It’s grandiose. It sets its inflated style with its opening voice-overed starry heaven, and continues this style during its (interminable) duration on earth. By contrast, Lothar Mendes’s one decade-earlier The Man Who Could Work Miracles, from Wells, begins the same way but becomes precise, life-sized, once the action comes down to our planet. The Mendes […]
Daily Archives: June 28, 2007
The two best westerns of the 1940s that John Ford did not direct both came from the writing-directing team of Lamar Trotti and William A. Wellman: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and Yellow Sky. The former is an acknowledged masterpiece, although its anti-vigilantism has led to debate in some quarters as to whether such a clear, […]
Adapted by Robert Alan Arthur from a novel by Oakley Hall, Warlock is a minor though worthwhile western. It was directed by Edward Dmytryk, and it is informed, I believe, by Dmytryk’s own recent past. Let us pause to recall that past. Dmytryk was one of the Hollywood Ten—Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Ring […]
Oskar Werner is wonderful as Guy Montag, a firefighter who reads on the sly David Copperfield, just to find out what a book is like, in François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, from Ray Bradbury’s futuristic novel. In a society that has banned books, Guy’s job is to ferret them out and burn them. According to Bradbury, […]
Dennis Grunes 