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David Hinton’s thoroughly captivating Made In England: The Films Of Powell And Pressburger (a highlight of the 23rd edition of the Tribeca Festival) has Martin Scorsese (who is also an executive producer) as our personal guide into the wonderful world of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, which includes production designers Alfred Junge and Hein Heckroth, cinematographer Jack Cardiff, and art director Arthur Lawson.

Starting with The Thief Of Baghdad (co-directed by Powell with Ludwig Berger and Tim Whelan) and The Tales Of Hoffmann on a black and white TV, little Marty was already “bewitched.” Later, The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp’s influence is vast on Scorsese, with the duel between Clive Candy (Roger Livesey) and Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) inspiring the way he shot (cinematography by Michael Chapman) and cut (by Thelma Schoonmaker) the fight scene in Raging Bull, and with...

David Hinton with Anne-Katrin Titze (holding up her Mansur Gavriel Square Toe Ballerinas) on Moira Shearer starring in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes: “She was a ballerina, she wasn’t an actress. And Michael insisted, we must have a ballerina!”

David Hinton’s thoroughly captivating Made In England: The Films Of Powell And Pressburger (a highlight of the 23rd edition of the Tribeca Festival) has Martin Scorsese (who is also an executive producer) as our personal guide into the wonderful world of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, which includes production designers Alfred Junge and Hein Heckroth, cinematographer Jack Cardiff, and art director Arthur Lawson.

David Hinton on casting Karlheinz Böhm in Peeping Tom: “It seems such an extraordinarily strange thing to do but it works so perfectly, doesn’t it?”

Starting with The Thief Of Baghdad (co-directed by Powell with Ludwig Berger and Tim Whelan...

David Hinton with Anne-Katrin Titze (holding up her Mansur Gavriel Square Toe Ballerinas) on Moira Shearer starring in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes: “She was a ballerina, she wasn’t an actress. And Michael insisted, we must have a ballerina!”

David Hinton’s thoroughly captivating Made In England: The Films Of Powell And Pressburger (a highlight of the 23rd edition of the Tribeca Festival) has Martin Scorsese (who is also an executive producer) as our personal guide into the wonderful world of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, which includes production designers Alfred Junge and Hein Heckroth, cinematographer Jack Cardiff, and art director Arthur Lawson.

David Hinton on casting Karlheinz Böhm in Peeping Tom: “It seems such an extraordinarily strange thing to do but it works so perfectly, doesn’t it?”

Starting with The Thief Of Baghdad (co-directed by Powell with Ludwig Berger and Tim Whelan...

In David Hinton’s new documentary “Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger,” Martin Scorsese talks about the profound influence the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger had on him.

A young, asthmatic Scorsese grew up largely an indoor child when American films weren’t licensed to television, so he feasted on the duo’s great British films like “The Red Shoes” and “Tales of Hoffmann.” Co-written and narrated by Scorsese, “Made in England” makes direct connections between a Powell and Pressburger film like “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” and Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence” and “Raging Bull.” In one remarkable sequence, Hinton even crosscuts between Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) from “Taxi Driver” and Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) from “The Red Shoes,” as Scorsese narrates, “They’re both characters on the edge of things, listening, observing other people, always on the verge of exploding.

by Cláudio Alves

Some would sell their soul for riches beyond compare, fame and the immortality that comes with it, or perchance beauty, wisdom, and other such treasures. The Faust of Teutonic legend yearned for all the knowledge in the world and pleasure to go with it. When Goethe re-imagined him as a dissatisfied scholar, Faust sought to trick Mephistopheles by asking for transcendence. Compared to these bargains, the protagonist of The Queen of Spades seems modest in his ambitions. For Captain Herman Suvorin of the Russian army, the immortal soul is an appropriate price to pay for the secret of winning at cards.

Starring Anton Walbrook and envisioned by director Thorold Dickinson, Suvorin's story becomes the basis for an oft-forgotten gem of Gothic Horror that's also one of Martin Scorsese's favorite movies…...

World War II was still raging in May 1944. The allied invasion of Normandy — aka D-Day — was just around the corner on June 6th. Americans kept the home fires burning and escaped from the global conflict by going to the movies. Two of the biggest films of the year, Leo McCarey’s “Going My Way” and George Cukor’s “Gaslight,” recently celebrated their 80th anniversaries.

Actually, “Going My Way” had a special “Fighting Front” premiere on April 27th: 65 prints were shipped to battle fronts and shown “from Alaska to Italy, and from England to the jungles of Burma.” The sentimental comedy-drama-musical arrived in New York on May 3rd.

And it was just the uplifting film audiences needed. Bing Crosby starred as Father O’Malley, a laid-back young priest who arrives at a debt-ridden New York City church that is run by the older, set-in-his ways Father Fitzgibbon (Barry Fitzgerald). The elder...

This post contains spoilers for "Barbie."

Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" movie is a cinematic marvel. The first film in the newly-minted Mattel cinematic universe, "Barbie" mines corporate history and IP while still managing to be original, subversive, and even laugh-out-loud funny. Frankly, it's shocking the film got made at all, especially considering the fact that Will Ferrell plays a highly satirical version of Mattel's very own CEO. In fact, when she first read the script, star Margot Robbie's first thought was "We'll never make this movie," because of how much it pokes fun at the company behind the (in)famous doll.

Working under both the constraints of a big Hollywood studio and a billion-dollar toy corporation, Gerwig and her co-writer Noah Baumbach came up with a script that is wholesome enough to appeal to the bosses but witty enough to tickle even the most cynical of viewers. Robbie is perfection in the lead role,...

To mark the release of Queen of Spades on 23rd January, we’ve been given Blu-ray copies to give away to 2 winners.

St. Petersburg, 1806. Army officer Herman Suvorin (Anton Walbrook) has become obsessed with playing cards, particularly the game of Faro, where the Queen of Spades is considered an unlucky card.

