News

Daniel Selznick, a Hollywood producer and executive who was a son of legendary Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick and theatrical producer Irene Mayer Selznick, has died. He was 88.

He died Thursday of natural causes at the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills and will be remembered “for his intelligence, charm, sweetness and generosity,” a spokesperson announced.

Born in Los Angeles on May 18, 1936, Selznick graduated from Harvard University, attended the University of Geneva and did graduate work at Brandeis University. He continued in his family’s footsteps and pursued a career in the entertainment industry, including working as a production executive at Universal Studios for four years.

His father, who died in 1965, produced dozens of iconic films, including 1939’s Gone With the Wind, 1946’s Duel in the Sun and 1933’s King Kong. His mother, who died in 1990, was the daughter of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer...

Filmax has acquired international rights to Spanish thriller “Nina,” the new feature written and directed by Andrea Jaurrieta (“Ana by Day”) that bows at this week’s Málaga Film Festival as one of its higher profile titles in main competition.

Loosely based on the play of the same name by José Ramón Fernández, which borrows elements of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” “Nina” tells the story of a woman, an actress, who returns to her home town on Spain’s rugged northern coast seeking to take revenge on a celebrated writer. As she encounters past acquaintances, including a once close childhood friend, and faces dark memories, she begins to question whether vengeance is the only way forward.

“Nina” stars Goya-winning actress Patricia López Arnaiz (“Ane is Missing”) as the titular character and San Sebastián Silver Shell winner Darío Grandinetti, famed for his performance in Pedro Almodovar’s “Talk to Her,...

Martin Scorsese accepted the Producers Guild’s David O. Selznick Achievement Award at the PGA Awards tonight and took the Hollywood & Highland Ovation Ballroom down memory lane — to about 60 years ago, when he accepted a PGA nod for his student film, It’s Not Just You, Murray! at the ripe age of 22.

Painting the scene, the Killers of the Flower Moon filmmaker said: “On the stage, Alfred Hitchcock, James Stewart, Jack Benny, Samuel Goldwyn, Jack Warner and Norman Lear, Lew Wasserman, Julie SteinCary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, Janel Leigh, Dick Van Dyke, Elke Sommer and David O. Selznick. They were the people on the dais at the 13th edition of this event on March 8, 1965. That dinner was called the Milestone Awards Dinner and presented at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

“At the very end of the dais was me,” Scorsese continued. “I was all the way on the end. I was receiving the Jesse L.

Nearly 74 years after the Producers Guild of America was formed, its members learned Sunday night that they finally be getting closer to getting healthcare coverage.

PGA presidents Stephanie Allain and Donald De Line announced at the trade organization’s 35th annual Award ceremony that the group has launched an initiative to eventually see every health insurance benefits for all full-time producers in the film and TV biz. Watch the clip from the show below.

“Producers, unlike unionized creative professionals in the industry, lack guaranteed health insurance benefits,” Allain and De Line said onstage at the PGA Awards in Hollywood. “Until now,” Allain declared.

Related: Charles D. King Makes History With PGA Milestone Award; Ryan Coogler Extols Macro Founder As Producer Who Wills Projects “To Exist”

“No one should go without these essential benefits. Producing is challenging enough without the added anxiety of wondering how you are going to obtain health...

Exclusive: The “Pay It Forward” PSA was launched during the Producers Guild Awards tonight, featuring a group of producers discussing producing.

“I’d say it starts with a feeling,” Victoria Alonso says.

Other producers featured in the video include Tommy Oliver, James Lopez, Taja Perkins, Ian Cooper, Kyle Wilson, Gary Goetzman, Linda Morel, Sharon Lopez, Jessica Elbaum and Christine Oh.

They take turns talking about all the obstacles they have to go through to make a production happen, like directors asking for a Black Hawk but not specifying if they meant the helicopter or the bird. Wilson says he ended up booking both.

Related: Martin Scorsese Accepts Producers Guild’s David O. Selznick Award, Shares How ‘Duel In The Sun’ Inspired Parts Of ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’

In one funny moment in the clip, Perkins questions the balance between her social and work life. “Am I in the office...

Over the course of his long career, Martin Scorsese has amassed scores of producing credits on projects ranging from “Uncut Gems” to “Once Were Brothers” and “Vinyl” in addition to his own work on films such as Oscar and PGA nominee “Killers of the Flower Moon.” His love of cinema and preservation of it is well established, making him a more than worthy recipient of the PGA’s David O. Selznick Achievement Award in Theatrical Motion Pictures.

But, technically speaking, Scorsese wasn’t much of a producer during the first three decades of his career. He’s listed as a producer on his early short films “Vesuvius VI” (1959) and “The Big Shave” (1967) and an associate producer on the music documentary “Medicine Ball Caravan” (1967). But he didn’t take another producing credit until the 1990 feature “The Grifters,” directed by Stephen Frears, and he didn’t take one on a film he directed until 2010’s “Shutter Island.

Pedro Almodóvar has never done Westerns. Not unless you count the winks at “Johnny Guitar” in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988) or “Duel in the Sun” in “Matador” (1985). Likely the most American and the most masculine of genres, the Western and the onscreen cowboy are foundational figures of manhood.

