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When John Lennon’s younger son, Sean, was born, the musician spoke about him with great pride. He stepped away from the public eye and his music career in order to raise him. He did not treat his older son this way. Julian Lennon was born during Beatlemania and spent little time with his father after his parents divorced. He spoke about how proud he was of his mother for raising him on “very little” while Lennon continued to get richer.

John Lennon’s son said he felt like his father cast him aside

After John and Cynthia Lennon divorced, Julian Lennon saw very little of his father. He said his mother was primarily responsible for raising him, and he believed that she did a great job.

“I’m immensely proud of her,” he wrote in the foreword to Cynthia’s book, John. “She’s always been there for me...

Cited as King Hu’s last pure wuxia film, 1975’s The Valiant Ones is set during the Ming Dynasty of the 16th century in a time when China’s coastlines were under constant harassment from Japanese wokou. As an opening narration explains, these pirates operate nearly unchallenged thanks to their fighting prowess and the corruption of Japanese consuls, Chinese officials, and even the Ming emperor (Chao Lei) himself. Despite the collusion, the monarch must keep up appearances of solving the problem, and so he commissions General Zhu (Tu Kuang-chi) to assemble a group of warriors to combat the pirates. Zhou in turn hires a brilliant captain, Yu Da-you (Roy Chiao), to lead the unit, along with a handful of fighters that includes a husband-wife duo (Wing Bai and Hsu Feng) who could each take on an entire platoon of bandits.

Whether or not Hu felt he was leaving behind the wuxia genre,...

Phil Karlson’s The Scarface Mob was originally made as a two-part pilot for the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse anthology series before the 80-minute episodes were re-cut for theatrical release. Given the sterility of so much dramatic television in the 1950s, it’s hard to imagine Karlson—best known for hard-hitting noirs like Kansas City Confidential and The Phenix City Story—seeing the format as suitable for his style. But Desi Arnaz, a huge admirer of the latter film, promised Karlson no studio interference. And while The Scarface Mob’s story presents a clear battle between good and evil in the form of Eliot Ness (Robert Stack) and Al Capone’s (Neville Brand) Chicago bootlegging empire, Karlson’s gritty brutality finds its way on-screen as the film conflates the maniacal ruthlessness of both men’s actions.

Stack’s performance went a long way in cementing Ness’s legacy in the public imagination.

Don Siegel’s 1976 western The Shootist stars John Wayne in his final film appearance, though it’s perhaps just as notable for the muted nature of its regard for the pathology of violence. After all, Siegel is the same filmmaker who half a decade prior made Dirty Harry, in which Clint Eastwood’s renegade cop relishes squeezing the trigger of his 44-magnum revolver whenever the opportunity presents itself.

There’s a propulsive mania to Siegel’s direction of Dirty Harry, tapping as it does into the curious overlap between Harry’s police tactics and a psycho sniper’s bloodlust. Wayne’s J.B. Books in The Shootist has no such compelling correlate. He’s a former sheriff turned gunslinger, now an old man easing the pain of his terminal cancer with swigs of laudanum, and he’s aiming to die in peace. It’s 1901, and the fact that he can’t...

The sci-fi classic Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright and Jeff Goldblum) is out now on 4K Uhd (Blu-ray) and Limited Edition Blu-ray from Arrow Video.

Remakes of great films are usually on a hiding to nothing, but Philip Kaufman’s brilliant update of the 1956 classic Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is a rare and memorable exception. Transposing the action to the heart of San Francisco allows Kaufman to retain all the suspense of Jack Finney’s original story while adding caustic social commentary about the selfishness of the 1970s “me generation” that remains all too relevant today.

But it’s a paranoid thriller first and foremost, based on one of the most psychologically terrifying of all premises – what happens when you can no longer trust not just the authorities but even your nearest and dearest?

Synopsis:

When health official Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams...

The fantastical films of French director Albert Lamorisse often limn the boundaries between the earthly and the sublime, with his characters trying to flee or transcend the physical limitations and demands of the material world through flight or the spiritual world of the imagination. In his most famous film, the Palme d’Or-winning short The Red Balloon, Lamorisse presents this dichotomy in a most elemental fashion, with his camera following a young boy, Pascal (Pascal Lamorisse), as he traipses about Paris with a balloon that appears to have a mind of its own.

There’s a consistent levity to the film as both boy and balloon engage in various sorts of play as they wander aimlessly about town. Yet their frivolity is met with resistance from a world that devalues the importance of joy and imagination, both through adults that won’t let Pascal inside places with his balloon and...

