M made Peter Lorre (1904–64) immortal and rightly so; by humanizing a monstrous killer, he changed forever how we would perceive such characters. There really was a child murderer; his name was Peter Kurten (1883–1931), and he had not yet been executed at the time of M's release. Unlike the tormented Hans Becker played by Lorre, Kurten felt no remor…
Seven-year-old Ludovic (Georges DuFresne) wants nothing better from life than to be a little girl, to dress like a fairy princess, to play with his doll Pam, and to marry his playmate Jerome (Julien Riviere). His parents pray it's just a phase. But the neighbors in their new suburban home, who had seemed so nice at first, treat Ludovic's entire family …
John Turturro's film about three Italian brothers was far more effective with this viewer than Edward Burns’ movie about The Brothers McMullen. Perhaps this is because the inspiration (Turturro's late father) feels more real. Turturro gets inside the bickering and the fighting to show the genuine love and strong bonds beneath the surface in the Vitelli family. He…
Madeleine Smith was a Victorian murderess…or was she? Director David Lean wanted audiences of the 1950s to have a question in their minds after seeing his film. Apparently, Madeleine (played by Lean's wife, Ann Todd) had a lusty relationship with Emile L'Angelier (Ivan Desny). Her father (Leslie Banks) wanted her to marry a man named M…
When Edward and Mrs. Simpson first hit international television screens in 1978, the actor playing Walter Monckton, a bespectacled advisor to the King, nearly stole the entire show. Nigel Hawthorne continued to play supporting roles in films and on television, but onstage, he was recognized as the star his enormous talent ought to have made him on big and small screens alike. Finally, Hawthorne ha…
In spite of the cast, The Maids is one of the least imaginative productions in the American Film Theatre series, and that's saying something.
The Making of “A Hard Day's Night” unravels one mystery I've been trying to solve for-absotively-ever: if Phil Collins, then 14, made his film debut in it, where the heck WAS he? Collins himself answers the question and shows us a crowd shot in which only his family could recognize him screaming along with all the other teenaged extras. This new documentary, produced by…
Clerks wasn't a smash hit or anything, but the black-and-white debut film did well enough in art houses for Gramercy Pictures to lure its young writer/director into making a color movie about Mallrats. After watching the rushes, did Kevin Smith wonder for an instant about giving all the credit to Alan Smithee? We may never know the answer to that one, but it would have been a kinder …
The Man in the Glass Booth is unique among the 13 American Film Theatre productions because its star, Maximilian Schell, won an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in the title role, the only participant to be so honored. Aside from that, we're looking at another stagey filmed play, a common failing among all but one of these movies (that would be Lord Laurence Olivier's T…
The 1956 re-make of The Man Who Knew Too Much is big and expensive and it has “Que Sera, Sera,” but the little kid in it drives me nuts, and I hate it when Jimmy Stewart gives Doris Day a sedative before he tells her about the kidnapping and she doesn't even return his volley with a left hook—she just goes into hysterics. Everything I detest about the 1950s is tossed in…
Love can be both sweet and fatal, the late François Truffaut (1932–84) says in his 1977 film, The Man Who Loved Women. Charles Denner plays a man who sneers at Don Juans, but behaves just like them. He's so obsessed with romance that he gets hit by a car and falls out of a hospital bed just because he wants to get a better look at all the pretty girls there are i…
Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera was made over 75 years ago, but it might well put many of today's avant-garde efforts to self-conscious shame.
Among the best movies released in 1988 was a 26-year-old film noir directed by John Frankenheimer. The Manchurian Candidate boasts a beautifully constructed script by Frankenheimer and George Axelrod, a terrific cast headed by Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury, and a dark premonitory vision that reveals all the horrors of the late ‘60s in embryo. Those who would like to re…
Amanda/Manny, 11 (Scarlett Johansson), and Laurel/Lo, 16 (Aleksa Palladino), are sisters, but they were adopted by different parents. They run away together, but Lo finds out she's expecting a baby, so they kidnap Elaine (Mary Kay Place), who works in a baby store. What's Elaine's story? They don't know, but Lo kno…
The recidivism rate for child molesters is so high that no one in his or her right mind would want to place a child in the unsupervised care of a known pedophile. That said, The Mark plans a unique form of violence on the viewer. Stuart Whitman gives the finest performance of his career as convicted child molester Jim Fuller. Fuller has served his time in prison, and has also received intensive th…
Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O is based on a 17th century book by Heinrich von Kleist and very much evokes the paintings of that time; every sequence of this beautifully photographed story would be suitable for framing.