On stumbling upon a mysterious book about the secrets of a notorious Count, Herman becomes convinced that the elderly Countess Ranevskaya (Edith Evans) possesses the secret of winning every game. Desperate to learn the secret for himself, Herman devises a plan to gain access to her house by seducing her young Ward, Lizaveta (Yvonne Mitchell). The plan goes awry when Herman accidently startles the Countess, leading to her death.

At the Countess’s funeral, Herman comes to pay his respects, but when he leans over her open coffin, her eyes open and he lets out a howl of fear.

Thorold Dickinson’s 1949 Pushkin adaptation is a glorious melodrama about an ambitious Russian military officer and a countess who sold her soul to the devil in exchange for the secrets of a card game

Ambition, sin and horror are the keynotes of Thorold Dickinson’s brilliant 1949 melodrama based on the story by Pushkin. The density of visual detail and incident on screen is superb and the swirling, delirious onrush of storytelling is addictive. This is surely one of the great gambling movies, and one that makes the theological connection explicit: Pascal recommended that you have nothing to lose by betting on God’s existence, but the worldly sinner gambles that the last judgement does not exist and that pleasure and gratification in this life are everything. Dickinson’s control of the screen is a joy, something to be compared to Max Ophüls: I wonder how he might have directed The Earrings of Madame De…...

There is nothing quite like the shades of red in a Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger movie. The color absolutely radiates from the screen in their Technicolor masterpieces, fully immersing us in the passions of the characters. You have the rouge on Kim Hunter's heart-shaped lips in "A Matter of Life and Death," like a premonition of a love so pure and strong it can bring David Niven's dashing airman back from the afterlife. At the other end of the scale, you have the ominous red in the closing scenes of "Black Narcissus," enveloping us in a spurned nun's murderous jealousy.

Then, of course, you have the titular footwear in "The Red Shoes," the film often considered the writer-producer-director duo's greatest work. Along with Jean Renoir's "The River," Powell and Pressburger superfan, Martin Scorsese, considers it to be one of the two most beautiful movies ever shot in color,...

Patrick Hamilton's play "Gas Light" debuted on the London stage in 1938. It was about Jack and Bella, characters who had recently married but whose relationship is immediately rocky. She hates his flirtatious ways and mishandling of money. Most frustratingly, he seems to disappear from their home for hours at a time without explanation. During this time, the gaslights in the house would dim. Whenever Bella brought up this odd quirk or mentioned any missing objects, Jack would assure her that she was imagining it -- indeed, that she might be going insane. It is from Hamilton's play that the modern vernacular has taken "gaslighting" as a verb. 

"Gas Light" was first adapted to film in 1940 by director Thorold Dickinson. That version starred Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard, and it was a modest hit. The 1940 version, however, is not nearly as well-remembered as George Cukor's far more popular remake only four years later.

The only sales pitch needed is “The Red Shoes has been encoded in 4K.” Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s 1947 masterpiece conquered America as had no previous English film. This is one artsy dance show that captivates nearly everybody: audiences can be counted on to ooh and ahh the film’s dazzling hues, striking dance artistry and endless visual creativity. Cameraman Jack Cardiff took first position as the world master of Technicolor, and Moira Shearer’s dancing is recorded forever, celebrated as with no other ballet artist. Criterion’s 4K remaster includes all the extras of their 2010 restored Blu-ray.

The Red Shoes

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 44

1947 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 133 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 14, 2021 / 49.95

Starring: Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring, Léonide Massine, Ludmilla Tchérina, Robert Helpmann, Albert Basserman.

Cinematography: Jack Cardiff

Production Design and Costumes: Hein Heckroth

Film Editor: Reginald Mills

Original Music: Brian Easdale

Written,...

In film history, the anthology genre is the most challenging. Episodic films often have several directors and screenwriters which gives them an inconsistent tone and quality. But the genre’s pitfalls haven’t stopped such filmmakers including Akira Kurosawa (“Dreams”), the Coens (“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”), Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez (“Sin City”); Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese (“New York Stories”); and Joe Dante, John Landis, George Miller and Steven Spielberg (“Twilight Zone: The Movie”).

Wes Anderson joined them with his latest film “The French Dispatch,” which received a nine-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. The comedy brings to life three stories from an American magazine published in a fictional French city and features his stock company of actors including Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson.

If you are a fan of the genre, here are the best anthology movies that...

(Welcome to The Quarantine Stream, a new series where the /Film team shares what they’ve been watching while social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic.) The Movie: The Red Shoes Where You Can Stream It: HBO Max The Pitch: Aspiring ballerina Vicky Page catches the eye of ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), […]

The post The Quarantine Stream: ‘The Red Shoes’ is Technicolor Passion Come to Life appeared first on /Film.

Creepy isn’t the same as scary.

Of course horror movies can be scary simply by using loud noises and sudden movements to make their audiences jump, but creepy is harder to pull off. To be effectively creepy, a film needs to establish a certain atmosphere; it needs to draw you in and make you care. It needs to give you something to think about when you’re trying to drop off to sleep at night; to make you wonder whether that creaking noise down the hallway was just the house settling or something lurking in the shadows. Creepy stays with you. It gives you goosebumps.

Here are 85 of the best horror movies (in no particular order) to chill your bones. Enjoy the nightmares.

Us (2019)

Jordan Peele’s follow up to his award winner Get Out is another social horror. While it might not be quite as accomplished or coherent...

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“Card Tricks”

By Raymond Benson

This British gem was considered a lost film until a print was somehow discovered a little over ten years ago and re-released in art houses and on home video. The Queen of Spades, from 1949, was one of only nine pictures helmed by Thorold Dickinson, a Norwegian director who worked mostly in the UK but also in Europe and Africa. He was perhaps most known for directing the original British version of Gaslight (1940), which George Cukor and MGM suppressed when they remade it as a Hollywood movie in 1944 (with Ingrid Bergman). There are some who believe Dickinson’s Gaslight is the better of the two.

Dickinson has been re-appraised in recent years by the likes of filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson, and by critics with a taste for genuine style and substance in their movies. The Queen of Spades...

The Queen of Spades

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1949/ 1.33:1 / 95 min.