John Lennon famously spoke about becoming a “househusband” to raise his second child, but he had a more distant relationship with his eldest son, Julian. Julian Lennon was born early in The Beatles’ time as a band, and his parents divorced when he was young. From there, his relationship with Lennon grew distant; he admitted to feeling like he hardly knew him. He shared why he felt this made Lennon a hypocrite.

Julian Lennon and John Lennon | David Cairns/Getty Images John Lennon’s son Julian said his father’s behavior was hypocritical

After The Beatles broke up, Lennon began speaking often about the importance of peace and love. He hosted bed-ins for peace with Yoko Ono, integrated the messaging into his music, and spoke out against the Vietnam War. Julian believed this behavior made his father a hypocrite.

Yoko Ono, Julian Lennon, and John Lennon | Bettmann/Contributor via Getty

“I have to say that,...

The Blue Bird will open the festival Photo: Courtesy George Eastman Museum/HippFest The Hippodrome Silent Film Festival - aka HippFest - has announced the programme for its 13th edition - which will open on March 22 with a screening of The Blue Bird , Maurice Tourneur’s fantasy fairy-tale of two children’s quest for happiness, and run until March 26.

Scotland’s only festival dedicated to silent film takes place in the country’s oldest purpose built cinema, the Hippodrome in Bo’ness..

The opening film will be accompanied by the world premiere of a new commission by Sonic Bothy, an award-winning Glasgow-based inclusive ensemble that explores, composes and performs experimental and contemporary music.

Earlier in the day critic and filmmaker David Cairns will be joined by Chris Heppell, a Campaigner with Changing Faces, the UK’s Visible Difference and Disfigurement charity for a talk “All Faces are Masks”: Visible Difference in Silent Cinema.

We're back with another Blu-ray round-up! As always, I gather up the latest releases for you in one handy spot. You're welcome. This latest round-up includes Criterion's release of Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet playing a pair of fine young cannibals in "Bones and All," Ralph Fiennes serving up "The Menu," and a tooth-drilling double feature of "The Dentist" movies.

Bones And All

Luca Guadagnino's "Bones and All" is a beautiful road trip movie that just happens to be about cannibals. It's the 1980s, and Maren (Taylor Russell) has a big secret: she's a cannibal who can't resist eating human flesh. After an unfortunate incident involving a classmate, Maren hits the road. She eventually encounters Lee (Timothée Chalamet), another cannibal. It turns out there are cannibals all over the country, and they can sense each other. Lee and Maren fall...

If discovering brilliant filmmakers appeals, it’s difficult to to better than this five-disc, nine-feature labor of recovery and restoration from Lobster films. Julien Duvivier is well known for a couple of pictures, one of which screened not so long ago on Eddie Muller’s TCM film noir show. But seeing his silent masterpieces may change your thinking about real cinematic art: theory meets narrative effectiveness through both technical innovation and delicate direction of actors. One silent in this set, about the economic power of a department store (!) is so effective, at the finish you’ll be convinced that a sync sound version couldn’t possibly be better. The set is appointed with expert introductions and analysis . . . this is the real French cinema that no ‘New Wave’ can invalidate.

Cinema of Discovery Julien Duvivier in the 1920s

Blu-ray

Flicker Alley

1925 – 1930 / B&w

1:33 Silent Ap. / 14 hours, 17 min.

Street Date January...

It’s a new deluxe Limited Edition of Sam Peckinpah’s mangled masterpiece, the third fancy boxed set in as many years. Arrow’s presentation is certainly got the edge in graphic elegance. They’ve also strived to include as many earlier extras as possible, plus new analytical-critical takes on the picture, and an excellent (and wickedly funny) visual essay from David Cairns. The disc has both of my commentaries, including the comprehensive one that details the missing scenes with information taken directly from Sam Peckinpah and Oscar Saul’s screenplay. And hey, you never know: this could be the year that Mitch Miller’s Singalong Gang makes an incredible comeback, and we can All fall in behind the Major.

Major Dundee

Blu-ray

Arrow Video

1965 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 136, 122 min. / (2-Disc Limited Edition) / Street Date June 29, 2021 / 59.95

Starring: Charlton Heston, Richard Harris, James Coburn, Senta Berger, Jim Hutton, Michael Anderson Jr., Brock Peters,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe cover for the new issue of Cahiers du Cinema is a patchwork tribute to the erratic year of 2020. Frederick Wiseman's City Hall also tops the Cahiers list of this year's top ten films. Actress and screenwriter Daria Nicolodi, best known for co-writing Dario Argento's Suspiria and appearing in a number of Argento's Giallo classics like Deep Red and Inferno, has died. Recommended VIEWINGAnthology Film Archives is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a showcase of video tributes from a wide range of artists, filmmakers, and scholars, including Bette Gordon, Abel Ferrara, Nathaniel Dorsky, and Michael Snow. They've also made available a free recreation of their inaugural program from November 30, 1970, featuring films by Georges Méliès, Joseph Cornell, Jerome Hill and Harry Smith. The curators of the Museum of Modern Art and the Berlinale...