The Marriage may just be the most vicious movie ever made regarding that particular institution, yet Arnaldo Jabor's ability to scrape close to the very core of human feelings is not only dazzling, it's right on the money. The neurotic, tempestuous music of Astor Piazzola emphasizes to perfection the feverish emotions in Jabor's film. Jabor's flamboyant style, given ful…
Martha and I was warmly received at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1991 but after its distributor went bankrupt, it sat on the shelf for three years until this beautifully made German entry acquired a new distributor.
Marty gave the little independent film stature and prestige at a time when the motion picture industry was trying to be BIG in order to attract the millions who were enjoying entertainment on the small screen. Marty also stunned movie studio executives with the realization that what people were watching on television for free could be every bit as good as or better than lavish films with high-pric…
Matador begins with its male lead masturbating to splatter videos. Then the female lead stabs a sexual partner as she climaxes. The rest of the movie shows how these two perfectly matched people meet and prepare for their mutual idea of the ultimate orgasm: simultaneous death. Writer/director Pedro Almodovar doesn't regard all this as aberrant or tragic, nor does he pass any moral ju…
The plot for The Matchmaker is straight out of a screwball comedy. Senator John McGlory (Jay O. Sanders) sends his assistant Marcy Tizard (Janeane Garofalo) to Ireland in search of his relatives. His re-election campaign in Massachusetts is in trouble and his strategy is to evoke John F. Kennedy's trip to Ireland in 1963. A few video clips of the Senator with his…
Matewan is the sort of picture that illustrates why independent film production is so necessary. John Sayles wrote the screenplay in the ‘70s, but no Hollywood studio was remotely interested in making a movie about a real-life massacre in which a dozen coal miners were murdered in West Virginia during the ‘20s. Sayles made it anyway, and it is among the most powerful works of his mem…
Maurice continues Berkeley-born director James Ivory's exploration of the English upper crust's high-class worries. Based on E.M. Forster's novel, the 139-minute film would not be hurt if it were half an hour shorter. It should come as no shock that there is a class structure in England and that schoolboys run off at the mouth, but it is tedious to watch long sequences convinc…
Medicine River is a captivating romance from Canada directed by Stuart Margolin. Oscar nominee Graham Greene plays Will, an international photojournalist who reluctantly returns to his native Blackfoot home for the first time in 20 years. He arrives late for his mother's funeral and finds himself unable to leave right away. A small-time hustler named Harlan Big Bear (Tom Jackson�…
At the time of its release, Medium Cool received rave reviews all over the world and its reputation remains undiminished over 30 years later. The first time I tried to reassess it in late 1997, I found myself mysteriously unmoved. The second time I tried, in late 1998, the mystery cleared up: As a writer/director, Haskell Wexler is a world-class cinematographer. I suspect that The Making of…
Meier is an enjoyable West German entry written and directed by Peter Timm.
Men in Love is reportedly the first feature film to be shot on BETA-SP and digitally mastered on D1-component before being transferred to 35mm.
In the first few minutes of Menace II Society, a teenaged boy named Caine (Tyrin Turner) watches as O-Dog (Larenz Tate) guns down a Korean couple who run a shop in Watts, California. Unlike O-Dog, Caine Lawson wants to leave this way of life, but he can't see a way out. Fellow gang member Sharif (Vonte Sweet) is the son of a teacher, Mr. Butler �…
The first thing you appreciate when you watch the films of Maya Deren is how unreflective of their own time they are. Deren made her first film, Meshes of the Afternoon, in 1943 when she was 26, but the visuals look like they might have been dreamed up 25 years later or more. Don't look for a plot. Traditional film narratives didn't interest her in the least. Maya Deren's avan…
It took Murray Lerner a quarter of a century to raise completion funds for Message to Love, his film of the 1970 Isle of Wight concert. Part of the problem was the TYPE of film he wanted to make. He wanted to show the sturm und drang that surrounded the concert, while most of the money folks wanted to skip all that and keep the focus on the music. Yet the behind-the-scenes conflict says a great de…
Metamorphosis offers a striking visualization of the Franz Kafka story, set in Prague, circa 1900.