Starring Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans

Directed by Throld Dickinson

One of the pleasures of discovering 1949’s The Queen of Spades is also discovering its director, Thorold Dickinson. Born and educated in Bristol, he abandoned Oxford for London to concentrate on the fine art of film editing and soon found himself behind the camera.

Dickinson made waves with 1940’s Gaslight but Queen was something of a critical flashpoint for the diligent director – called in as a last minute replacement, the project would cement his reputation as an artist whose portentous visual style said as much about his characters as any screenplay. Not coincidentally, those qualities were shared by the film’s associate producer, Jack Clayton.

Based on Alexander Pushkin’s 1834 short story, the film is set in a snowbound St. Petersburg enclave in 1803, a gothic inversion of one of Ernst Lubitsch‘s fairy tale villages.

To mark the release of La Ronde on 27th May, we’ve been given 1 copy to give away on Blu-ray.

Anton Walbrook guides us through the chain of amorous encounters as the enigmatic, omnipotent master of ceremonies. One fleeting moment links to the next, partners change and the dance goes on, turning with the elegance of a Viennese waltz, until the story is brought full circle in the final vignette.

With its breathtaking use of long takes and beautiful fluid camera moves Max Ophüls directs with stunning style and élan to create an astounding cinematic masterwork.

Please note: This competition is open to UK residents only

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The Small Print

Open to UK residents only The competition will close 10th June 2019 at 23.59 GMT The winner will be picked at random from entries received No cash alternative is available To coincide with Gdpr regulations, competition entry information will not...

What, another docu about Nazis? Rüdiger Suchsland’s show tells the entire story — with many rare clips and interesting actor and filmmaker profiles — of the hundreds of state-produced German films made during the Third Reich. It’s the most thorough, informative and eye-opening show on the subject I’ve yet seen. It comes with revelations about some surprising names, like Douglas Sirk and Ingrid Bergman.

Hitler’s Hollywood

DVD

Kino Lorber

2017 / Color & B&W / 1:78 enhanced widescreen / 105 min. / Street Date July 10, 2018 / Hitlers Hollywood: Das deutsche Kino im Zeitalter der Propaganda 1933 – 1945 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Narrated by Udo Kier

With film clips of Hans Albers, Heinz Rühmann, Zarah Leander, Ilse Werner, Marianne Hoppe, Gustaf Gründgens, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Alfred Abel, Lída Baaroví, Willy Fritsch, Gustav Fröhlich, Lilian Harvey, Johannes Heesters, Brigitte Helm, Paul Henreid, Margot Hielscher, Emil Jannings, Pola Negri, Magda Schneider, Kristina Söderbaum, Anton Walbrook.

Film Editor: Ursula Pürrer

Produced by Gunnar Dedio,...

The Video Essay is a joint project of Mubi and Filmadrid Festival Internacional de Cine. Film analysis and criticism found a completely new and innovative path with the arrival of the video essay, a relatively recent form that already has its own masters and is becoming increasingly popular. The limits of this discipline are constantly expanding; new essayists are finding innovative ways to study the history of cinema working with images. With this non-competitive section of the festival both Mubi and Filmadrid will offer the platform and visibility the video essay deserves. The six selected works will be shown during the dates of Filmadrid on Mubi’s cinema publication, the Notebook. There will also be a free public screening of the selected works during the festival. The selection was made by the programmers of Mubi and Filmadrid.Red ShowgirlsVideo essay by Jorge NegreteThe prestigious Lermontov Ballet Company changes its elegant...

In what could be his final film role, Daniel Day-Lewis is a perfect fit as a celebrated dress designer in Paul Thomas Anderson’s beautifully realised tale of 50s haute couture

Paul Thomas Anderson’s best film since Punch-Drunk Love is another cracked romance with a masochistic streak and a strong fairytale underpinning. Set in postwar London, amid the insular world of 50s haute couture, Phantom Thread is an oedipal gothic romance, a tale of lost mothers and broken spells, with secret messages (“never cursed”) sewn into its gorgeously cinematic cloth. A swooning score, crisp visuals and paper-cut-sharp performances combine to conjure a poisoned rose of a movie, inviting you to prick your finger on its thorns and succumb to its weird, dark magic.

Daniel Day-Lewis, in what the actor has claimed is his final performance, plays fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock, an artist with an obsessive streak, in the mould...

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From Thomas F Wilson in Back To The Future to Nicolas Cage and John Travolta in Face/Off - when actors play multiple roles...

The dramatic use of actors playing multiple characters is a bold and rather theatrical device that has its ups and downs. It goes at least as far back as Captain Hook being played by the same actor who plays the Darling children's father in stage productions of Peter Pan, a technique largely adopted in film adaptations of the story, too (hello to Jason Isaacs).

It's used a lot in cinema too. Done well, it's impressive, but when it's bad, it's Jack & Jill. Whether used in comedy or drama or outright horror, there are countless examples of actors delivering terrific performances in more than one role at once, and that's before we even get past Cloud Atlas. Still, we've had a go at totting up 25 of the best.

Each week, the fine folks at Fandor add a number of films to their Criterion Picks area, which will then be available to subscribers for the following twelve days. This week, the Criterion Picks focus on eight delightful French films.

Three decades of exceptional French cinema in the service of that most intoxicating, unpredictable and stubborn of muscles, to which laws of convention and commitment prove no barrier: the heart.

Don’t have a Fandor subscription? They offer a free trial membership.

Children of Paradise by Marcel Carne

Poetic realism reached sublime heights with Children Of Paradise, widely considered one of the greatest French films of all time. This nimble depiction of nineteenth-century Paris’s theatrical demimonde, filmed during World War II, follows a mysterious woman loved by four different men (all based on historical figures): an actor, a criminal, a count, and, most poignantly, a mime (Jean-Louis Barrault,...