Continue reading ‘Strange Way Of Life’ Review: Pedro Pascal & Ethan Hawke Pine For Their Unlived Romance in Pedro Almodóvar’s Terrific Western [Cannes] at The Playlist.

Director/Tfh Guru Allan Arkush discusses his favorite year in film, 1975, with Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Rules of the Game (1939)

Le Boucher (1970)

Last Year At Marienbad (1961)

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982)

Topaz (1969)

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

Hollywood Boulevard (1976) – Jon Davison’s trailer commentary

The Innocents (1961) – Joe Dante’s trailer commentary

The Earrings of Madame De… (1953)

Rope (1948) – Darren Bousman’s trailer commentary

Make Way For Tomorrow (1937)

The Awful Truth (1937) – Charlie Largent’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Duck Soup (1933) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

Going My Way (1944)

Nashville (1975) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary, Dan Perri’s trailer commentary

M*A*S*H (1970)

Shampoo (1975) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Bonnie And Clyde (1967) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

The Nada Gang (1975)

Get Crazy (1983) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary

Night Moves (1975) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Dog Day Afternoon (1975) – Katt Shea’s trailer...

US one sheet for Our Daily Bread.Though he was a name-above-the-title director back in the day and made some of the enduring classics of American cinema, the great Hollywood director King Vidor is no longer remembered as Hollywood royalty. The son of a Hungarian immigrant, Vidor made some 50 feature films over the course of 40 years, was nominated five times for the Academy Award for Best Director (in 1979 he was finally awarded an Honorary Oscar), and some of his films—The Crowd (1928) and Hallelujah! (1929) in particular—are die-hard masterpieces. Starting today, New York’s Film at Lincoln Center will be showing 20 of Vidor’s features in an attempt to redress the balance and revitalize his reputation. It is the first major US retrospective of his work since “Rediscovering King Vidor” ran at the Public Theater in 1994, on the 100th anniversary of his birth..Restlessly exploring multiple genres, working from the...

“Killing a Man is One Thing … Loving His Wife is Another!“

The Film Detective Presents the Intriguing, Golden Age-Sizzler The Capture, Coming to Special-Edition Blu-ray & DVD, Jan. 18th. Rare 1950 Western Noir Classic Returns With Striking New Restoration & Exclusive Special Features. Here’s a trailer for the restoration:

Cinedigm announced today that The Film Detective, the classic film restoration and streaming company, will release the western noir classic The Capture (1950) on special-edition Blu-ray and DVD, available Jan. 18.

From writer Niven Busch, author of Duel in the Sun, comes this equally torrid sizzler, loaded with the intrigue and passion that marked the Golden Age of Cinema.

Injured and on the run from police, Lin Vanner (Lew Ayres) confesses the sordid details of his life to a priest, which includes the death of a man he’d turned over to the police. Vanner also reveals that he fell in love with the dead...

Westerns are populated with cowboys, gunslingers, bandits, Native American, horses, cows and buffalos. But the genre is much more complex than shoot-‘em-ups. In fact, the best Westerns are Shakespearean in nature exploring such universal subjects as love, hate, revenge, greed, power and good versus evil. One of the most popular sub-genres is the “ranch” Western where the patriarch or matriarch — remember Barbara Stanwyck in “The Big Valley”– governs with a strict and often violent hand. They act like they are above the law and often take legal matters into their own hand. They are often widowers or widows and have sons who run the spectrum from hero to villain.

Jane Campion’s highly acclaimed Netflix Oscar-contender “The Power of the Dog” falls into this sub-genre. Set in Montana in 1925, the story revolves around the charismatic but sadistic Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) who relishes being the master of a cattle rancher.

Based upon the kudos count to date, Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” clearly ranks as one of the top awards-contending films of 2021. For those fascinated by that raucous, rowdy, storm-the-barricades Hollywood moment known as the “New Hollywood,” which started roughly in the mid-’60s and was exhausted or vanquished — depending upon who’s telling the history — by the end of the 1970s, it’s also the perfect embodiment of that era’s fondness for revisionism, both historical and cinematic, as well as sexual frankness wherever the filmmakers could find it.

Which shouldn’t be surprising, given that the film’s taut, deadly source material is Thomas Savage’s piercing 1967 modern Western, “The Power of the Dog.” Set in 1925, a little over a decade past the 1913 setting of Sam Peckinpah’s revolutionary 1969 revisionist Western, “The Wild Bunch,” “Dog,” like “Bunch,” skewers the American Dream along with myths of...

Welcome back to the Supporting Actress Smackdown. Each month we pick an Oscar vintage to explore through the lens of actressing at the edges. This episode goes back to the 19th Academy Awards honoring 1946. It isn't a particularly beloved Oscar vintage though the Best Picture winner, The Best Years of Our Lives, is sublime. Apart from the winner and the Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life, the Academy all but ignored the most enduring pictures of that post-war year. But we're here to discuss Best Supporting Actress and these five women were having a moment...