The Method is clearly a well-intentioned effort by Joseph Destein and 13 other men who worked on the film with him. It's the old story about the middle-aged woman who leaves home and family to find herself by taking acting lessons and by playing hookers on film. The filmmakers try to solve plot problems by picking up the slack with undeveloped sub-plots involving minor characters. Remember …
Metropolis was set 74 years in the future in the year 2000. Fritz Lang “detested it after it was finished”; he wanted it to include elements of magic and the occult, ghosts and ghouls, instead of the notion that “human beings were nothing but part of a machine.” Lang credits Thea von Harbou with the original concept ("She had foresight and was right"), but…
Christopher Eigeman looks and sounds like he's out of another time, like you'd find him at one of Jay Gatsby's garden parties immaculately tailored, supplying Scott AND Zelda Fitzgerald with literary inspiration for dozens of short stories. He was in Whit Stillman's first two pictures and Noah Baumbach's debut film, but I only see him in Pacific Bell commercials …
How often have you watched a movie and wondered: “How in the world were they able to get this project past the story board?” In the case of Miami Blues, I have a pretty good hunch which sequences attracted Jonathan Demme to produce it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that YOU have to blow your entertainment allowance on it. Miami Blues is your basic home movie with a budget.…
Galway-born actor George Brent used to be a dispatch rider for Michael Collins. He escaped Ireland with a price on his head and eventually wound up in Hollywood at the Warner Bros. studio. Had the future of Ireland not been his preeminent concern, Michael Collins could have torn up the silver screen. Check out the newsreels of the early 1920s; Collins appears onscreen and you can't look at …
At first, Mina Tannenbaum evokes memories of the 1991 British comedy, Antonia and Jane, although director Martine Dugowson's incisive reflections on a 25-year friendship are in no way softened by humor. Instead, we see two young women sustained and strengthened by the friendship each wishes she had, rather than what's actually there. Mina, the more sensitive and artistic of the two, …
A storm of controversy erupted when Roberto Rossellini's The Miracle was released with The Human Voice in 1948 as a two-part film, L'Amore. Cardinal Spellman in New York was particularly outraged at this tale of a simple woman who sleeps with a bum (portrayed by screenwriter Federico Fellini) under the impression that he is Saint Joseph. The next item on her agenda is g…
When Miracle Mile was first released, some reviewers commented on the improbability of a ringing pay telephone alerting protagonist Harry (Anthony Edwards) to a nuclear nightmare. But how did we learn about Chernobyl in 1986, anyway? And doesn't Death sometimes (in 1997, actually) arrive in the form of two drops of dimethyl-mercury that leak through latex gloves?…
The history of the motion picture industry has always been shrouded in mystery. Take the very first filmmaker, for example. In November of 1888, Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince patented his camera, and some of the films he made in October of that year still survive. One shows the Yorkshire garden of his British father-in-law, the other records traffic crossing Leeds Bridge. The following year, Le Pr…
When Queen Victoria's doctor told her that her days of bearing children were over, she cried, “Oh, Doctor, can I have no more fun in bed?” Despite this reported incident, and many examples in the Queen's own writing of her deep physical attraction to Prince Albert and their sensual love life, the Victorians and their era have acquired an undeserved reputation for prudis…
Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) left behind a few recordings of her voice, which Jennifer Jason Leigh listened to over and over again, trying to get every inflection just right. Audiences either loved or hated Leigh's voice as Parker; it was the centerpiece of her interpretation. Let's see—if Parker only made a few recordings, she could not have been very comfo…
Mr. North is a 1988 movie that, except for the color and the sound, is virtually indistinguishable from any Cinderella yarn of 1928. Ah, for the good old days when integration meant marriage between the immigrant Irish and the third generation Irish, when amusing the rich provided the poor with access to their privileged world, and when every young dreamer enjoyed a fairytale ending. Set in Newpor…
A Modern Affair is a first directorial effort by Vern Oakley, working with a script by Paul Zimmerman.
