Winning a war (at the Battle of San Jacinto) six weeks after horrifically losing a legendary battle might have provided a coda of sorts to The Alamo; but James Edward Grant, who wrote the film, and John Wayne, who produced and directed it as well as starred as Davy Crockett, keep the focus on the […]
Monthly Archives: June 2010
By harkening back to their coolly corrupt postwar Vienna in The Third Man (1949), even to the point of including a couple of tilted shots in ominous nighttime streets, scenarist Graham Greene and director Carol Reed’s Our Man in Havana, set in the politically sour Cuban metropolis just prior to Castro’s revolutionary overturn, projects an […]
A Cuban The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) that enlists some of the style of Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Un hombre de éxito is largely a sweeping, although carefully detailed portrayal of upper-class extravagance and decadence, and middle-class opportunism, during the last gasps of Machado’s increasingly censorial presidency and the long nightmare of Batista’s vicious […]
Since he is credited first and his wife, Carla Del Poggio, co-stars, we may assume that Alberto Lattuada is the co-director of Luci del varietà who counts more heavily; but, since the hectic atmosphere surrounding the vaudeville troupe resembles that of a circus (Fellini came up with the story from which he, Lattuada, Tullio Pinelli […]
Rich with a sense of autumnal beauty, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, which was promoted as “[a] comedy about a corpse,” turns on the joke that the corpse of Harry Worp, found in the woods one morning with what appears to be a fatal gunshot wound, won’t stay buried. Four times after clandestine burial […]
Dennis Grunes 