The Nominees For the 1946 Oscars the Academy invited back two previous winners (Gale Sondergaard & Ethel Barrymore), tossed a bouquet in the form of 'career' nomination to a legend (Lillian Gish), honored a character actress for stretching (Flora Robson) without realizing how poorly that kind of stretch would age, and invited a new starlet (Anne Baxter) into the club.

In just a week's time the next Supporting Actress Smackdown and its companion podcast arrives. We'll be discussing the films and performances of 1946 so hurry up and finish watching Anna and the King of Siam, Duel in the Sun, The Razor's Edge, Saratoga Trunk, and The Spiral Staircase. Your votes count. Let's meet your fellow panelists, shall we?

Please Welcome New Guests...

The Supporting Actress Smackdown will resume in March 2021. Final Season! 

Happy Smackdown to you Happy Smackdown to you

Happy Smackdown you actressexuals,

Happy Smackdown to youuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!

After StinkyLulu graciously let us continue/revive the series here seven or eight years ago (eep!) we've done 35 episodes: 1938, 1941, 1943, 1944, 1947, 1948, 1952, 1954, 1957, 1960, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1968, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1994, 1995, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, and concurrently with Oscar races as they happened 2016, 2017, and 2018. 

So, where to now? 

The Remaining Years

1937- Brady  (In Old Chicago) | Leeds (Stage Door) | Shirley (Stella Dallas) | Trevor (Dead End) | Whitty (Night Must Fall)

1946 - Baxter (The Razor's Edge) | Barrymore  (The Spiral Staircase) | Gish (Duel in the Sun) | Robson (Saratoga Trunk) | Sondegaard (Anna and the King of Siam)

1951 Joan Blondell (The Blue Veil) | Dunnock (Death of a Salesman) | Grant (Detective Story) | Hunter (A Streetcar Named Desire) | Ritter (The Mating Season)

1986 - Harper (Crimes of the Heart) | Laurie (Children of a Lesser God) | Mastrantonio (The Color of Money) | Smith (A Room With a View) | Weist (Hannah and Her Sisters...

The writer/director of The Love Witch talks about her favorite classic women’s pictures.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

The Love Witch (2016)

Baby Face (1933)

Stromboli (1950)

Europa ’51 (1951)

Fear (1951)

Duel In The Sun (1946)

The Scarlet Empress (1934)

Blonde Venus (1932)

Nora Prentiss (1947)

Woman On The Run (1950)

Wait Until Dark (1967)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Imitation of Life (1969)

Little Women (2019)

Emma (2020)

My Cousin Rachel (2017)

Sex and the City (2008)

Mamma Mia! (2008)

Mildred Pierce (1945)

The Reckless Moment (1949)

Sudden Fear (1952)

Torch Song (1953)

Captain Marvel (2019)

Other Notable Items

The Captain Trips virus in Stephen King’s novel The Stand (1978)

Marlene Dietrich

Mae West

Jennifer Jones

Joan Crawford

Joan Bennett

Gene Tierney

Barbara Stanwyck

The Hays Code

Cary Grant

Marilyn Monroe

Ingrid Bergman

Roberto Rossellini

The Academy Awards

Bette Davis

Jennifer Jones

Gregory Peck

Joseph Cotten

Travis Banton

Josef von Sternberg

Catherine the Great

The Criterion Collection

Kent Smith

Dan Duryea

Douglas Sirk

Jane Austen

Mildred Pierce TV miniseries...

Charles Laughton’s sole directorial effort, the 1955 suspense classic The Night of the Hunter is getting a modern remake from Universal Pictures, according to Variety. Amy Pascal’s (Spider-Man: Far From Home) Universal Pictures-based banner Pascal Pictures will produce along with Peter Gethers. The screenplay will be written by Matt Orton, best known for the Nazi-hunter film Operation Finale, based on Davis Grubb’s 1953 novel.

The original film is iconic, and Robert Mitchum’s portrayal of newly released prison convict Harry Powell is one of the greatest villains of the silver screen. This is the film which introduced the hand tattoos Love and Hate and the biblical battle fought just below the knuckles. It is the story of good and evil that goes back to when “Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low.” The inked-fingers had “veins that run straight to the soul of man.”

The book and...

American director-producer-screenwriter King Vidor (1894-1982), whose long and notable career parallels the history of Hollywood filmmaking, is the subject of a 35-film retrospective at the Berlinale, curated by Rainer Rother, artistic director of the Deutsche Kinematek and head of the Retrospective program. The films, chosen from five decades, will be screened in the best extant copies. Rother notes, “We are able to present very good 35mm prints of most of the films; given the developments in the industry, that most likely won’t be possible too often anymore.” Screenings will take place at CinemaxX 8 and at Zeughauskino, which is part of the Deutsches Historisches Museum. Select silent works will feature live piano accompaniment.

After several retrospectives centering on films from specific time periods or genres, or illuminating the history of aesthetic and technical innovations, Rother felt it was a good time to dedicate a retrospective to a director again. Why Vidor?...

What were you doing at 25? Well, Saoirse Ronan is a four-time Oscar nominee, picking up her latest bid, for Best Actress for “Little Women,” on Monday. She’s now the second youngest person, male or female, to accrue four acting nominations.

