The inspiration for the legendary Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Neal Cassady was the avatar of the Beat Movement. Cassady, who died at 42 after an all-night drinking binge, is the main character of The Last Time I Committed Suicide, a series of incidents whose atmospheric lyricism suggests the influence of Gus […]
Daily Archives: February 8, 2007
Tubercular Stephen Crane died in 1900, falling short of his twenty-ninth birthday. Although it isn’t quite in the league of masterpieces by Herman Melville (Moby-Dick, The Confidence Man, Pierre) and Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson), his Red Badge of Courage is a great American novel, easily the finest ever written about […]
Few, if any, rank Saboteur among Alfred Hitchcock’s great works, but many find it an engaging thriller nevertheless, and it was an enormous popular success. Saboteur is indeed one of the most compulsively watchable films by cinema’s most compulsively watchable artist-entertainer. At three in the morning, popping Antonioni or Pudovkin into the machine is an […]
Cleopatra (1963) notwithstanding, writer-director (and producer) Joseph L. Mankiewicz made some incredibly entertaining films, chief among them his gloriously bickering Oscar-winning best picture All About Eve (1950), for which he won his third and fourth Oscars. (He had also won writing and directing Oscars for A Letter to Three Wives, 1949). If I had to […]
The final installment of Peter Jackson’s financially enormous J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy, which a friend of mine aptly described as “unmagical,” is an exhausting piece of work full of stress and fuss—a production rather than a film, to which—brace yourself—more than 400 technicians contributed. The credits list ten producers, co-producers and executive producers: ten. And for […]
Dennis Grunes 