Martin Scorsese’s teeming, sprawling Gangs of New York makes as little sense in its butchered form, courtesy of Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein, as did Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963) in its butchered version, courtesy of star Burt Lancaster, who engineered a drastically cut, English-dubbed version purely for American consumption despite the fact that […]
Daily Archives: March 31, 2007
Shot in 1½ weeks, Samuel Fuller’s anarchic black-and-white Forty Guns is one of the great American westerns. Set in and around 1881 Tombstone, Arizona, it revolves around complex, corrupt cattle rancher Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck, fierce, concentrated, brilliant), the landowning “lady with a whip,” atop the throne of her white steed, leading an army of […]
Except for The Gold Rush (1925), all of Charles Chaplin’s great films admit a degree of unevenness. This is most true of The Circus, which wavers between comic brilliance of the highest order and D. W. Dishrag melodrama. Overall, though, this is an amazing piece of work, with virtuoso passages (the chase in the hall […]
With the exception of a rare oddity or two, most especially Kundun (1997), a labor of love, Martin Scorsese’s track record as filmmaker has been dismal and mediocre at best. Extremely hard to fathom is the infatuation for a slew of his worst movies that some reviewers have (honestly?) professed: Raging Bull (1980), The Last […]
Dennis Grunes 