Jennifer Lawrence is the youngest to do so, also at the age of 25, when she was shortlisted for Best Actress for “Joy” (2015), but she has the edge because of her birthday; Lawrence was born Aug. 15, 1990, and Ronan on April 12, 1994, so JLaw was approximately four months younger at the time of their respective nominations.

Lawrence grabbed the record from another Jennifer — Jones, who was 27 at the time of her fourth consecutive nomination, for Best Actress for “Duel in the Sun” (1946).

Ronan is already the seventh youngest Best Supporting Actress nominee, earning the bid at 13 for her breakthrough turn in “Atonement” (2007), but she’s been denied some other “youngest” records. While...

If Saoirse Ronan makes the Best Actress Oscar cut for “Little Women,” there’s a 99.9 percent chance she’ll be the youngest nominee of the group at the age of 25. But in terms of Oscar resumes, she’d be an ol’ veteran. Ronan would be on her fourth career bid, which would make her the second youngest performer, male or female, to amass four nominations.

The record is currently held by Jennifer Lawrence, who snatched it from Jennifer Jones. Jones, who won Best Actress on her 25th birthday for “The Song of Bernadette” (1943), was 27, a couple weeks shy of her 28th birthday, at the time of her fourth consecutive nomination, for Best Actress for “Duel in the Sun” (1946). Lawrence was 25 when she received her fourth nomination, for Best Actress for “Joy” (2015), but the tiebreaker is their birthdays — Lawrence was born Aug. 15, 1990, and Ronan on April 12, 1994 — so Lawrence was about four...

While much has been made about Quentin Tarantino’s plans for his tenth and (supposed final) film, the director’s next creative project might not be a film at all. In a wide-ranging conversation with fellow filmmaker Martin Scorsese published in the fall issue of “DGA Quarterly,” Tarantino revealed that he’s working on a book whose plot ponders Hollywood vs. foreign cinema. “I’ve got this character who had been in World War II and he saw a lot of bloodshed there. And now he’s back home, and it’s like the ’50s, and he doesn’t respond to movies anymore. He finds them juvenile after everything that he’s been through. As far as he’s concerned, Hollywood movies are movies,” Tarantino said. “And so then, all of a sudden, he starts hearing about these foreign movies by Kurosawa and Fellini. … And so he’s like, ‘Well,...

Gay Talese comparing Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Cimino to Italian painters working for the Popes during the Renaissance: "These painters now are directors." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In early 1970, Gay Talese drove up unannounced to the Spahn Ranch. It was less than a year after the murders of Sharon Tate, Voytek Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Jay Sebring by members of the Manson family that had lived there. The journalistic adventure of meeting George Spahn was turned by Gay into the Esquire magazine article Charlie Manson's Home On The Range. The location is featured in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt with Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate and Bruce Dern as Spahn.

Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) and Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

King Vidor's Duel in the Sun, starring Gregory Peck,...

Man Without a Star

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1955/ 2.00:1 / 89 min.

Starring Kirk Douglas, William Campbell, Jeanne Crain, Claire Trevor

Cinematography by Russell Metty

Directed by King Vidor

King Vidor, the director behind the bucolic Kansas sequences in The Wizard of Oz and the histrionics of Duel in the Sun, has it both ways in 1955’s Man Without a Star starring Kirk Douglas.

Douglas follows his director’s lead – acting primarily with his teeth, the eager to please ham gives a performance almost as broad as his wayward sailor in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But as screenwriter Borden Chase slowly pulls back the masks on his characters, Douglas settles into a more reasonable approximation of a human being.

Closing in on 40, the irrepressible show-off plays a wandering cowpoke named Dempsey Rae who follows constellations for clues to his destiny and so far he’s come up empty – the “man without a star.

Tony Sokol Jul 30, 2019

Western movies, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, wouldn't have been the same without the infamous ranch owned by George Spahn.

Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood attempts to take back stolen potential via the kind of fantasy fulfillment that's made only possible on celluloid. As with the Beatles' song "Helter Skelter," Sharon Tate, and the peace and love generation as a whole, the icons of hope in the 1960s were all tainted by mere association with Charles Manson. None of these needed to be linked to the murderous narcissist. Tate, magnificently captured Margot Robbie in the film, would have continued the rising trajectory of her film and modeling career; "Helter Skelter" would be remembered as the song that invented heavy metal, when it was just Paul McCartney trying to make as much noise on vinyl as possible; peace and Love would...

Classic cinematics from first-rank filmmakers. No ballet or heroism, so not a crowd pleaser, but Michael Powell’s original version of Gone to Earth is another unique Archers creation. Jennifer Jones finally gets to chew on a character role with grit, as a natural virgin/vixen misunderstood by contrasting suitors. David O. Selznick’s revision The Wild Heart is a classic too — of unnecessary meddling.

Gone to Earth / The Wild Heart

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1950 / Color / 1:37 flat Academy / 110, 86 min. / Street Date June 25, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Jennifer Jones, David Farrar, Cyril Cusack, Sybil Thorndike, Edward Chapman, Esmond Knight, Hugh Griffith.

