The Great Escape

I vividly remember seeing this when it was new. I was in the theater with three friends: Calvin, Phil, and Jan. (Damn, two of them are dead now!) And they had us at the first seconds with the opening bars of one of the best music scores of all time, by the great Elmer Bernstein. Dead now too, alas. Go to Wikipedia and take a look at the sheer number of scores he wrote!

And it just ... Read more »

Great Expectations

If I had to pick a favorite Dickens novel it would probably be David Copperfield, but this one is a close second. And I don’t really see the need to create a modern-day version of it when we have a perfect example already in David Lean’s 1946 version, starring John Mills and a very young Alec Guinness. I don’t mind too much that they excised several plot ... Read more »

The Great McGinty

And so we end our Preston Sturges film festival with the first movie he directed. This is his political film, and it’s a humdinger. McGinty (Brian Donlevy) is a bartender in a dive in an unnamed little country, and he tells the story of his rise and fall to a couple of patrons, one of whom stole some money from the bank where he worked. The man was basically honest, and now wants to kill ... Read more »

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid

This is not only one of my favorite western movies, it’s one of my favorites of all time. Certainly on my Top 100. There was a lot of experimenting going on in the western genre in the early ‘70s, when what was probably the most popular form of action movie in the early days of cinema and right up into the ‘50s was virtually dead. Singing cowboys in white hats, or just white hats and black ... Read more »

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (Second review)

We just watched one of the revisionist westerns of the early ‘70s, The Culpepper Cattle Company, which we liked. This one came out in the same year and is even better. It is the fact-based story of the last robbery attempted by the James-Younger gang. Jesse and his brother Frank went on to make more robberies (or as Jesse called them, “guerilla raids”) but it was ... Read more »

The Great Race

This is a big overblown comedy like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and few would say it’s completely successful, but I’ve always had a soft spot for it. I guess it had me from the first time the Great Leslie’s teeth sparkled. Tony Curtis plays him, always dressed in white, always spotless, All-American, multi-talented, everything Professor Fate hates. Jack ... Read more »

The Great Train Robbery

I really love heist movies, and this is one of my favorites. In addition to being an ingenious and tense caper, it has the added bonus of happening in Victorian England, and explores some of the odder parts of the culture of those strange times. Have you ever heard of ratting? It was a popular form of gambling, where a terrier was thrown into a pit with a lot of rats and bets were laid on ... Read more »

The Great Waldo Pepper

William Goldman has written about seeing his original screenplay shown to an audience for the first time. Everything was going well, the audience was with him, enjoying the flamboyant antics of the barnstormers and flying circuses of the 1920s. Robert Redford was at his most dashing, romance was developing between him and Susan Sarandon. Then they were doing a wing-walking stunt … and ... Read more »

The Great Wall

This is one of the goofiest big budget films you are ever likely to see. Goofier than Transformers or Godzilla, if you can believe that. When you find yourself laughing during the scenes that are supposed to be intense and scary, you know a picture just wasn’t thought out well. How in the world was Matt Damon convinced to sign on? ... Read more »