Category: Film

Woody Allen’s first film as a director (1968), in which he plays Virgil Starkwell, Public Schmuck Number One. This ragged collection of gags and sketch fragments was reportedly pieced together from an incoherent mass of footage by ace film doctor Ralph Rosenblum, yet whatever its genesis, Allen’s scraggly rhetoric evolved into the dominant comic style […]

Not Walt Disney, but a 1975 science fiction film based on Harlan Ellison’s World War III story. The survivors of the nuclear holocaust are divided into two camps—the roving bands of scavengers on the surface and the passionately bourgeois citizens of “Topeka,” an artificial community buried five miles underground. Director L.Q. Jones worked as an […]

A short documentary (1965, 47 min.) on the probable effects of nuclear escalation, war, and the resultant breakdown of social structure and public morale, made by Peter Watkins for the BBC—which declined to show it, chickening out on the grounds that the film was too upsetting for all the Alf Garnetts (British Archie Bunkers). It […]

This 1941 film, which Warren Beatty remade as Heaven Can Wait, is nothing special in itself—a fairly routine romantic comedy from the 40s, with Robert Montgomery having a hard time acting like a lowlife. He’s a boxer in this first draft, and the love interest is provided by Evelyn Keyes. With Claude Rains and Edward […]

George Stevens gives his usual heavy treatment to a screwball comedy about a fugitive (Cary Grant) hiding in a house that landlady Jean Arthur has just rented to Supreme Court justice Ronald Colman. Overblown, too long, and not nearly as much fun as it’s cracked up to be, this 1942 feature demonstrates the same sort […]

Three recent works about Asians living in the U.S. by the independent documentarist. Includes Adopted Son: The Murder of Vincent Chin, Sei Chien: Goddess in Flight, and Bittersweet Survival.

The Oscar winner for 1929, this MGM feature was the first movie musical. The staging is wooden, the story insipid, and the dialogue sequences mostly painful, but the film’s integration of song, dance, and story (“100% All Talking! 100% All Singing! 100% All Dancing!”) was a clear narrative advance over the music pictures being released […]

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