Jim McBride, whose minor classic David Holzman’s Diary (1967) represents in retrospect promise unfulfilled, has chutzpah; his Breathless dares to remake the unremakeable by reversing, at least changing, key tacks and elements of the original, Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (1959), arguably the most famous and certainly the most influential film ever made. Thus […]
Daily Archives: November 9, 2007
In a Hollywood film of the thirties, two childhood best friends in the same New York neighborhood would take different paths in adult life, one becoming a priest, and the other becoming a gangster. A descendant of such a film as Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938), Keeping the Faith changes things a bit […]
Robert Altman, the brilliant director of The Long Goodbye (1973) and Nashville (1975), wanted to have his name erased from the credits of The Gingerbread Man, and he did manage to hide his authorship of the script behind the pseudonym Al Hayes. In short, Altman repudiated this film, which is based on a story that […]
When it came to social and political issues, Gregory LaCava was an even better filmmaker than Frank Capra, and, like Capra, he was an important artist during the Great Depression, when American society suffered upheaval and dislocations. Both Gabriel Over the White House (1933), a cautionary work showing a progressive U.S. presidency sliding into fascism, […]
The thirteenth of his Rougon-Macquart cycle of twenty novels, Émile Zola’s 1887 La terre (The Earth, or The Soil) is a transplantation of Shakespeare’s King Lear to rural France—Beauce, in the Cloyes region. The book is extraordinary; in it, the land is alternately described in erotic terms as a woman and in cosmic terms as […]
Dennis Grunes 