The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis Raymundo Gleyzer’s pulsating, deeply moving México, la revolución congelada is a brilliant Argentinean documentary […]
Monthly Archives: May 2009
Producer John Houseman and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, culture-vulturing, made a film from one of William Shakespeare’s few boring plays, Julius Caesar; the one claim on our interest is, perhaps, that the film recycles sets from other M-G-M films. Like the play, the film is about the assassination in Rome, in 44 B.C., of Julius […]
“I am forever living in my childhood.” — Ingmar Bergman Ingmar Bergman is eight years old in the mid-1920s; his family nickname is Pu. It is hard to say how his mother, nurse Karin Åkerblom, feels about him, but, at least according to Söndagsbarn, he was the apple of his father Erik’s eye. This wistful, […]
In fictional Las Piedras, various lives—people from all over—have reached their dead-ends. The area, somewhere in South America, is exploited and ruled by S.O.C.—the Southern Oil Company. Three hundred miles away, one of the fields is aflame; two pairs of drivers are offered $2,000 each by the U.S. company to drive trucks loaded with, combined, […]
“They broke in upon me and found me doing an unholy thing. . . . For thy sake I was buried alive.” Without doubt the jewel of the early sound Universal horror films is Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934). What is the next-best? Neither Tod Browning’s Dracula nor James Whale’s Frankenstein (both 1931), […]
Dennis Grunes 