Cinematography: Christopher Challis

Film Editor: Reginald Mills

From the novel by: Mary Webb

Music by Brian Easdale

Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

This is one beautiful production, one that will thrill Powell & Pressburger fans eager to see all of his films. With his typical cinematic simplicity,...

The college censorship debate has reached Hollywood. More than 50 prominent artists, writers, and film scholars are supporting the restoration of the names of the Gish sisters, Dorothy and Lillian, to a film theater at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

The letter accuses the university of making “a scapegoat in a broader political debate.” Among those signing their names are James Earl Jones, Helen Mirren, Martin Scorsese, George Stevens Jr., Bertrand Tavernier, Malcolm McDowell, Lauren Hutton, Joe Dante, and Taylor Hackford. The letter is a response to Bowling Green’s May 3 decision to change the name of the Gish Theater because of Lillian Gish’s acting role in D. W. Griffith’s incendiary 1915 silent film “The Birth of a Nation.”

“The Birth of a Nation” has been called one of the most racist films ever made, and it’s credited with leading to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in America.

The McCullough family band together as Phineas is robbed of influence and Eli goes chasing The Blue Light on The Son season 2, episode 6.

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This The Son review contains spoilers.

The Son Season 2 Episode 6

In The Son, season 2, episode 6, "The Blue Light," flirts with surrealism as legal woes and societal norms take their toll on the usually steadfast First Son of Texas. Eli McCullough (Pierce Brosnan) shows the first cracks in the armor which has protected him his whole life. His many lives, if you count how many times he's survived seemingly insurmountable wounds. The episode shows he's not as self-sufficient as he's let on. A stronger force has been propping him up since his days as a Comanche, and it is sobering to see Eli so nakedly needy. Although, not quite sobering enough.

In the newest timeline, Ulises Gonzales (Alex Hernandez) finds the last remnants of...

Happy Jennifer Jones Centennial!

Paolo wasn't kidding when he said that the Centennial of Jennifer Jones (that's today!) would be a challenge. Though we usually have some buy-in for centennials literally no one else on Team Tfe volunteered for this one so it'll be short. But I'll do one or two pictures. i'm annoyed that I can't do Duel in the Sun (1946), which I've never seen, but I can't find it to stream. Actually easy availability is how I came up with your choices. So vote and tell me which of these films you most want to discuss:

free polls

But before we get there, and overview of her career.

And the eternal question: How long can any given star can stay at 'the top' from Old Hollywood to the right now...

For the Centennial of one of Oscar's largely forgotten superstars, we asked Team Experience to pick one of her films to watch.

by Paolo Kagoaoan

We’ve done centennials here before but this one comes with some degrees of difficulty. It doesn’t help that someone changed her name from Phylis Lee Isley into the whitest name in the world, and that the person who gets more Google results for that name is a curler. As a Canadian I can’t say anything bad about curling, but shouldn't a Best Actress Academy Award winner be on at least equal standing to a Gold medallist? Look up all the women who have had five Oscar nominations and a win and imagine the world forgetting them. Explaining Jones to friends is equally difficult, even to people in the film industry who know her second husband's name, David O. Selznick.

I’d only...

Once upon a time, in a long-forgotten early Hollywood before David O. Selznick was the most famous movie producer of his time, the term "Selznicked" was coined to describe someone who had just lost their shirt. Such was the impact of the rags-to-riches-to-rags story of Lewis Selznick, David’s pioneering movie industry father. Lewis, a Russian Jewish immigrant, was a flash-in-the-pan success during the silent era, earning and then going on to lose something like $11 million dollars in the course of a decade. In fact, one of the most powerful and longest-reigning moguls of classical Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer, had a grudge against the young Selznick that would have killed most movie careers in the cradle. He warned his besotted daughter Irene that David would amount to nothing ("a bum like his father"), and refused to give the upstart a job at MGM until pressed by other colleagues. Mayer, like the rest of Hollywood elite,...

Cult favorite Samuel Fuller explodes the mid-range Hollywood oater with elements we can all appreciate: a ritualistic fetishizing of the gunslinger ethos, and a reliance on kinky role reversals and provocative tease dialogue. It’s as radical as a western can be without becoming a satire. Playing it all perfectly crooked-straight is the still formidable Barbara Stanwyck. Her black-clad ‘woman with a whip’ keeps a full forty gunmen to enforce her will on a one-lady town.

Forty Guns

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 954

1957 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 80 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 11, 2018 / 39.95

Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan, Dean Jagger, John Ericson, Gene Barry, Eve Brent, Robert Dix, Jidge Carroll, Paul Dubov, Gerald Milton, Ziva Rodann, Hank Worden, Neyle Morrow, Chuck Roberson, Chuck Hayward.

Cinematography: Joseph F. Biroc

Film Editor: Gene Fowler Jr.

Original Music: Harry Sukman

Produced, Written and Directed by Samuel Fuller

Was there ever a...

Ya know, “It’s a Big Country!” Westerns and pacifism are like oil and water, but William Wyler, Jessamyn West and three other top writers found a way for Gregory Peck to surmount eight showdowns and never fire a pistol in anger. Jean Simmons and Charlton Heston win top acting honors, while Burl Ives earns his Oscar, Carroll Baker gets the thankless role and composer Jerome Moross makes western music history. MGM’s remastering job fixes the problems of an earlier Blu-ray, and even brings the title sequence up to tip top condition. Plus several hours of special extras.

