During the run of the television series Seinfeld, its gifted star, Jerry Seinfeld, opined that anti-Semitism no longer exists in the United States. On the surface it would certainly seem so, with Seinfeld’s own immense popularity and success—Seinfeld is Jewish—certifying this happy development. However, reports of the demise of American anti-Semitism are greatly exaggerated. Public […]
Monthly Archives: February 2007
Time is capable of reversing judgments, and certain films now cherished were at the time of their initial appearance dismissed, even disparaged. In 1948, in the United States, Letter from an Unknown Woman, directed by Max Ophüls during his Hollywood sojourn, was regarded as sentimental in the extreme. The contemporary reviewers had their day, and […]
Signalling the rebirth of his film career after a string of box-office failures and Blue Skies (1946), the success of which provided the high note on which Fred Astaire announced his retirement, Easter Parade is a glorious musical-comedy entertainment. The film was prepped by Vincente Minnelli for wife Judy Garland but ultimately directed, in a […]
Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while […]
In grainy black and white, its style journalistic-cinéma-vérité, its length a trim, no-nonsenscial hour and a quarter, Bolivia is a small gem, sharply observant, finely expressive. It follows Freddy, a Bolivian husband and father of four, who has separated from his family in order to find work in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he tries to […]
There is no accounting for taste, and there is no accounting for those who maintain the fiction that the ’70s were anything other than the dreariest decade in the history of American cinema. There were, of course, some excellent films: Jon Jost’s Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977), John Huston’s Fat City (1972) and […]
“Grace, irony, gravity, timeless loveliness: Greta Garbo is cinema’s most enchanting tragedienne—all in all, its greatest actress.” This is how I described Garbo in a list of the fifty greatest film actors and actresses. Grand Hotel, which won the 1932 Oscar as best picture, gave Garbo her most famous line, the one that capped her […]