It’s Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing together in a horror picture, a formula no shock feature fan can resist. Most of us remember staring at the beautiful full-color photo of Chris Lee in monster makeup in Denis Gifford’s picture book about horror movies. Yet this has remained one of the pair’s most obscure items, at least as a quality presentation. Powerhouse Indicator’s expert added value items put all the rumors to rest, including the question that’s been repeated through the years — where’s the legendary 3-D version? Or perhaps more to the point, was there really a 3-D version? And then there’s the other question — is the movie any good?

I, Monster

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1971 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 75, 81 min. / Street Date September 28, 2020 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99

Starring: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Mike Raven, Richard Hurndall, George Merritt, Kenneth J. Warren.

Cinematography:...

Koji Shima’s Eye-Popping Warning From Space (1956) will be available on Blu-ray From Arrow Video October 13th

The first Japanese science fiction film to be made in color, Koji Shima s Warning From Space features eye-popping special effects from the same team at Daiei Studios that would bring Gamera to life a decade later.

As Japan is rocked by mysterious sightings of UFOs over Tokyo and large one-eyed aliens attempting contact, scientists collaborate to investigate the unexpected rise in extraterrestrial activity. Unbeknownst to them, one of the aliens has already assumed human form and is about to deliver a very important message that could be humanity s last hope for survival.

With a witty script by Hideo Oguni (screenwriter of several Akira Kurosawa classics including Seven Samurai) and iconic starfish-like aliens designed by avant-garde artist Taro Okamoto, the original Japanese version of Warning From Space finally makes its official English-language video debut.

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.And now they've quietly disappeared William Fox's name from the company: guilty by association with Rupert Murdoch, even though he never associated with him.***I believe David Thomson once said something about Fox's fifties output being "the antithesis of cinema," which is very slightly nuts if you consider the films of Samuel Fuller (Pick-Up on South Street among others), Nicholas Ray (Bigger Than Life), Frank Tashlin (The Girl Can't Help It), and more.But we sort of know what he means: the advent of CinemaScope caused aesthetic confusion, as technical advances often do, and we can all picture laundry lines of less-than-fresh 1940s actors eking out their remaining B.

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.And now they've quietly disappeared William Fox's name from the company: guilty by association with Rupert Murdoch, even though he never associated with him.***Dangerous Crossing was directed by Joseph M. Newman in 1953, not long before the one title he's semi-remembered for, This Island Earth. It seems to have been greenlit as a B-picture to take advantage of the sets built for Fox's Titanic, as it's an ocean voyage mystery.Newlywed Jeanne Crain boards ship with her husband, who promptly vanishes, and nobody will admit to ever having seen him. Of course the plot kernel was used before, by writers Launder and Gilliat for director Hitchcock in The Lady Vanishes.

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.And now they've quietly disappeared William Fox's name from the company: guilty by association with Rupert Murdoch, even though he never associated with him.***Joseph L. Mankiewicz, former producer at MGM, where Louis B. Mayer called him Joe Monkeybitch, became a top director at Fox, and his films there are spectacularly well-represented on streaming services today, along with Ford and Preminger, but one exception seems to be House of Strangers, his 1949 noir saga starring Richard Conte, Susan Hayward, and Edward G. Robinson.It's an unusual genre to find the urbane Mankiewicz dirtying his hands with. Robinson's presence is a throwback to the pre-Code gangland epics of Warner Bros., while the...

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.And now they've quietly disappeared William Fox's name from the company: guilty by association with Rupert Murdoch, even though he never associated with him.***Two of the 1940s Raymond Chandler adaptations, Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946) and Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet (1944), are rightly considered classics. Hawks identified the key challenge of the first-person detective story: find a leading man interesting enough that the audience doesn't get bored of seeing him in every scene. Hawks hired Bogart.Dmytryk was lumbered with Dick Powell, but Powell stretched himself and Dmytryk did everything to make the surroundings interesting, even nightmarish.The third movie from the third major studio is Robert Montgomery...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSGoodbye, Dragon Inn (2003)Cancellations, closures, and cuts continue in the wake of Covid-19. Box Office Pro, Cineuropa, and Complex will be regularly updating timelines of the virus's impact on theatres and the film industry. In response to these events, website Screen Slate and New York City-based cinema Light Industry have launched the Cinema Worker Solidarity Fund, which seeks to help movie theater workers whose jobs have been affected by the closure of local cinemas. Meanwhile, the fate of this year's Cannes Film Festival remains indeterminate, with film companies planning a virtual market (and online screenings) should the festival be cancelled. Elsewhere, SXSW pushes forward by opting to distribute screening links to its jurors for award decisions. Recommended VIEWINGAll of avant-garde filmmaker Sky Hopinka's short films are now available for free, including Fainting Spells...

