Posted on December 16, 2021 at 4:27 pm
It was a great honor to be invited to participate on the Smithsonian’s panel discussion of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and what we can learn from it about our history.
Posted on March 31, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, is a book by Mark Harris about five of the greatest directors of all time who joined the war effort to document it and to promote morale at home. It is also about how the experienced changed them and inspired them to come home after the war and create richer, more complex, and more powerful films than they had before. George Stevens, Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Ford, and John Huston created films during and after the war that helped shape our views on the war but also on America and what kind of world we would create when the war was over.
The book is now a series on Netflix, narrated by Meryl Streep and featuring commentary from today’s top directors, including Guillermo del Toro, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg, as well as clips from films we know by heart like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “The Best Years of Our Lives,” and film that has been rarely seen since the war, including stunning documentary footage.
Posted on December 17, 2015 at 8:00 am
This is my favorite scene in a movie that is just about everyone’s favorite at this time of year: It’s a Wonderful Life. George tries to pretend that he doesn’t love Mary and almost fools even himself. But when they have to stand so close together….
Posted on December 24, 2014 at 3:26 pm
Posted on November 13, 2013 at 3:59 pm
One of the most insightful people I know about movies is my friend Michal Oleszczyk, and he has written a marvelous essay about one of my favorite movies, “It Happened One Night.” The screwball romantic comedy about a runaway heiress and a fast-talking reporter won a Best Picture Oscar and Oscars for its stars, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, and for director Frank Capra and writer Robert Riskin, the only five-Oscar sweep until “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Silence of the Lambs” many decades later. Fans of the film — and those who have not seen it yet — will enjoy Oleszczyk’s witty and insightful love letter to this great film.
Pauline Kael famously said that American comedies of 1930s presented marriage and courtship as a vaudeville act, and love is indeed equaled with roleplaying throughout It Happened One Night. Peter and Ellie first click as a couple when they act out an impromptu scene to dupe the detectives sent by Ellie’s father. The entire mock-fight, taking place in a camping bungalow amidst lovingly depicted morning disarray, serves as the first instance of intimacy that’s enjoyed by both Peter and Ellie. As they impersonate conjugal strife all too plausibly (can it be that we get a glimpse into their much later married life?), they take physical pleasure in suddenly becoming a working-class bickering couple.
The scene also includes one of the loveliest and most erotic pieces of business in the film: as soon as the detectives leave, Peter kneels before Ellie and buttons up her blouse, all the while congratulating her on the performance she just gave. He doesn’t have to look down her cleavage to signal his desire: putting on some clothes had rarely been that sexy (a point made even stronger by the fact that there’s hardly a costume change in the film – Peter and Ellie are like a pair of commedia dell’arte mimes, putting on identities even as their costumes remain the same). Even more than Dirty Dancing, It Happened One Night is a movie in which sexual bliss is signified by lovers’ harmony as performers.
