Last year saw the publication of two worthwhile biographies of Otto Preminger, the individual tenors of which were well-described by their titles. Foster Hirsch's was called Otto Preminger: The Man Who
Our heroes, Frank (Davis) and Lloyd (Perryman). Two small-time guys with big dreams. How far back does that theme for a narrative go? All the way back to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, one guesses. Likely
This post is for Bill R., proprieter of The Kind of Face You Hate. "La vecchiaia e carogna" is a very old and mercilessly pitched Italian adage meaning "old age is carrion." The opening minutes of Michael
This post is for the Self-Styled Siren. Although even the most ardent of auteurists understands that it's finally impossible to pinpoint just which revered collaborator is responsible for just what
Now he's gonna talk to a cow: Rogers in Doctor Bull, Ford, 1933. We see Will Rogers' inheritors everywhere. Chris Rock has got a bit of Rogers in him. So does Rush Limbaugh. Any comic or putatively
Are you ready for some football? I know, I know—the regular season was over as of Sunday. and its entirely probable that the readership of The Auteurs' Notebook isn't exactly teeming with gridiron nuts
Michel Ciment hits New York to preside over the “Mavericks and Outsiders: ‘Positif’ Celebrates American Cinema” series.
The first minutes of this picture, the last one Joseph Losey made in the United States, are weirdly bracing in a way that seems unique to late '40s-early '50s noir-inflected B pictures. Young George
The Crystals' "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)" was not quite the last gasp of a certain strain of masochism in popular culture...but it can be usefully cited as probably the last time said strain
When Terence Davies' voice is first heard in his new film Of Time And The City, anyone who's never heard him speak before may be a little surprised. It is an uncommonly deep voice—authoritative, mellifluous
I had intended to begin this appraisal of the film by discussing an impulse in late '60s British cinema (and, to a lesser extent, literary fiction; c.f. Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman) to break
Looking at The Comfort of Strangers nearly 20 years after its release, and shortly after the death of its screenwriter Harold Pinter, one is, first off, inclined to rue the fact that Pinter and director