What you notice first about Mommy is how good an actress Patty McCormack was and still is. Since McCormack never relied on the tricks of most kiddie stars (baby talk, cuteness, innocence, OR sweetness), she didn't miss them when she moved into adult roles. As the title character, McCormack projects skin-deep politeness, but we all know what's underneath her mask: a soci…
Bob Hoskins gets out of prison and asks slimy gangster Michael Caine for a job. He winds up driving around an expensive call girl (Cathy Tyson). Hoskins keeps a pretty tight lid on his loneliness and desperation, but by caring about his nightly charge, he's in over his head. Neil Jordan would later rework and satirize some of the themes here in 1992's The Crying Game, b…
Here's Hugh Beaumont in another “B” movie for Leave It to Beaver fans who just HAVE to see Ward Cleaver acting like a real rat once in a while. He's a fiend in this one as “Steve Clark” (it's an alias). In one sequence, he asks Julie (Frances Rafferty) to turn up the radio so the neighbors won't be disturbed while …
From his breakthrough appearance in the 1966 Karel Reisz classic Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment right on up to the present day, David Warner has specialized in playing strange dudes, each role progressively weirder than the one that preceded it. His body of work provides a feast for fans of offbeat cult films, although I can think of no other actor of his stature who is such a shy enigma of…
San Francisco Bay area filmmaker Rick Schmidt is the author of Feature Filmmaking at Used Car Prices and he isn't kidding about that title. The press kit for Morgan's Cake begins with a list of virtually every dollar that was spent on the movie, as well as informative tips on how he was able to make the best use of his time and money. Roughly, production expenses cost $3,700, …
This successful West German effort by Rainer Werner Fassbinder focuses on the title character, played by Brigitte Mira. Mother Küsters is a woman who finds herself drawn into politics after her husband's suicide; she acquires our sympathy slowly, but relentlessly. At first, she appears to be a woman unfairly hanging on to her grown children and her memories. Gradually, however, her a…
Mother's Boys, deemed to be unworthy of an advance press screening and therefore destined for automatic boxoffice failure, is, in fact, not a bad little film. It stars Jamie Lee Curtis as Jude, a deeply disturbed woman who's already abandoned her family twice and is now back for a third stab at reengaging their affections. Her husband, Peter Gallagher, has finally adjusted to her dep…
Motorama is a shapeless travelogue about a 10-year-old boy whose big dream is to collect all eight letters in the title so that he can compete for $500 million in a national contest. It turns out that the contest is full of hot air and so is the movie, in spite of all its stellar cameos (Shelley Berman, Martha Quinn, Michael J. Pollard, Drew Barrymore, etc.). The chief problem…
This is the movie that started me on a lifelong love affair with Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), and once again, it was John Huston who ignited the affair, just as he had with Sam Spade and The Maltese Falcon on his very first assignment as a young director. Moulin Rouge was a nominee the year that Cecil B. De Mille's The Greatest Show on Earth won the Academy Aw…
Mountains of the Moon, like many movies about explorers, raises an inevitable question: how would these sagas emerge if they had been told from the point of view of the natives rather than the outsiders who invaded their homelands? British explorers of the past were a stubborn lot, determined to impose inappropriate values and customs on uncharted territories even when it when meant the loss of li…
Kenneth Branagh wanted to breathe life into the works of William Shakespeare, and that he definitely has. This rambunctious romantic comedy is filled with fun and high spirits, not to mention four glittering American stars. Well, if Branagh had filled EVERY role with moonlighting actors from Masterpiece Theatre, you'd be looking at a movie that was at Cannes on April 15th and on PBS by Apri…
Until Murder on the Orient Express was released, big screen adaptations of the works of Agatha Christie (1890–1976) were few and far between. And then came this sumptuous production with a cast headed by 11 Oscar winners and/or nominees. Set in 1930, the plot focuses on a group of highly suspicious-looking passengers aboard the Orient Express (from the classy, gu…
An unusual friendship is explored in the Australian entry by P. J. Hogan, Muriel's Wedding. Muriel (Toni Collette) is a chunky young woman who dreams of a lavish wedding and warm acceptance from a clique who reject her at every opportunity. Muriel is also a compulsive liar and a thief who thinks nothing of feeding her unrealistic dreams with a string of deceptions. While on ho…
You can make a comedy about any subject, but getting audiences to watch it is a whole other problem. In 1971, Louis Malle wrote and directed Murmur of the Heart, about a young boy with a heart condition who winds up in bed with his ravishing mother. The French Movie Commission wanted to ban the film, but later decided to restrict attendance to adult audiences. Those who actually saw the movie in F…
Alan Madden's Mushrooms shows how two dotty best friends cover up the accidental death of their lodger.