Ingrid Bergman ca. early 1940s. Ingrid Bergman movies on TCM: From the artificial 'Gaslight' to the magisterial 'Autumn Sonata' Two days ago, Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” series highlighted the film career of Greta Garbo. Today, Aug. 28, '15, TCM is focusing on another Swedish actress, three-time Academy Award winner Ingrid Bergman, who would have turned 100 years old tomorrow. TCM has likely aired most of Bergman's Hollywood films, and at least some of her early Swedish work. As a result, today's only premiere is Fielder Cook's little-seen and little-remembered From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1973), about two bored kids (Sally Prager, Johnny Doran) who run away from home and end up at New York City's Metropolitan Museum. Obviously, this is no A Night at the Museum – and that's a major plus. Bergman plays an elderly art lover who takes an interest in them; her...

Alessandro Nivola is coming to London with a moustache, to star alongside Bradley Cooper and Patricia Clarkson in The Elephant Man Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

From Alessandro Nivola, over breakfast, we learn how Nicolas Winding Refn poached an entire family, including Elle Fanning and Christina Hendricks, from Sally Potter's Ginger And Rosa and spun them into The Neon Demon, with Alessandro channeling Anton Walbrook's portrayal of Boris Lermontov in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes wrapped into Tom Ford.

Coco Chanel is the link between Jean Renoir's masterpiece La Règle Du Jeu (The Rules Of The Game) and Anne Fontaine's Coco Before Chanel, in which Alessandro plays Chanel's lover who "borrowed" her for two days. How James Gray, Darren Aronofsky and Matteo Garrone will factor in is yet to be determined. Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells with Olivia Wilde and Evan Rachel Wood...

To begin with, no, 49th Parallel is not a Canadian film. At least not technically. The Hungarian Emeric Pressburger, who had been working in England for about five years, wrote the 1941 feature, and the Kent-born Michael Powell, who had been making films since the early 1930s, directed it. All but one interior was shot at Denham Studios in Buckinghamshire, and Ortus Films, a British company, produced the picture after the Ministry of Information commissioned it. The cast is a veritable who’s who of prominent British actors, including Laurence Olivier, Anton Walbrook, and Leslie Howard, among others. David Lean, then the preeminent editor in England, cut the picture.

Still, it is a great Canadian film. Locations range from Winnipeg to Quebec to Alberta. Perhaps more than any other film, certainly of the era, it also deals explicitly with Canada’s largely ignored involvement in World War II—as far as the movies are concerned anyway.

Above: French poster by Boris Grinsson for You’ll Never Get Rich (Sidney Lanfield, USA, 1941).In the new edition of Film Comment, out this week, I write about British airbrush artist Philip Castle and his iconic poster for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The other man behind that poster, aside from Kubrick himself, was producer, director and writer Mike Kaplan who, at the time, was Kubrick’s marketing guru.Kaplan, who has been collecting movie posters, as well as art directing them, for 35 years, is a tireless proselytizer for the art form and his latest project is a labor of love and a pure delight. Gotta Dance! The Art of the Dance Movie Poster, a book he wrote and curated, was born out of a touring exhibition of his own personal collection that he has been exhibiting around the country for the past few years. Its latest stop is...

Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine' 1938: Jean Renoir's film noir (photo: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine') (See previous post: "'Cat People' 1942 Actress Simone Simon Remembered.") In the late 1930s, with her Hollywood career stalled while facing competition at 20th Century-Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power's wife), Simone Simon returned to France. Once there, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine. An updated version of Émile Zola's 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine is enveloped in a dark, brooding atmosphere not uncommon in pre-World War II French films. Known for their "poetic realism," examples from that era include Renoir's own The Lower Depths (1936), Julien Duvivier's La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937), and particularly Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) and Daybreak (1939).[11] This thematic and...

Best British movies of all time? (Image: a young Michael Caine in 'Get Carter') Ten years ago, Get Carter, starring Michael Caine as a dangerous-looking London gangster (see photo above), was selected as the United Kingdom's very best movie of all time according to 25 British film critics polled by Total Film magazine. To say that Mike Hodges' 1971 thriller was a surprising choice would be an understatement. I mean, not a David Lean epic or an early Alfred Hitchcock thriller? What a difference ten years make. On Total Film's 2014 list, published last May, Get Carter was no. 44 among the magazine's Top 50 best British movies of all time. How could that be? Well, first of all, people would be very naive if they took such lists seriously, whether we're talking Total Film, the British Film Institute, or, to keep things British, Sight & Sound magazine. Second, whereas Total Film's 2004 list was the result of a 25-critic consensus,...

"Performance" is the theme of the new issue of Screen Machine, with essays on Al Pacino in Michael Mann's Heat (1995) and Anton Walbrook’s in Thorold Dickinson's Gaslight (1940 and more. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Time Out's polled directors, scientists and authors for its list of the "100 best sci-fi movies." Plus Terrence Rafferty on Jacques Demy, Adam Schatz on Alain Robbe-Grillet, Laya Maheshwari's conversation with Park Chan-wook, Jessica Kiang's interview with William Friedkin—and Josh Horowitz has gotten Woody Allen to appear on his first podcast. » - David Hudson...

"Performance" is the theme of the new issue of Screen Machine, with essays on Al Pacino in Michael Mann's Heat (1995) and Anton Walbrook’s in Thorold Dickinson's Gaslight (1940 and more. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Time Out's polled directors, scientists and authors for its list of the "100 best sci-fi movies." Plus Terrence Rafferty on Jacques Demy, Adam Schatz on Alain Robbe-Grillet, Laya Maheshwari's conversation with Park Chan-wook, Jessica Kiang's interview with William Friedkin—and Josh Horowitz has gotten Woody Allen to appear on his first podcast. » - David Hudson...

1. The term "gaslight." The Ingrid Bergman thriller "Gaslight" -- released 70 years ago this week, on May 4, 1944, wasn't the original use of the title. There was Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play "Gas Light," retitled "Angel Street" when it came to Broadway a couple years later. And there was a British film version in 1939, starring Anton Walbrook (later the cruel impresario in "The Red Shoes") and Diana Wynyard.

Still, the glossy 1944 MGM version remains the best-known telling of the tale, with the title an apparent reference to the flickering Victorian lamps that are part of Gregory's (Charles Boyer) scheme to make wife Paula (Bergman) think she's seeing things that aren't there, thus deliberately undermining her sanity in order to have her institutionalized so that he'll be free to ransack the ancestral home to find the missing family jewels.