The Big Country

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1958 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 166 min. / Street Date June 5, 2018 / 60th Anniversary Edition / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Carroll Baker, Charlton Heston, Burl Ives, Charles Bickford, Alfonso Bedoya, Chuck Connors, Chuck Hayward, Dorothy Adams, Chuck Roberson.

Cinematography: Franz F. Planer

Film Editor: Robert Swink...

Prepare to let your jaw drop: Jennifer Jones and Charlton Heston’s sleazy bucolic ‘romance’ comes off as two-way sex harassment, with suggestive one-liners that make us cringe. Are there other pictures like this? Is this where dolts came to believe that women wanted to be treated like stupid squeeze toys? The great King Vidor directed, with no sign of intentional satire — the bizarre, eventually violent Southern-set melodrama is a one-of-a-kind grotesque spectacle.

Ruby Gentry

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1952 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 82 min. / Street Date April 24, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.96

Starring: Jennifer Jones, Charlton Heston, Karl Malden, Tom Tully, James Anderson, Josephine Hutchinson, Phyllis Avery, Barney Phillips.

Cinematography: Russell Harlan

Film Editor: Terry Morse

Original Music: Heinz Roemheld

Written by Silvia Richards from a story by Arthur Fitz-Richard

Produced by Joseph Bernhard, King Vidor

Directed by King Vidor

I have two basic thoughts on 1952’s Ruby Gentry. First,...

David O. Selznick’s marvelous romantic fantasy ode to Jennifer Jones was almost wholly unappreciated back in 1948. It’s one of those peculiar pictures that either melts one’s heart or doesn’t. Backed by a music score adapted from Debussy, just one breathy “Oh Eben . . . “ will turn average romantics into mush.

Portrait of Jennie

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1948 / B&W w/ Color Insert / 1:37 flat Academy / 86 min. / Street Date October 24, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Cecil Kellaway, David Wayne, Albert Sharpe.

Cinematography: Joseph H. August

Production Designers: J. MacMillan Johnson, Joseph B. Platt

Original Music: Dimitri Tiomkin, also adapting themes from Claude Debussy; Bernard Herrmann

Written by Leonardo Bercovici, Peter Berneis, Paul Osborn, from the novella by Robert Nathan

Produced by David O. Selznick

Directed by William Dieterle

Once upon a time David O. Selznick’s Portrait of Jennie was an...

David O. Selznick’s absurdly over-cooked western epic is a great picture, even if much of it induces a kind of hypnotic, mouth-hanging-open disbelief. Is this monument to the sex appeal of Jennifer Jones, Kitsch in terrible taste, or have Selznick and his army of Hollywood talents found a new level of hyped melodramatic harmony? It certainly has the star-power, beginning with Gregory Peck as a cowboy rapist who learned his bedside manners from Popeye’s Bluto. It’s all hugely enjoyable.

Duel in the Sun

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1946 / Color / 1:37 flat Academy / 144 min. / Special Edition / Street Date August 15, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring Jennifer Jones, Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotten, Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Walter Huston, Butterfly McQueen, Charles Bickford, Tilly Losch.

Cinematography Lee Garmes, Ray Rennahan and Harold Rosson

Production Designer J. McMillan Johnson

Film Editor Hal C. Kern, John Saure and William H. Ziegler

Original Music Dimitri Tiomkin

Written by Niven Busch,...

This isn’t the only Alfred Hitchcock film for which the love does not flow freely, but his 1947 final spin on the David O. Selznick-go-round is more a subject for study than Hitch’s usual fun suspense ride. Gregory Peck looks unhappy opposite Selznick ‘discovery’ Alida Valli, while an utterly top-flight cast tries to bring life to mostly irrelevant characters. Who comes off best? Young Louis Jourdan, that’s who.

The Paradine Case

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1947 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 125 min. / Street Date May 30, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring Gregory Peck, Alida Valli, Ann Todd, Charles Laughton, Louis Jourdan, Ethel Barrymore, Joan Tetzel.

Cinematography Lee Garmes

Production Designer J. McMillan Johnson

Film Editors John Faure, Hal C. Kern

Original Music Franz Waxman

Writing credits James Bridie, Alma Reville, David O. Selznick from the novel by Robert Hichens

Produced by David O. Selznick

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

There...

Another release of the Kramer-Foreman-Zinnemann classic gives Savant another chance to make his argument that this supposedly 'liberal' movie is too confused to be anything but political quicksand -- if anything, its statement is bitterly hawkish. High Noon Blu-ray Olive Signature 1952 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 85 min. / Street Date September 20, 2016 / available through the Olive Films website / 39.95 Starring Gary Cooper, Thomas Mitchell, Grace Kelly, Katy Jurado, Lloyd Bridges, Lon Chaney Jr, Harry Morgan, Otto Kruger, Lee Van Cleef. Cinematography Floyd Crosby Production Designer Rudolph Sternad Film Editor Elmo Williams Original Music Dimitri Tiomkin Written by Carl Foreman Produced by Stanley Kramer Directed by Fred Zinnemann

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

This is my fourth time out with a review of High Noon, starting fourteen years ago with a pretty miserable Artisan DVD, then a Lionsgate 'ultimate edition,' followed by Olive Film's first, quite good Blu-ray. Olive now revisits the 1952 classic as...

