a phenomenal western director, glorious Oscar-nominated black-and-white cinematography, a ferocious and intelligent script, a superb supporting cast…what more could you want? Maybe, at last, THE FURIES is on its way to becoming the classic it has always been to those of us who love and admire it.

The Iron Giant (1999): Animating the Cold War

John DiLeo — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:43:59 +0000

It’s rare for an animated film to have such a strong social context in recent history. The Iron Giant is a children’s film about the Cold War, and it deals explicitly with the fear of other, yet it does so without becoming a didactic finger-wagger. With humor and the emotional bonding between boy and giant, the points are made in the right way, through dramatic action and character development. It’s a comic-book style entertainment rooted to a very real, and nervous, time and sensibility. The movie has some satiric fun with the period by including two black-and-white sequences that scream the 1950s: scenes from a stiffly acted, science-fiction movie about a square-jawed scientist, his curvy nurse, and a hungry brain, that Hogarth watches on television; and a schoolroom educational short about how to survive “atomic holocaust.” Both scenes induce smiles for their innocent quaintness. Just because Rockwell, Maine is an idyllic America, with a sun-baked wharf and autumnal colors brightening the landscape, doesn’t mean that its citizens aren’t expecting invaders from Mars, or at least Russia.

Time after Time (1979): Jack the Ripper in the Disco Era

John DiLeo — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:37:54 +0000

The time travel in Portrait of Jennie is of a spiritual variety, an inexplicable colliding of past and present in the name of a transcendent love that would otherwise never be. In Time after Time, traveling through time is accomplished by the nuts and bolts of science, specifically a helicopter-like machine that converts sun rays into electricity. This is time travel as H. G. Wells envisioned it in his novel The Time Machine (1895), and that’s no coincidence: Time after Time is an ingenious, grown-up fantasy thriller that puts Wells himself inside the machine of his imagination and sends him hurtling into the future. That’s a fresh, clever concept of make-believe, but the film’s creators go a step further by adding another historical figure to their magical revisionism: Jack the Ripper. Written and directed by Nicholas Meyer (with a story by Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes), Time after Time is smart and inventive, an accomplished amalgam of social satire, serial-killer horrors, offbeat romance, fish-out-of-water comedy, and historical conjecture. These ambitious elements congeal so sensibly, and plausibly, that Time after Time whizzes by, a witty entertainment made of equal parts charm, scares, and laughs. And it does all this with a minimum of special effects.

Portrait of Jennie (1948): A Love Beyond Time

John DiLeo — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:31:06 +0000

Isle of the Dead (1945): The Psychological Horror Film

John DiLeo — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:24:55 +0000

Lewton used three directors for the series: Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson, and Robert Wise. Each of these men had worked as film editors, with Wise editing Citizen Kane (1941) and Robson on board as the associate editor. After directing Cat People, Tourneur directed the next two: I Walked with a Zombie (1943), a voodoo reworking of Jane Eyre, and The Leopard Man (1943). Robson, who was the editor on the three helmed by Tourneur, graduated to director with The Seventh Victim (1943), all about a satanic cult in Greenwich Village, and The Ghost Ship (1943). Wise, replacing Gunther V. Fritsch and sharing screen credit, took over the directing chores on The Curse of the Cat People (1944), a sequel only in a loose sense, and then made The Body Snatcher (1945), the film that brought Boris Karloff into the Lewton fold. Lewton’s final two, both starring Karloff and directed by Robson, were Isle of the Dead (1945) and Bedlam (1946). (The cheesy titles of all these films continue to do them a disservice.) All three directors took what they learned here—how to do a lot with a little—and brought it to film noir, a genre whose emergence certainly owed a debt to the fatalistic mood and shadowy style of Lewton’s work. Tourneur directed Out of the Past (1947), Wise made Born to Kill (1947), and Robson gave us the noir-ish boxing classic Champion (1949). Tourneur’s career never rose to the A list, but he continued to do fine work, such as Stars in My Crown (1950) and Wichita (1955), two exceptional Joel McCrea vehicles. Wise and Robson became big-time Hollywood players, with Wise winning Oscars for West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965), and Robson bringing Peyton Place (1957) and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) to box-office glory. (Wise returned to his “horror” roots with 1951’s memorable sci-fi drama The Day the Earth Stood Still.)