In Sam Peckinpah’s heart-grazing Junior Bonner, Steve McQueen, achingly sweet and complex, gives the performance of a lifetime as Junior “JR” Bonner, a rodeo circuit cowboy visiting hometown Prescott, Arizona, for its Fourth of July Frontier Days, which gives him another shot at lasting eight seconds on bucking Sunshine and at seeing his estranged parents, […]
Monthly Archives: August 2009
For as long as I have been that I can remember, I have adored Ginger Rogers. She is one of the best Hollywood film actresses, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool. However, Ginger was not infallible, and she gave some bad performances. Perhaps the most terrible one can be found in Magnificent Doll. […]
In the 1920s William A. Wellman’s lavish aerial war adventure, Wings (1927), took the first best picture Oscar; in the 1930s Wellman made splendid films about American aspiration and defeat: So Big (1932) and A Star Is Born (1937). But three of his four best films arrived during the Second World War: Roxie Hart (1942), […]
Ettore Scola’s Brutti sporchi e cattivi, called Down and Dirty in the U.S., is a trenchant study of hectic, noisy urban poverty, how the conditions and lifestyle that poverty imposes pervert the idea of family and the individuals comprising four generations of one particular family that live together, one on top of the other, in […]
In August 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed their mutual non-aggression pact. A week later, beginning September 1, both German and Soviet armies separately invaded Poland; on Poland’s border the Soviets imprisoned more than 10,000 Polish officers and soldiers, all of whom they executed in April 1940. Following Germany’s invasion of Russia, canceling […]
Dennis Grunes 