Filmmakers will look almost anywhere for inspiration, but for Magnificent Seven director Antoine Fuqua, inspiration came from a place very close to home--grandma's home.  For Fuqua, his love of Westerns and his desire to make one is very much tied to the relationship he had with his grandmother, who used classics like Shane and Duel in the Sun to keep her grandson from becoming the kind of villain she despised.  "She was just one of those little ladies from the South,...

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Beginning in 1937 — the opening credits take us through a series of period photos and alert us to expect something with a potentially greater scope than simply the biopic of one man — Scarred Hearts is still inspired by the life of one figure: writer and intellectual Max Blecher, in the case of this film reconfigured as Emanuel (Lucius Rus), suffering from bone tuberculosis and put in a hospital on the edge of the Black Sea. A 20-year-old man with his life ahead of him, there’s the belief within him that this is all to pass, though, as history will attest, that’s unfortunately not true.

Like another two-and-a-half-hour Romanian dry comedy about the medical process, Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Scarred Hearts plays up the control doctors hold over us in a critical state for maximum absurdity, of course the joke of antiquated health care emphasized in director Radu Jude’s case.

The early cowboy movies were built on a simple moral struggle between goodies and baddies. So why did they so quickly evolve into psychologically bleak depictions of damaged souls?

Among the rocks and dust of an Arizona canyon, a man and a woman want to kill each other. Each draws closer, gun in hand, and they take turns to fire, inflicting wounds. Yet between each shot, the desire they feel for one another overwhelms them. Here, love reveals itself as murderous, and murder proves loving. Mortally wounded, the woman crawls through the dust so they may die, stilled at last, in each other’s arms. The scene is over-the-top, it is preposterous, and yet in being so it is also exceedingly magnificent. From Duel in the Sun (1946), David O Selznick and King Vidor’s delirium-dream of a movie, this moment encapsulates the operatic astonishment of the postwar Hollywood western, with...

The early cowboy movies were built on a simple moral struggle between goodies and baddies. So why did they so quickly evolve into psychologically bleak depictions of damaged souls?

Among the rocks and dust of an Arizona canyon, a man and a woman want to kill each other. Each draws closer, gun in hand, and they take turns to fire, inflicting wounds. Yet between each shot, the desire they feel for one another overwhelms them. Here, love reveals itself as murderous, and murder proves loving. Mortally wounded, the woman crawls through the dust so they may die, stilled at last, in each other’s arms. The scene is over-the-top, it is preposterous, and yet in being so it is also exceedingly magnificent. From Duel in the Sun (1946), David O Selznick and King Vidor’s delirium-dream of a movie, this moment encapsulates the operatic astonishment of the postwar Hollywood western, with...

There aren’t many films we’re anticipating more than Martin Scorsese‘s priest drama Silence. An adaptation of Shûsaku Endô‘s novel, the story follows Andrew Garfield as Father Rodrigues, a 17th-century Portuguese Jesuit who travels to Japan with a fellow priest amid rumors that Rodrigues’ mentor (Liam Neeson) has abandoned the Church.

Once aiming for a Cannes debut, rumors suggest that likely won’t be happening, but a new report from Screen Daily suggests Paramount will release it this November, a fitting bow in the heat of awards season. Unlike Scorsese’s last film, The Wolf of Wall Street, the date means he won’t be so down to the wire in the editing room.

As we await the drama, Scorsese has also chimed in to celebrate 100 years of Technicolor, the motion picture process invented in 1916 and then later utilized for a great number of cinematic classics. In...

Refresh your screen for updates as we add to the list. If you suspect you've seen a statistic worth shouting about, put it in the comments.

Records Broken This Year

Jennifer Jones (Duel in the Sun, age 27) vs Jennifer Lawrence (Joy, age 25)• Jennifer Lawrence (who is 25 years old) breaks Jennifer Jones's record of quickest actor to 4 nominations. Jones had held that record -- she accomplished 4 nominations by the age of 27 -- since 1947. But no more.

• Carol becomes the Most Nominated Film in the modern expanded Best Picture field era to not receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The previous record was a three way tie between The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Skyfall (2012) and Foxcatcher (2014) which each received 5 nominations but were not included in Best Picture. [Aside: The all time record holder, from back when there were only 5 Best Picture nominees and more room for this sort of "achievement" in not quite making it, is They Shoot Horses Don't They (1969) which received 9 nominations. Of these four other pictures, all but Foxcatcher won at least one Oscar. So we'll see on Carol.

2015 Specific Records

• Tom Hardy and Domnhall Gleeson are the most ubiquitous faces from the Best Picture lineup. Each actor appears in two...

