The same year he made his final masterpiece, Steamboat Bill, Jr., Buster Keaton forfeited his independence by signing up with M-G-M, the studio that had butchered Stroheim’s Greed (1924) and routinely practiced embalming “respectable” material. Uneven, The Cameraman, co-directed by Edward Sedgwick and (uncredited) Keaton, emerged from this new business arrangement. Alas, Keaton’s downfall was […]
Daily Archives: September 22, 2008
From Hungary, West Germany and Austria, István Szabó’s mesmerizing Hanussen—called Profeta in Hungary—opens with a German attack on a chapel in the First World War. The soft, dry colors suggest a fantasy, and the culmination is a potent though academic irony: the chapel graveyard, strewn with fresh corpses. This is a guess, but it is […]
Dennis Grunes 