This version of Hamilton's tale was so popular that it made the word "gaslight"into a verb,...

(Thorold Dickinson, 1940, BFI, PG)

Although he only directed eight features, Thorold Dickinson (1903-84) had as remarkable and wide-ranging a career in the British cinema as his close contemporaries David Lean and Anthony Asquith. Like Lean, he served a long apprenticeship as an editor. Like Asquith, a fellow liberal, Oxford-educated son of the establishment, he had an early interest in the avant-garde and played a significant role in organising Act, the film industry trade union.

As film critic of the Spectator, Graham Greene praised The High Command and The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, Dickinson's first two films, both thrillers. But there were long absences from commercial cinema. In the late 1930s he spent several years making leftwing documentaries supporting the Spanish government. Much of his second world war was devoted to public information pictures, and for several postwar years he produced pictures for the United Nations. In the 1960s he became Britain's...

Jean Kent: ‘The Browning Version’ 1951, Gainsborough folds (photo: Jean Kent in ‘The Browning Version,’ with Michael Redgrave) (See previous post: “Jean Kent: Gainsborough Pictures Film Star Dead at 92.”) Seemingly stuck in Britain, Jean Kent’s other important leads of the period came out in 1948: John Paddy Carstairs’ Alfred Hitchcock-esque thriller Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948), with spies on board the Orient Express, and Gordon Parry’s ensemble piece Bond Street. Following two minor 1950 comedies, Her Favorite Husband / The Taming of Dorothy and The Reluctant Widow / The Inheritance, Kent’s movie stardom was virtually over, though she would still have one major film role in store. In what is probably her best remembered and most prestigious effort, Jean Kent played Millie Crocker-Harris, the unsympathetic, adulterous wife of unfulfilled teacher Michael Redgrave, in Anthony Asquith’s 1951 film version of Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version — a Javelin Films production...

★★★☆☆Austrian actor Anton Walbrook is perhaps best-known for his turn as ballet master Boris Lermontov in Powell and Pressburger's sumptuous The Red Shoes (1948). In that film, jealousy saw him prey on the fears and desires of Mora Shearer and eight years earlier he was causing similar mental anguish through manipulation in Gaslight (1940). Rereleased as part of the BFI's Gothic season, its narrative is also driven by an obsession over items of glimmering scarlet - on this occasion, some hidden rubies. Yet, it's a dearth of tension that ultimately lessens the impact of Thorold Dickinson's psychological drama.

Review by Sam Moffitt

Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is one of those films I have read and heard about for years, and finally got to see. How nice to see a legendary “great film” and see it live up to, and in many ways surpass, its reputation. First a little back ground.

The Archers is one of the most honored and respected film production companies in the history of the cinema. Based in England, most of their films were produced, written and directed by two men, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Some of their films I have been familiar with for years, the incredible Black Narcissus. The equally incredible Red Shoes, one of the most honored, studied and dissected films ever made. College courses have been made around this one film, the Red Shoes, and it seems to be required viewing for anyone who dances or wants to dance ballet.

Paul Henreid: Actor was ‘dependable’ leading man to Hollywood actresses Paul Henreid, best known as the man who wins Ingrid Bergman’s body but not her heart in Casablanca, is Turner Classic Movies’ Star of the Month of July 2013. TCM will be showing a couple of dozen movies featuring Henreid, who, though never a top star, was a "dependable" — i.e., unexciting but available — leading man to a number of top Hollywood actresses of the ’40s, among them Bette Davis, Ida Lupino, Olivia de Havilland, Eleanor Parker, Joan Bennett, and Katharine Hepburn. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of Paul Henreid movies to be shown on Turner Classic Movies in July consists of Warner Bros. productions that are frequently broadcast all year long, no matter who is TCM’s Star of the Month. Just as unfortunately, TCM will not present any of Henreid’s little-seen supporting performances of the ’30s, e.

Feature Aliya Whiteley 20 Jun 2013 - 10:11

The films of post-war Britain are fascinating; Aliya picks 10 of the best British thrillers from the 1940s

The 1940s was a heck of a decade for the British. We started it at war with Nazi Germany, with the threat of Ira collaboration with the enemy looming large. By the end of it we had seen Independence achieved by India, lived through strikes and rationing, and held the fourteenth Olympic Games in London at a time of great austerity. The welfare state was under formation, and in the space of ten years we had become a very different country.

The British film industry reflected those changes, particularly in the thrillers that were made. The lines between good and evil, safety and danger, were the stuff of entertainment that tapped into the concerns of the public. It was a period of vivid, ambitious, and surprising films.

Before the legendary British filmmaking duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger lensed the classics The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus or A Matter of Life & Death, they raised quite a stir with their life long tale of an aging army officer, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The directors were working as hired guns on British war propaganda films in the midst of World War II when they started work on the picture. Featuring the well-known British cartoon icon created by David Low, Colonel Blimp was a satirical symbol of low brow soldiery and politics of the time, and when Powell and Pressburger decided to recast the character as Clive Candy, placed by the amorphous Roger Livesey, and have him befriend a German soldier, a sworn enemy of the state at the time, British officials, including Winston Churchill himself, were outraged and tried desperately to dissuade the film’s completion.

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: March 19, 2013

Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95

Studio: Criterion

Roger Livesey stars in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Considered by many to be the finest British films ever made, the1943 war-drama-romance classic The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (The Battle of the River Plate).

Roger Livesey dynamically embodies outmoded English militarism as the indelible General Clive Candy, who barely survives four decades of tumultuous British history (1902 to 1942) only to see the world change irrevocably before his eyes. Anton Walbrook (The Red Shoes) and Deborah Kerr (Black Narcissus) provide unforgettable support, he as a German enemy turned lifelong friend of Blimp’s and she as young women of three consecutive generations—a socially committed governess, a sweet-souled war nurse, and a modern-thinking army driver—who inspire him.

Shot in gorgeous Technicolor, Colonel Blimp is both moving and satirical—a...

