staged with such smooth, “epic” sweep, Prapancha Pash may appear to be much better than the melodramatic claptap that it is. This silent film, which was shot in Rajasthan, is based on the Sanskrit poem The Mahabharata. At a time when cinema was an adventurous art form, German filmmaker Franz Osten’s “masterpiece” is plot-driven—or is […]
Monthly Archives: April 2010
James Hagan’s 1930 play One Sunday Afternoon, which had been filmed with Gary Cooper in the lead in 1933, became a rollicking entertainment in its second screen incarnation, adapted by Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein, directed by Raoul Walsh and retitled The Strawberry Blonde, with James Cagney now playing “Biff” Grimes. (Following Hagan’s death, […]
Everything is ambiguous in Dadaist-to-Surrealist Man Ray’s— Emmanuel Radnitzky’s—L’étoile de mer, whose very title finds the star of the sky in the “star” of the sea. Accompanied by a poem by Robert Desnos, Ray’s silent masterpiece revolves around a man and a beautiful woman as they walk outdoors or otherwise unite. As its object, she […]
This depressingly dull, largely incoherent musical derives, by way of a stage musical, from one of Ingmar Bergman’s beauties: Smiles on a Summer Night (1955), a Shakespearean comedy that submits romance to mortality’s clock as couples change partners during a weekend visit to the country. To judge from the film, Stephen Sondheim’s music and lyrics […]
During the overnight journey of the ocean liner Pride of Le Havre from Le Havre to Portsmouth two strangers, Thomas and Alice, will strike up a conversation, a relationship of sorts, a “brief encounter” during which the 16-year-old French schoolboy will lose his virginity to the young though far more sophisticated English woman. This is […]
Dennis Grunes 