Movie Reviews
Paths of Glory
This movie totally stunned me the first time I saw it. I could hardly believe such a thing could happen. But it could. Not frequently, but it did happen. Two generals decide an enemy position must be taken in two days. Never mind that World War One had been going on for two years and the position of the trenches hadn’t changed more than ... Read more »
The Killing
Stanley Kubrick’s third film (though for all practical purposes it’s his second, as he did everything he could to bury his first). This is where he really began to find his voice. It’s a crackerjack caper movie starring Sterling Hayden, who with a crew of five plans to rob a racetrack of two million dollars. The mastermind reminds me a little of the Parker character in Richard Stark’s ... Read more »
Killer’s Kiss
Compared to the ten grand his first film cost, Kubrick spent a fortune on this one: $40,000, again borrowed from his uncle. I get the feeling almost no one saw Fear and Desire when it was new (and very few people since), but this one got him enough notice to get some decent money for the next one.
I ask myself, looking at this, would I peg it as a Kubrick ... Read more »
The 5 Obstructions
What an odd little movie. The grand old man of Danish cinema, Jørgen Leth, made a 13-minute experimental film called “The Perfect Human” in 1967. Leth’s student and current bad boy of Danish cinema, Lars von Trier, who professes to love Leth and his film, challenges the master to re-make his film 5 times, each time under conditions, or “obstructions,” dictated by Lars. First obstruction: ... Read more »
Fear and Desire
Hold the phone! Stop the presses! Tear up the front page! I happened to stumble on a showing of Fear and Desire on Turner Classic Movies. I TiVoed it, and sure enough, “For the first time on television,” there was Robert Osborne talking to a guy from the Eastman House, about the film, and about film preservation. There was no explanation about why, after 58 ... Read more »
The Seafarers
There’s no way to describe this other than “awful.” It’s not even a documentary, was probably never shown in theaters. It’s a thirty-minute commercial and recruiting film for the Seafarers International Union. Somehow the title led me to think I’d be seeing some ships, maybe sailing ships. Actually, there are only about two or three minutes of shipboard activity, all aboard tankers and ... Read more »
Day of the Fight
This one is about 20 minutes. It’s a fair piece of documentary short, nothing more. Once again, nothing but his name in the credits would make you think it was Kubrick, unless it’s at the fight at the end, where he gets in close. It begins with some lame philosophizing about boxing, and then follows a boxer from getting up in the morning to the ten-rounder that night, which turns out to ... Read more »
Flying Padre: An RKO-Pathe Screenliner
Screenliner? Maybe the reference is to streamliner, or airliner, but to me it brings to mind plastic garbage can liners, which probably didn’t exist in 1951. At only eight and a half minutes, this is the shortest and, to me, the most interesting. If you are of my generation or older, you will recall that movies often used to play as double features. You could really make a night of it at ... Read more »
Blood Simple
Citizen Kane aside, I can’t think of a more assured, confident, groundbreaking first film than this one. I mean, it had me from the opening frames and never let me go. I can almost hear M. Emmett Walsh (who got a big career boost from this movie), speaking over the shot of the bleak Texas plains:
The world is full o’ complainers. An’ the fact ... Read more »
Raising Arizona
If Blood Simple announced the arrival of Joel and Ethan Coen with a bang, this one served notice that you were never going to be sure what they might come out with next. Could two films by the same authors be further apart? Blood Simple was slyly funny, but very, very dark; this one is laugh-out-loud hilarious. I’ve never talked to ... Read more »