George Cukor’s favorite among his films, Sylvia Scarlett has Katharine Hepburn kissing a woman on the lips—but don’t worry; Sylvia, Hepburn’s character, is in drag as Sylvester, which is the way she appears throughout much of the film, as she and her father, an embezzler, flee France and try to elude British police, becoming grifters. […]
Monthly Archives: October 2007
January 30, 1972: Bloody Sunday, when British troops opened fire on a peaceful protest march by Catholics in Derry, thus ending for all time the Northern Ireland civil rights movement and reigniting the Irish Republican Army, for which the day’s horror provided a recruitment bonanza. British soldiers claimed they had been fired on first—a lie […]
Amnesiac Jason Bourne is relentlessly pursued by Russian intelligence, whose agent kills Bourne’s romantic partner, Marie, while aiming for him, and (formerly) his own Central Intelligence Agency, the latter of which wrongly thinks he has murdered one of their agents. Out in the cold, Bourne is again on the global run. This film version of […]
Ellen Terry’s superlative The Fall of Fujimori documents the political fortunes of Alberto Fujimoto, president of Peru from 1990 to 2000. It is a deft mosaic of news footage and interviews that calls into question, sometimes with dazzling wit, the film’s centerpiece: Perry’s interview with Fujimori in Japan, the nation of his ancestors, to which […]
Senso proved as doomed as the mostly one-sided, purplish romance at the center of its plot. Ingrid Bergman and Marlon Brando agreed to star; but when (under pressure from spouse Roberto Rossellini) Bergman withdrew, Brando followed suit. Cinematographer Aldo Graziati was killed in a road accident during filming. The producer worried that the film’s depiction […]
Dennis Grunes 