The same year as The High and the Mighty, an expensive, enormously popular, and deadly-dull film for which he was Oscar-nominated, “Wild Bill” Wellman also directed the spare, stunning Track of the Cat, like his magnificent The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) from a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. The financial success of one film enabled […]
Tag Archives: Wellman
Although the film eventually veers into unconvincing melodrama hinging on a villainous predatory hobo’s self-sacrificial change of heart, the early parts of Wild Bill Wellman’s silent Beggars of Life are very beautiful and atmospheric. Indeed, the opening passage tries to prepare us for Oklahoma Red’s transformation with back-to-back reversals of expectation. Jim, a hobo in […]
In the 1920s William A. Wellman’s lavish aerial war adventure, Wings (1927), took the first best picture Oscar; in the 1930s Wellman made splendid films about American aspiration and defeat: So Big (1932) and A Star Is Born (1937). But three of his four best films arrived during the Second World War: Roxie Hart (1942), […]
“You know, Esther, there will always be a wilderness to conquer. Maybe Hollywood is your wilderness now.” — Lettie, to her granddaughter Tremendous and overwhelming, the original A Star Is Born is the one substantial film among the three versions. People will continue to argue whether Janet Gaynor or Judy Garland gives the better performance […]
Hollywood took advantage of the absence of diplomatic ties between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.—the U.S. would recognize the Soviet Union the following year—by not bothering to credit the more substantial film that inspired its Wild Boys of the Road: Nikolai Ekk’s The Road to Life (Putyovka v Zhizn, 1931). Ekk’s film proceeds from a […]
Dennis Grunes 