“40 films from the ‘40s” is a movie challenge to watch and write about one film from that era weekly. Why the ‘40s? That decade is fascinating, because of the juxtapositions between films released during WWII and those released after. Half the decade was spent scrambling to keep nations afloat during war and the second half was spent trying to pick up the pieces and move forward.

****

The Red Shoes

Written & Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Starring Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, and Marius Goring

UK, 133 min. – 1984

Based on Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale, The Red Shoes follows the story of young, aspiring ballet dancer, Victoria Page (Shearer). Vicky dreams of dancing for Boris Lermantov’s (Walbrook) company. She finally gets the chance to do so, in Lermnatov’s newest ballet, “The Red Shoes”, composed by the young, musical genius, Julian Craster (Marius Goring). Vicky lives for dancing and Lermantov...

An elegy for the British stiff upper lip, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp couldn't have been more foreign to a young Italian-American in the 1950s. But Martin Scorsese tells Joe Queenan why restoring the classic is part of his duty to cinema

One rainy day in the early 1950s, a very young Martin Scorsese was watching a butchered version of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp on his black-and-white TV. Colonel Blimp, which deals with a lifelong friendship between Clive Candy, a British soldier sporting an upper lip of almost unbelievable stiffness, and his top-hole German counterpart, Theodore Kretschmar-Schuldorff, first saw the light of day in 1943. This was not the best time to be releasing a film with a sympathetic German character.

The film Scorsese saw was not the film Michael Powell had shot, nor the film his collaborator Emeric Pressburger had written. (For years, the pair...

Sarah Dobbs Rosie Fletcher Oct 30, 2019

These horror movies don't use cheap thrills to get scares. They rely on atmosphere and suspense rather than gore and jump-scares.

Creepy isn’t the same as scary. Of course horror movies can be scary simply by using loud noises and sudden movements to make their audiences jump, but creepy is harder to pull off. To be effectively creepy, a film needs to establish a certain atmosphere; it needs to draw you in and make you care. It needs to give you something to think about when you’re trying to drop off to sleep at night; to make you wonder whether that creaking noise down the hallway was just the house settling or something lurking in the shadows. Creepy stays with you. It gives you goosebumps.

I love most kinds of horror movies, but creepy films are probably my favorite. Or rather, my least favorite,...

The Mumbai Film Festival (October 18 – 25, 2012) is the largest film festival in India with over 100,000 attending. The Festival is 14 years old itself but Reliance Big Entertainment, the company that backs both Dreamworks and Im Global, one of U.S.’s foremost international sales agents, has backed this festival for the last 4 years and the result is a scaled up festival. It is part of the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image, a not for profit trust founded in 1997 by Indian Film Industry personalities led by renowned filmmaker late Hrishikesh Mukherji. Its 220 films are all free.

Parenthetically, though not part of the festival itself, Mumbai is "'in the news" with the Tiff's City-to-City program focusing on Mumbai. This was organized by Cameron Bailey directly with filmmakers in Mumbai and is not a Mumbai Film Festival program…Also of interest is that Mumbai also hosts India's largest international Queer Film Festival For Everyone which was held in May of this year with the Alliance Francaise de Bombay.

The Mumbai Film Festival also works with Unifance and French Rendez-Vous.

Sections include Discovery, Retrospective - this year to feature 50 years of the Cannes Critics Week, International Competition which awards $200,000 to a first feature.

Three new developments are taking place this year.

1. To celebrate 100 years of Indian cinema, the festival is launching a new competition for Indian films (called 'India Gold') with cumulative cash rewards of around $30,000 Us. The winners will be selected by an international jury to be announced.

2. The festival is moving to historic South Bombay. The festival, previously held mostly in the Juhu and Andheri districts of Mumbai – where Bollywood is located - will now take place in the south of the city, the historic center of old colonial Bombay with amazing Victorian landmarks – train station, court house, with the National Centre for the Performing Arts (Ncpa) and Inox Theatre as the main venues. The retrospective of restored films will be screened in a third theater - a historic art deco theater named the Liberty Cinema – so named because it was built in 1949, the year of India's independence from Britain. For more information on the Liberty see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Cinema

3. The Spotlight on Film Restoration and Preservation. For the first time, a section of the festival (programmed by Ian Birnie, U.S. Representative for the Mumbai Film Festival) will be devoted to screenings of restored classic films with a particular focus on Twentieth Century Fox. Screenings will be introduced by various archivists all of whom are leading experts in the field. A panel will bring together Western archivists and their Indian counterparts and the discussion will focus on the economic challenges and new technologies that are changing the future of film preservation.

The American participants are:

Schawn Belston, Senior VP, Library and Technical Services, Twentieth Century Fox

Margaret Bodde, Executive Director, The Film Foundation

Mike Pogorzelski, Director, The Academy Film Archive

Douglas Laible, Managing Director, World Cinema Foundation

TheTwentieth Century Fox Archive will present 8 films spanning 40 years in the 'Fox Classics' series. Note: all were restored in-house at Fox, and by Fox in association with the Academy Film Archive (Afa) and with The Film Foundation (Ff)

Sunrise (1928/b&w/94 min.) dir: F.W. Murnau; w /George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston.(Fox/Afa)

How Green Was My Valley(1941/b&w/118 min.) dir: John Ford; w/ Walter Pigeon, Maureen O'Hara. (Fox/Afa)

Laura (1944/b&w/88 min.) dir: Otto Preminger; w/ Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb. (Fox in-house)

Leave Her to Heaven(1945/color/110 min.) dir: John Stahl; w/ Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain. (Fox/Afa/Ff)

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953/color/91 min.) dir: Howard Hawks; w/ Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell.(Fox in-house)

Wild River(1960/color/110 min./CinemaScope) dir: Elia Kazan; w/ Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick, Jo Van Fleet. (Fox/Afa/Ff)

The Leopard (1963/color/187 min.) dir: Luchino Visconti; w/ Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale.(Fox/Ff/Cineteca di Bologna)

Two for the Road(1967/color/110 min./Panavision) dir: Stanley Donen; w/ Audey Hepburn, Albert Finney. (Fox/Afa)

In addition to the Fox titles, 7 additional restored films will be screened.

