More Chekhovian than Brechtian (and just as well, since it isn’t aiming for clever neatness), Abschied—Brechts letzter Sommer depicts the last day of Bertolt Brecht’s vacation in August 1956 before returning to East Berlin. Throughout the film, which Jan Schütte beautifully directed from Klaus Pohl’s superlative script, the German socialist—along with Pirandello and Beckett, one […]
Daily Archives: September 9, 2008
Frank Borzage won two Oscars for direction, for the mawkish silent melodrama Seventh Heaven (1928) and the New York City Depression drama Bad Girl (1931), which led to another New York Depression drama, A Man’s Castle. But this is the worst of the three. Trina, who is homeless, hasn’t eaten for two days when she […]
I generally find David Lean’s cinema thin and hollow. His “big” works tend to be his most insipid: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), etc. But I am fond of some of the earlier black-and-white stuff, especially Brief Encounter (1945), largely because I adore Celia Johnson. Since childhood I also […]
