Today’s Google Doodle pays tribute to one of the great visionaries of the early days of movies, Russian director Sergei Eisenstein on the 120th anniversary of his birth.
The earliest films were pretty much just using the camera as though it was seated in the audience of a play, with some close-ups. Eisenstein was hugely influential in the development of “montage” story-telling, with cuts back and forth to different points of view. His classic “Odessa Steps” sequence from his film “Battleship Potemkin” is still studied today.
This scene in “The Untouchables” pays tribute to it.
You can learn more about Eisenstein here:
It is interesting to note that his father, Mikhail Eisenstein, was an architect whose majestic and imaginative work is still on display in Riga, Latvia.
What a treat to see a tribute to Alice Faye’s classic “You’ll Never Know” in Guillermo del Toro’s new film, “The Shape of Water.”
The song was introduced by Faye in “Hello, Frisco, Hello.” The lyrics were based on a poem by a WWII war bride. It not only won the Oscar for best song and became a hit — it was such a hit that Faye sang it again a year later in another movie, “Four Jills in a Jeep.” It is now a standard, covered by Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, and many others, including Barbra Streisand, who chose it as her first-ever recorded song, made at a do-it-yourself booth when she was 13 as a gift for her mother.
Twenty of the films in the Kino Lorber Pioneers of African-American Cinema collection are now available on Netflix. They include Paul Robeson’s debut in “Body and Soul,” a black and white silent film where he plays the dual roles of a preacher and his evil brother and “The Bronze Buckaroo,” with Herb Jeffries as a singing cowboy, as well as “Hot Biskits” (a man cheats at golf using magnets), “Birthright” (a Harvard-educated man goes home to start a school), and “Verdict not Guilty” (“Truth” serves as judge over a woman’s life).
Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” turns 50 this week. Rogerebert.com critics pay tribute, fitting as the film was one of Roger Ebert’s favorites and his review of the film helped to make his reputation as a critic of seriousness, insight, and influence. He wisely and accurately wrote at the time that the film was “a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance” and predicted “years from now it is quite possible that ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s.” Later, with some perspective, he included it as one of his “Great Films” and wrote, “It was a film in which all of the unlikely pieces were assembled at the right time. And more than anything else, it was a masterpiece of tone, in which the actors and filmmakers were all in sync as they moved the material back and forth between comedy and tragedy.”
“Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate,” she wrote. “The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours—not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours.” And with that, she’s off and running, not only drawing us in with the breathless urgency of her praise, but vibing on what would become one of her signature preoccupations: the wild notion that this commoner’s entertainment could also be considered art, even when functioning outside the rigid confines of the “art film.”
She tackles this idea sideways, in considering and refuting the key argument of the film’s detractors (chief among them, Crowther at the Times): its violence. “To ask why people react so angrily to the best movies and have so little negative reaction to poor ones is to imply that they are so unused to the experience of art in movies that they fight it,” she surmises, and expands upon that notion thus:
Though we may dismiss the attacks with “What good movie doesn’t give some offense?,” the fact that it is generally only good movies that provoke attacks by many people suggests that the innocuousness of most of our movies is accepted with such complacence that when an American movie reaches people, when it makes them react, some of them think there must be something the matter with it—perhaps a law should be passed against it.
These were fairly radical notions at the time (for an American critic, anyway), that a popular art form like film should not only be provocative, but was better for it – and at the very least, it was a radical idea for the tony pages of the New Yorker. But the film’s volatile relationship with its audience, how it turns our expectations and reactions (to violence, to sexuality, and especially to humor) back on its viewers, make for both the essay’s most compelling ideas, and its most astonishing writing.
Prop Store: Auctioning Props and Costumes from “Robocop,” “Batman,” “Back to the Future,” Pulp Fiction,” and “Star Wars”
Posted on July 26, 2017 at 5:52 pm
I had a blast at Comic-Con talking to Stephen Lane about The Prop Store‘s upcoming auction of movie props and costumes. SDCC attendees loved seeing some of the items coming up for auction, including Samuel L. Jackson’s wallet from “Pulp Fiction” and Matt Damon’s spacesuit from “The Martian.”
Twenty of the films in the Kino Lorber Pioneers of African-American Cinema collection are now available on Netflix. They include Paul Robeson’s debut in “Body and Soul,” a black and white silent film where he plays the dual roles of a preacher and his evil brother and “The Bronze Buckaroo,” with Herb Jeffries as a singing cowboy, as well as “Hot Biskits” (a man cheats at golf using magnets), “Birthright” (a Harvard-educated man goes home to start a school), and “Verdict not Guilty” (“Truth” serves as judge over a woman’s life). 