The Academy Film Archive will present two recent restorations from their ongoing project to restore all the films by the great Indian director Satyajit Ray:

Charulata(1964/b&w/117 min.) w/ Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee, Shailen Mukherjee.

The Chess Players (1977/color/129 min.) w/ Sanjeev Kumar, Saeed Jaffrey, Shabana Azmi

The Film Foundation will present two recent restorations:

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1945/color/163 min.) dir: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger; w/ Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, Anton Walbrook.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984/color/ ??? min.) dir: Sergio Leone; w/ Robert DeNiro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern.

The World Cinema Foundation will present its new restoration of a classic Indian film:

Kalpana (1948/b&w/155 min.)

The Cineteca Bologna will present two restored Italian silent classics as part of an Italian Cinema retrospective.

Sections of the Festival

Dimensions Mumbai, a short film competition of films dealing with any aspect of life in Mumbai and targeted to the Mumbai Youth below 25 years was introduced in 2008.

An International Competition for the First Feature Film of directors with the award money of Us $ 150,000 (Us $ 100,000 for the Best Film and Us $ 50,000 for the Jury Grand Prize) was introduced in 2009. The UK Film 'White Lightn'in won the 2011 Best Film Award and Austria-Italy co-production La Pivillina won the Jury Grand Prize.

The Audience Choice Award carrying U.S. $ 20,000 for any film participating in the Festival, (excepting the Retrospectives and Tribute sections) was introduced in 09 as well. The Indian Film 'Road to Sangam' won this award.

International Lifetime Achievement Award was conferred on the Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos.

A new initiative Mumbai Young Critics was introduced in '09 as well. 24 college students selected from more than 80 aspirants recommended by the colleges in Mumbai went through a workshop conducted by the German writer and film critic Daniel Kothenschulte for three days before the Festival. This group watched the films in the festival, wrote about them in Festival publications and newspapers and also selected a film for the Mumbai Young Critics Award.

Last year the festival showcased over 200 films from 60 countries across various sections at its three venues- Cinemax Versova, Cinemax Sion and Metro Big Cinemas.

The festival hosts a special section ‘4me Rendez-Vous’, in collaboration with Unifrance, Embassy of France in India and Consulate General of France in Mumbai. The section screens the best of New French Cinema, which last year included ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, ‘The Conquest’ and ‘Declaration of War’ amongst others.

Last year's highlight was the special presentation by Lee Yong Kwan, Director, Busan International Film Festival, who presented a selection of the latest Asian Films from Busan.

Lifetime Achievement Award was conferred on the legendary actor Morgan Freeman. Olivia Harrison widow of George Harrison presented the documentary film “George Harrison: Living in the material World”.

The Festival strengthened and consolidated its academic activities with an Indo-German Script Development Workshop scheduled from 11th to the 13th of October just ahead of the festival opening. Speakers at the workshop included the renowned directors Dani Levy, Thorsten Schulz, Screenwriters Anjum Rajabali and Sooni Taraporevala amongst others.

This year's Festival continues to facilitate cinema business with the Mumbai Film Mart, created 'by' the industry, 'for' the industry, 'in' the industry hub - Mumbai, the Film Capital of India. The Mumbai Film Mart saw participation from the biggest Entertainment Industry players, both from India and abroad. In the three days, over 2,000 meeting requests were received, 400 meetings were carried out face to face, while an equal number took place among the senior decision makers from leading film production houses, buyers, sellers, festival programmers and independent filmmakers as they milled around and networked with each other.

Among the many firsts, the Mart attracted all the forthcoming big ticket films such as ‘Ra One’, ‘Don 2’, ‘Rockstar’, ‘Ricky Behl v/s Ladies’, ‘The Dirty Picture’, ‘DesiBoyz’ , tabled for acquisition and distribution in the non-traditional markets for Indian Cinema in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Germany, France and Latin America. The focus on these countries attracted leading buyers that included Huayi Brothers Media Corp. (China), NikkatsuCorp.(Japan), Happinet Corp.(Japan), Showbox (Korea), Apex Entertainment (Korea), Cj Entertainment (Korea), Top Films (Ukraine), Novo films (France), Rapid Eye (Germany), Im Global (USA), amongst many others.

The International Jury will be responsible choosing the winners out of 14 films, all first features of debut filmmakers around the world, awarding them with a huge cash prize. This way we would like to recognize and encourage the first time filmmakers, going in line with the festival theme of discovery.

Apart from the main international section, there are many other sections including the world cinema, Indian Frame, New Faces in Indian Cinema, Documentaries etc. Please do check out their website www.mumbaifilmfest.com for more information. Last year, it screened about 220 films from 60 countries.

Composition of Mami:

Shyam Benegal, Eminent Filmmaker – Chairman

Amit Khanna, producer, lyricist and Chairman of Reliance Entertainment

Amol Palekar, acclaimed actor-director

Ashutosh Gowarikar (Oscar Nominee - Best Foreign Language Film for Lagaan)

Farhan Akhtar, one of the youngest directors and actor

Jaya Bachchan, acclaimed and award winning actress

Karan Johar, director-producer of some of the most successful films at the box office

Ramesh Sippy, well known filmmaker of Sholay fame

Shabana Azmi, renowned actress who has won acclaim and awards Internationally

Yash Chopra, producer-director, doyen of the Hindi film industry.

Narayan is the Director and head programmer, Anu is second in command.

And there is a selection committee that screens all the competition films – industry people and critics in Mumbai.

About Reliance Big Entertainment

Reliance Big Entertainment Ltd. (Rbel) is the flagship media and entertainment arm of India's Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, with a significant presence in film entertainment (film production, distribution, and exhibition), broadcasting and new media ventures.

Rbel's motion picture brand, Reliance Big Pictures ( www.reliancebigpictures.com ) has built a impressive film production slate in Hindi, English & other Indian languages, which it markets and distributes worldwide. Following Reliance Big Picturess association with Im Global, the company now benefits from an international sales team with an excellent reputation and global presence dedicated to selling its Bollywood and regional language slate. Going into production in November is the $45 million ðDreddð, which Reliance Big Entertainment is co-financing with Im Global.

