Ingmar Bergman considered The Serpent’s Egg, which he wrote and directed, to be a horror film; he was right. Like his earlier English-language film, The Touch (1971), it is about a Jewish American—in this case, Abel Rosenberg, a jobless trapeze acrobat stranded in inflationary, impoverished Berlin in the 1920s as a result of the economic […]
Monthly Archives: August 2010
The French team of scenarist Jacques Prévert and director Marcel Carné is celebrated for their poetic realism in moody, fatalistic works and for the tragic enchantment of their period romances. However, the Leftist pair also created a zany, brilliantly funny comedy. Drôle de drame ou L’étrange aventure du Docteur Molyneux is the complete title of […]
The title of Stephen Frears’s best film, Prick Up Your Ears, can be read in two entirely different ways (one referring to ears, the other to another, specifically male body part), and one of these was considered sufficiently salacious in Ronald Reagan’s reactionary America that the film couldn’t be given mainstream advertisement in many parts […]
“I will not put up with any irony.” Sharply written by the director, Luis García Berlanga, along with Juan Antonio Bardem and Miguel Mihura, ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! is a film from Spain whose hectic satirical comedy, especially given its lively, dense scenes of humanity, somewhat resembles Preston Sturges’s Hollywood films. (Fernando Rey’s calm voiceover narration […]
Written by Will Tremper, immersed in gorgeous gloom by Helmut Ashley’s black-and-white cinematography and electrified by Horst Buchholz’s lead performance, Nasser Asphalt is a superficial film, set in 1951 Berlin, about honest versus dishonest print journalism in relation to the gathering “history” referencing the recent world war that ended in Germany’s defeat. It is about […]
Dennis Grunes 