Although he eventually directed her to a richly deserved Oscar for her sly, manipulative Maerose in the satirical crime comedy Prizzi’s Honor (1985), John Huston openly regretted starring teenaged daughter Anjelica, in A Walk with Love and Death, too early. In the face of the largely derisive notices Anjelica received, the elder Huston felt guilt. […]
Monthly Archives: August 2011
Julien and Clémence Bouin live at the end of what had once been a pretty street in Courbevoie, a Paris suburb. The retired couple, a former typesetter and an acrobat, hardly speak to each other, eat separate meals, sleep in separate beds; Clémence wonders whether it is her pronounced limp, the result of a circus […]
Three very good performances from Gary Cooper, Helen Vinson and Ralph Bellamy spark The Wedding Night, an affecting early production code-era drama for which King Vidor won the directorial prize at Venice. Edith Fitzgerald’s script, from a story by Edwin H. Knopf, revolves around Tony Barrett (Cooper), a young writer whose successful first novel has […]
Sigmund Freud, no less, considered Dostoievski’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) the greatest novel ever written; and, while numerous books and essays of his refer to it, it is a focus of his 1928 article “Dostoievski and Parricide,” and his speculative masterpiece about the origin of culture, Totem and Taboo (1913), reeks of it. Modeled on […]
Fritz Lang intended to direct this film. He helped Thea von Harbou write the script, which was based on her 1917 novella. In 1922, Lang and Harbou married. (The marriage lasted until Harbou joined the Nazi Party and Lang fled Germany, eventually settling in the U.S.) The 3½-hour, two-part lavish adventure in India (filmed in […]
Dennis Grunes 