In Hollywood, Reliance Big Pictures has partnered with Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider on the formation of DreamWorks Studios and hasdevelopment deals with Nicolas Cage's Saturn Films, Jim Carrey's Jc 23 Entertainment, George Clooney's Smokehouse Productions, Chris Columbus'1492 Pictures, Tom Hanksð Playtone Productions, Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment, Jay Roach's Everyman Pictures, Brett Ratnerðs Rat Entertainment,Julia Robertsð Red Om Films and Brian Grazer and Ron Howardðs Imagine Entertainment.

Also worth noting: the competition section of the festival is for first features and carries a Grand prize of Us$100,000 and a Jury prize of Us$50,000.00, with a percentage of the money of allocated to the sales agent who submitted the film. With 14 features, the odds are better than most lotteries… This was last year's lineup http://www.mumbaifilmfest.com/Mami/films_list.php The Salesman, one of the films their U.S. Representative Programmer, Ian Bernie (former longtime Lacma programmer) selected, won the Jury Award and Best Actor.

A starry cast and a knowing air can't add depth to Peter Morgan's tale of blackmail, infidelity and dodgy deals

Peter Morgan made his reputation with remarkably perceptive screenplays about British people, mostly real-life ones, going through bad patches in their careers at home (The Damned United, The Queen) and abroad (Frost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland), and encountering some rather odd people. More recently, however, he's moved on to a larger canvas involving the mystical and metaphysical, and the results have been less satisfactory. Hereafter, which Steven Spielberg produced and Clint Eastwood directed, began with an astonishing re-creation of the south-east Asian tsunami, then proceeded with flat-footed banality to tell the parallel stories of three people from different countries (a French TV reporter, an American blue-collar worker and a south London schoolboy) mysteriously linked by their near-death experiences.

His new film, 360, directed by Fernando Meirelles, takes him...

Arguably the finest British film made during the second world war, Powell and Pressburger's 1943 epic traces the career of General Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), a bluff, middle-class British soldier from the Boer war, where he won a Vc, up to 1943 when clearly a less gentlemanly form of military behaviour was needed to defeat the Nazis. They were inspired by David Low's celebrated military fogey, Colonel Blimp, but they turn the cartoonist's caricature into a character. Anton Walbrook is outstanding as an honourable German, Candy's friend of long standing, a figure who infuriated Winston Churchill, and Deborah Kerr, Powell's lover at the time and the love of his life, is enchanting as three different women over successive generations. She adds that haunting touch of romantic mystery we find in much of Powell and Pressburger's best work.

War filmsMichael PowellDramaPhilip French

guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

The Dictator (15)

(Larry Charles, 2012, Us) Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris, Jason Mantzoukas, Ben Kingsley, John C Reilly. 83 mins

Having run out of unsuspecting Americans to prank, Sacha Baron Cohen takes the conventional fish-out-of-water route this time, as his Arab tyrant comes to terms with western democracy. But if the story plays it safe, the comedy treads a risky line between lampooning Islamophobia and fuelling it. The high gag rate, animated performance and general broad-spectrum offensiveness help him get away with murder, and worse.

The Raid (18)

(Gareth Evans, 2011, Indon/Us) Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, Yayan Ruhian. 101 mins

Throwing more punches than every other movie this year combined, this single-minded Indonesian martial arts epic doesn't let up until everyone in its baddy-infested apartment block, and the auditorium, is pummelled into submission. Pacifists, look away now.

2 Days In New York (15)

(Julie Delpy, 2011, Ger/Fra/Bel) Julie Delpy, Chris Rock, Albert Delpy. 96 mins

Welcome return for Delpy's chaotic,...

This glorious film gets more fascinating and moving each time its seen

This exotic English romance of 1943, by Powell and Pressburger, has been reissued, and each time it gets more fascinating and moving. Taking as their starting point David Low's cartoon character, the film-makers created General Clive Wynne-Candy, superbly played by the husky-voiced Roger Livesey. As we join the story in 1943, he appears to be nothing more than a pop-eyed, reactionary buffer. But the movie takes us back in time to show how the old grump was once a young blade, a dashing officer of frank and good-natured simplicity who won a Vc during the Boer war. His life was changed by an intense and ennobling friendship with a German army officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, played by the incomparably elegant Anton Walbrook. Candy is also entranced with an ideal embodiment of woman, played in three incarnations and three generations by...

They outraged the authorities on release. But the two films, made before and during the second world war, are now considered classics – and will be re-released this month. Our critics consider their impact

Ryan Gilbey on Le Quai des Brumes

It's easy now to call Marcel Carné's Le Quai des Brumes a masterpiece. When the film was released in 1938, such a view was more contentious. In the wake of the collapse of France's Popular Front government, the film was seen as exacerbating the mood of despair creeping into the left. Jean Renoir labelled it "counter-revolutionary". The Motion Picture Herald concluded: "One will be sorry that such art and talents have been used for such a trite and sordid story, which includes not a decent or healthy character." The Vichy government denounced it as "immoral, depressing and detrimental to young people", and declared that if the war was lost, Le Quai des Brumes...

Film is dying, but the cinema still lives. To mark the death of one cycle in the age of motion pictures and the beginning of another, Film Forum recently ran a series called "This Is Dcp" to introduce us cinephiles to our inevitable digital future. Dcp, for those of you who’ve been hiding in a mineshaft the last few years, stands for Digital Cinema Package, the new industry standard for digital projection that has just recently replaced 35mm film as the most common means of presenting movies in the United States. On the first day of the series, I went to see a presentation by Grover Crisp—Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Executive Vice President of Asset Management, Film Restoration, and Digital Mastering—that was billed as Dr. Strangelove Side-by-Side but which probably should have been called Dr. Strangelove A-Few-Minutes-of-One-Followed-by-a-Few-Minutes-of-the-Other. Film Forum projected a version of the movie on an...