My Beautiful Laundrette was a landmark film for Daniel Day-Lewis, Stephen Frears, and Hanif Kureishi, but not alas, for the appealing Gordon Warnecke, who plays Omar, the central character. (He would make an appearance, along with Fergie impersonator Pippa Hinchley, in Kureishi's London Kills Me six years later.) Omar remodels a seedy laundry with his friend Johnny (Day…
I first became aware of filmmakers Anna Thomas and Gregory Nava in 1981 when I saw Thomas’ The Haunting of M, a Scottish ghost story starring Shelagh Gilbey as Marianna and Nina Pitt as her sister. I haven't been able to get the film out of my head, although sadly, I've never been able to find it on cable or video. The idea then was that Thomas and Nava would alternate as writ…
Daniel Day-Lewis was a sure bet for an Academy Award from the instant audiences first saw him as Christy Brown. My Left Foot, a splendid film written and directed by Jim Sheridan, is based on the book by Brown, who refused to let a major obstacle like cerebral palsy prevent him from achieving recognition as an artist and a writer. The key to Brown's success, the film makes clear, is largely…
This sweet little film is about a boy of 12 (Anton Glanzelius) who is sent to stay with relatives during his mother's illness. It's set in 1950s Sweden and is filled with colorful village characters and an irresistible tomboy with whom he tumbles into as much puppy love as he can handle at that age. The unexpected success of My Life As a Dog stunned exhibitors and woke …
Zzzzzz… Of course, I didn't know at the time that I was watching self-destruction in action, I thought I was just watching a couple of actors delivering dialogue that was written for them by the director. Even if I had known what was going to happen in front of the Viper Club in the wee hours of Halloween, 1993, my reaction to My Own Private Idaho would still be zzzzzz…. There…
This modest entry in the Shadow Zone series created by J.R. Black represents a comeback of sorts for a nearly unrecognizable Margot Kidder as a character named Sol. It also stars Shelley Duvall as a teacher named Mrs. Fink whose fate is linked to that of a spooky-looking doll. Sheila McCarthy and John Neville are in it, too, as a Mom and as a mysterious shopkeeper. Young protagonist Jesse brings h…
Believe it or don't, My Tutor is among the top 50 indie moneymakers of all time. Why? My own theory is that the cast and the script helped to give it good word-of-mouth. Hunky Matt Lattanzi needs a tutor so Dad Kevin McCarthy hires pretty Caren Kaye for the job. So far, it's standard. In fact, the plot line continues to be standard (GUY MEETS TUTOR, TUTOR LIKES GUY, GUY LOSES …
This watchable but sketchy film arrives on the heels of two superior documentaries, Last of the Tsars and The Last Days of the Last Tsar; it incorporates footage from Days that reconstructs the slaughter of the Romanov family at Ekaterinburg. The screenwriter is Peter Kurth, author of the well-written but now debunked Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson. Kurth got caught up in the long-running …
This charming story about three teenage girls growing up in Mystic, Connecticut, won its director a Best First Film prize at 1989's Independent Spirit Awards. With that sort of encouragement, better movies were expected of director Donald Petrie than Opportunity Knocks, The Favor, Grumpy Old Men,and Richie Rich. But back in Mystic, the characters played by Annabeth Gish, Julia Roberts, and …
Terrific title, fair flick. Why do families who don't get along get together for the holidays? This dreary gathering of relatives is like 91 minutes in Hell. The only interesting part occurs when Mia (Julianne Moore) splits in search of the ending of a book and meets Cezanne (James LeGros) who used to send her Valentines when they were little. Their moments toget…