With The Great Gatsby surprisingly raking in over fifty million dollars on its opening weekend, I guess it’s here to stay, for a little while anyway.  Which means that I may end up seeing it.  But didn’t I swear that I would never again see a Baz Luhrmann movie?  I still haven’t recovered from that sustained horror known [...]

[Read more →]

Born James Stewart on May 6, 1913, Stewart Granger (who died at age 80 in 1993) would have turned 100 today.  A London native, he made a solid career for himself (after the necessary name change) in the British film industry during the middle and late 1940s.  (The most notable of his English films is [...]

[Read more →]

My first book, And You Thought You Knew Classic Movies!: 200 Quizzes for Golden Age Movie Lovers (1999), is making its debut as an e-book this June, and it will also be getting its second print edition.  There are some slight revisions in the text, plus a very obvious change on the outside:  a brand-new cover.  In place of [...]

[Read more →]

Set in 1954 Japan, director Sam Fuller’s House of Bamboo belongs to a rare sub-genre:  the color noir.  That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it accurately describes a select club of movies that also includes Violent Saturday (1955), Slightly Scarlet (1956), and The River’s Edge (1957).  These films use vibrant colors to play on our [...]

[Read more →]

As film noir was emerging in the mid-to-late 1940s, an interesting hybrid was developing right alongside it:  the docudrama noir.  The bad guys in these movies are embroiled in noir-ish crime stories filmed in stunning shadows, while the good guys are bent on displaying the inner workings of U.S. law enforcement institutions:  T-Men (1947) deals with the Treasury [...]

[Read more →]