Based on British journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir, which Nick Hornby (About a Boy, 2002) has adapted, An Education centers on 16-year-old Jenny Mellor, whose involvement with charming David Goldman, about twice her age, beginning in 1961 introduces her to a whirl of sophistication, fancy dinners and fine French movies that threatens to divert her from […]
Monthly Archives: March 2010
Miriam Hopkins, glitteringly lovely and massively moving, gives the performance of a lifetime as “Swan,” who beds with a dishonest man for security and loses her heart to an honest, poetically minded man in Barbary Coast, one of the most dazzling dramatic entertainments of the Great Depression. The film was written by Ben Hecht and […]
Fabulous isn’t the word for The Fabulous Baker Boys, a tinny, smutty “entertainment” about the double piano lounge act of two Seattle-based brothers, Jack and Frank Baker, that takes on a jazzy chanteuse to bolster their sagging appeal. Susie Diamond, otherwise a Holly Golightly in terms of employment, reawakens younger brother Jack’s love of serious […]
Induced by Warner Bros. to make this film as a test run for his dream project, The Big Red One (1980), Samuel Fuller had wanted Gary Cooper to play U. S. Army Brigadier General Frank D. Merrill, who during the Second World War commanded the unit that the press dubbed “Merrill’s Marauders.” Cooper, dying, declined, […]
Roman Polanski recently won the directorial prize at Berlin for his exhilarating, humane The Ghost Writer (2009); but more than forty years ago a film of his took the top prize, the Golden Bear, at the same international film festival. This was the British Cul-de-sac, Polanski’s second, black-and-white film after exiting Communist Poland. Two wounded […]
Dennis Grunes 