A major genre in the 1960s, the “spaghetti western” saluted Sergio Leone as its master. Few dispute that his C’era una volta il West, to whose original story Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento contributed, is the genre’s highest attainment. It may be saddled with a sack of melodrama, but it claims a host of gorgeous […]
Tag Archives: Henry Fonda
Douglas A. Roberts, whose initials suggest an elitist organization (Daughters of the American Revolution), “has background,” as we used to say; he is one of those “college boys” that his captain, Morton, whose background is rough and working-class, disdains. (They treated him with contempt when he was a busboy.) During the waning days of the […]
The first and most brilliant part of John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy is Fort Apache; the only Ford film to star both Henry Fonda and John Wayne, it pits two characters against each other who epitomize different aspects of the military impetus: purity and practicality; careerism and leadership; military orders and military order. Although this powerful […]
Sergei M. Eisenstein declared John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln his favorite American film and, given the depth of its criticism of the American political landscape, it isn’t hard to see why. There is also the rural visual poetry that, early on, the film musters for the occasion. This was the first of Ford’s seven collaborations […]
The sexiest romantic comedy ever, and also the funniest, The Lady Eve, brilliantly written and directed by Preston Sturges from a story by Monckton Hoffe, revolves around boy and girl. Charles (“Hopsy”) prefers snakes to women and is heir to the Pike’s Ale fortune, while self-assured con-artist Jean is out to fleece him. But the […]
Dennis Grunes 