Bigotry & Bloodshed: SAPPHIRE (1959)

A beautiful young woman named Sapphire (Yvonne Buckingham) has been murdered. Her bloodied corpse was found in London’s Hampstead Heath park. A seasoned detective (Nigel Patrick) and his young partner (Michael Craig) are called on to investigate the case but as they try to piece together the puzzle of this post-war whodunit the mystery only …

GORDON PARKS: FILMMAKER, PHOTOGRAPHER & RENAISSANCE MAN

“Something mighty there is inside a man that takes him from being the youngest of 15 children raised in Kansas poverty, something that lets him clear the cruel hurdles implanted by a racist society, something that permits not merely survival but mastery of all that he embraced. A poet, and a pianist, a classical music …

EQUAL SHARES FOR ALL: THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN (1960)

The League of Gentlemen (1960) contains one of my favorite moments from postwar British cinema; a group of ex-soldiers carrying submachine guns plow through London’s narrow streets with their faces concealed behind gas masks. Instead of dodging an attack they are preparing to rob a bank and their military uniforms have been replaced by civilian …

LOSEY LET LOOSE: THE CRIMINAL (1960)

While looking through the collection of Joseph Losey films currently available to stream on FilmStruck I was inspired to revisit The Criminal a.k.a. Concrete Jungle (1960), a low-budget British crime thriller about an underworld kingpin named Johnny Bannion (Stanley Baker) who organizes a high-stakes robbery that goes terribly wrong. When he finds himself behind bars …

STRANGER THAN FICTION: THE BARON OF ARIZONA (1949)

“In the movie business, a good ending must sometimes hold sway over the truth.” – Samuel Fuller, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking Before Samuel Fuller wrote and directed his own films he was a gutsy go-getting newspaperman. Fuller first worked at the New York Journal as a copyboy and eventually graduated to the …

VINCENT PRICE & GENE TIERNEY: A DOOMED ROMANCE

This post was part of my month-long celebration of Vincent Price–TCM’s October Star of the Month in 2013. Throughout the course of Vincent Price’s long career, he worked with some of my favorite actresses such as Barbara Steele, Diana Rigg, Jennifer Jones and Linda Hayden. But if I had to single out Price’s most important …

Plucking the Petals of Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower (1964)

“Tokyo… After three long years. It makes my head spin. Just look at it. Why so many people crammed into tiny cage-like boxes? People… Such strange animals. What keeps them all going? They look like they’re half dead. Making a frantic pretense of being alive. What was so wrong about killing one of these stupid …

CRIME & PUNISHMENT: LE CERCLE ROUGE (1970)

August 10, 2017: FilmStruck is currently streaming 11 films featuring Alain Delon as part of their “Icons: Alain Delon” theme and for the next 4 weeks I’ll be spotlighting a few of my favorite titles in this collection. To learn more about the French actor please see a previous post I wrote in 2010 to celebrate …

HONOR AMONG THIEVES: FAREWELL, FRIEND (1968)

In the tradition of classic French heist films such as Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), Rififi (1955) and Bob le flambeur (1956), Farewell, Friend (aka Honor Among Thieves, 1968) takes viewers on a treacherous adventure where femme fatales lurk around every shadowy corner and crime rarely pays. But that doesn’t stop some fortune hunters from risking everything to make a quick buck or in …

Triad Theater: THE MISSION (1999)

Shakespearean in its scope and operatic in its execution, THE MISSION (‘99) remains one of the most taut, compelling and superbly composed films made in Hong Kong during the 1990s. This sinewy thriller helped cement Johnnie To’s reputation as one of today’s most accomplished action directors and you can currently catch it streaming on FilmStruck …

CRIME & PASSION: POOL OF LONDON (1951)

I, along with some of my fellow FilmStruck colleagues, have been modestly building a case for the reassessment of Basil Dearden’s career during the past year by spotlighting many of his films including Sapphire (1959), The League of Gentlemen (1960), Victim (1961), All Night Long (1963), Frieda(1947), The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970) and The Captive Heart (1946). Despite the fact that the British director has …

Film Writing Nov. 2016 – April 2017

It's been awhile. Work obligations, as well as personal projects and other responsibilities, have taken precedence over updating my blogs. Of course, you can always find me on my Tumblr as well as Twitter & Facebook. Before I let another month get away, I thought I'd finally share an update to the film writing I've …

Jan. & Feb. 2016 at TCM’s Movie Morlocks

Links to some of the writing I did for TCM's Movie Morlocks blog in Jan. & Feb. Jan. 7: William Cameron Menzies: Chandu the Magician (1932) Excerpt: "In recent weeks, you might have heard about the upcoming Doctor Strange film currently scheduled for release in November of 2016. The news caught my attention because I’ve …

6 Months of Film Writing

I'm afraid I've been neglecting Cinebeats again but I've been busy with various personal projects and obligations. I've also recently started writing for Publishers Weekly but I thought I'd finally update with some highlights from TCM's Movie Morlocks. Here's some of the more interesting (in my estimation) film related writing & entertaining babble I've produced …

SEIJUN SUZUKI’S EVERYTHING GOES WRONG (1960)

I recently signed up for a temporary “Plus” account with Hulu.com so I could sample some of the hard-to-see Japanese films Criterion has made available there. According to Criterion their partnership with Hulu “gives viewers a chance to explore our library, sample films they might want to buy, discover films they never knew they would want, and …