A few years ago the editors of Shadowlocked asked me to compile a list of what was initially to be, the ten greatest movie matte paintings of all time. A mere ten selections was too slim by a long shot, so my list stretched considerably to twenty, then thirty and finally a nice round fifty entries. Even with that number I found it wasn’t easy to narrow down a suitably wide ranging showcase of motion picture matte art that best represented the artform. So with that in mind, and due to the surprising popularity of that 2012 Shadowlocked list (which is well worth a visit, here Ed), I’ve assembled a further fifty wonderful examples of this vast, vital and more extensively utilised than you’d imagine – though now sadly ‘dead and buried’ – movie magic.

It would of course be so easy to simply concentrate on the well known, iconic,...

Is there anything more inherently cinematic than a good old fashioned “cat and mouse” story? One character wants to kill another. That other wants to stay alive at all costs. Put them in an interesting setting, ratchet up the emotional stakes, and watch humanity boil over for two hours or so. Desierto, the feature directorial debut […]

The post ‘Desierto’ Trailer: Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Gael Garcia Bernal Have a Little Duel in the Sun appeared first on /Film.

Kitty Gordon: Actress in silent movies and on the musical comedy stage. Rediscovering a long-forgotten silent film star: Kitty Gordon It seems almost unthinkable that there are still silent stars who have not been resurrected, their lives and films subject to detailed, if not always reliable, examination. Yet I am reminded by Michael Levenston, a Canadian who has compiled what is best described as a “scrapbook” of her life and career, that there is one such individual – and not just a “name” in silent films, but also from 1901 onwards famed as a singer/actress in musical comedy and on the vaudeville stage in both her native England and the United States. And she is Kitty Gordon (1878-1974). 'The Enchantress' and her $50,000 backside Kitty Gordon was a talented lady, so much so that Victor Herbert wrote the 1911 operetta The Enchantress for her; one who also had a “gimmick,” in that...

Edward Dmytryk's big-scale cattle empire saga sees paterfamilias Spencer Tracy drive away his sons and bull his way into a modern civil dispute that can't be resolved with force. Robert Wagner is the loyal son and Richard Widmark the resentful son impatient for Dad to cash in his chips. Fox's early CinemaScope and stereophonic sound western is a transposition of a film noir mystery thriller. Broken Lance Blu-ray Twilight Time Limited Edition 1954 / Color / 2:55 widescreen / 96 min. / Ship Date November 10, 2015 / available through Twilight Time Movies / 29.95 Starring Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Jean Peters, Richard Widmark, Katy Jurado, Hugh O'Brian, Eduard Franz, Earl Holliman, E.G. Marshall, Carl Benton Reid, Philip Ober. Cinematography Joseph MacDonald Film Editor Dorothy Spencer Original Music Leigh Harline Written by Richard Murphy, Philip Yordan Produced by Sol C. Siegel Directed by Edward Dmytryk Reviewed by Glenn EricksonSome of the early 'big' westerns that aspire to epic status are...

Robert Walker: Actor in MGM films of the '40s. Robert Walker: Actor who conveyed boy-next-door charms, psychoses At least on screen, I've always found the underrated actor Robert Walker to be everything his fellow – and more famous – MGM contract player James Stewart only pretended to be: shy, amiable, naive. The one thing that made Walker look less like an idealized “Average Joe” than Stewart was that the former did not have a vacuous look. Walker's intelligence shone clearly through his bright (in black and white) grey eyes. As part of its “Summer Under the Stars” programming, Turner Classic Movies is dedicating today, Aug. 9, '15, to Robert Walker, who was featured in 20 films between 1943 and his untimely death at age 32 in 1951. Time Warner (via Ted Turner) owns the pre-1986 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer library (and almost got to buy the studio outright in 2009), so most of Walker's movies have...

Above: a theater advertising Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951).If there’s one thing I love almost as much as movie posters (at least as far as the world of movie advertising goes) it is the movie theater marquee. I am particularly attracted to marquees in their more elaborately designed and outlandish incarnations, but I am also fond of photographs of marquees simply as a record of a moment in time when a particular film was out in the world. (One of my personal favorite Movie Poster of the Week posts was this examination of a 1930 photo of Times Square theater signs.)Over the past few years on Tumblr I have been collecting some of the best images of movie theater signage through the ages and today I am launching Movie Poster of the Day’s sister blog Movie Marquees. In Maggie Valentine’s The Show Starts on...

Teresa Wright: Later years (See preceding post: "Teresa Wright: From Marlon Brando to Matt Damon.") Teresa Wright and Robert Anderson were divorced in 1978. They would remain friends in the ensuing years.[1] Wright spent most of the last decade of her life in Connecticut, making only sporadic public appearances. In 1998, she could be seen with her grandson, film producer Jonah Smith, at New York's Yankee Stadium, where she threw the ceremonial first pitch.[2] Wright also became involved in the Greater New York chapter of the Als Association. (The Pride of the Yankees subject, Lou Gehrig, died of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in 1941.) The week she turned 82 in October 2000, Wright attended the 20th anniversary celebration of Somewhere in Time, where she posed for pictures with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. In March 2003, she was a guest at the 75th Academy Awards, in the segment showcasing Oscar-winning actors of the past. Two years later,...