Masaki Kobayashi’s striking collection of Japanese ghost tales, on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK, in a Limited Edition Set

Eureka Entertainment to release “Kwaidan,” Masaki Kobayashi’s ambitious anthology of Japanese ghost tales, on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK, presented from a 2K digital restoration. Available from 27 April 2020 as part of The Masters of Cinema Series in a Limited Edition Set of only 3000 copies, featuring a Hardbound Case and 100-page Collector’s Book.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, “Kwaidan” features four nightmarish tales adapted from Lafcadio Hearn’s classic Japanese ghost stories about mortals caught up in forces beyond their comprehension when the supernatural world intervenes in their lives: “The Black Hair”, “The Woman of the Snow”, “Hoichi the Earless”, and “In a Cup of Tea”.

Breathtakingly photographed entirely on hand-painted sets, the film is an abstract...

Synopsis

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, Kwaidan features four nightmarish tales adapted from Lafcadio Hearn’s classic Japanese ghost stories about mortals caught up in forces beyond their comprehension when the supernatural world intervenes in their lives: “The Black Hair”, “The Woman of the Snow”, “Hoichi the Earless”, and “In a Cup of Tea”.

Breathtakingly photographed entirely on hand-painted sets, the film is an abstract wash of luminescent colours from another world. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present the complete 183-minute original Japanese cut of Masaki Kobayashi’s masterpiece on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK.

Special features

Limited Edition Hardbound Slipcase [3000 copies]

A 100-page Perfect Bound Illustrated Collector’s book featuring reprints of Lafcadio Hearn’s original ghost stories; a survey of the life and career of Masaki Kobayashi by Linda Hoaglund; and a wide ranging interview with the...

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out. The great movie factories were so prolific, none of them have succeeded in making anything like all their major works available on the repertory circuit, home video, television, or streaming, but Fox now seems particularly indifferent to providing any access to their catalog, so focusing on them seems fair. I hope to illuminate the movies Fox ought to be proud of, and a few you couldn't blame them for wanting to hide under a rock.Oh, and we're doing it chronologically, so first up is a crummy kids' film from 1917.Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp is directed by workhorses Sidney and Chester M. Franklin, perhaps best remembered for the Dorothy Gish...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSLolita (1962)This year's Golden Globes winners have been announced and can be found here.Looking ahead, take note of Criterion's roster of upcoming films to look forward to in 2020, from Steven Spielberg's West Side Story to Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir Part II. Sue Lyon, who starred in films like Stanley Kubrick's Lolita and The Night of the Iguana by John Huston, has died. The Studio Ghibli official New Year's message includes the announcement that Hayao Miyazaki's How Do You Live? is about 15% complete, as Miyazaki is completing about one minute of animation per month. Nevertheless, we look forward to the auteur's latest opus. Recommended VIEWINGThe first trailer for Downhill, an adaptation of Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell as a couple whose relationship is threatened by a fateful avalanche.

There have been very many takes on Bram Stoker's Victorian shocker Dracula, but most of them have quite a bit in common, either adapting, closely or loosely, the book's text, or suggesting a sequel that takes the original as read. Jonathan, the debut film of writer-director Hans W. Geißendörfer in West Germany in 1970, does something else.The Jonathan of the title would appear to be J. Harker, though he's never explicitly named as such, and he's a German villager rather than a London estate agent. Rather than visiting a sinister count on business, he's sent off to be a vampire-hunting secret agent. As bloodsuckers ravage the countryside, his daring mission is to infiltrate the castle of the fiends' leader, free the prisoners, open the doors for an attacking peasant army, and help drive the undead horde into the sea.Which, in a rather flat and disappointing manner, is exactly what happens.

Nothing But the Best (1964) signifies a turning point in the British new wave: a sudden flip from grim northern drama to swinging London archness, here under the controls of three masters of that tone.1. Frederic Raphael is best known for writing Two For the Road (impossibly arch) and Eyes Wide Shut (strange... very strange), and this film does have some kind of commonality with those: glamorous young people, sporty cars, hard-to-get-into parties in sprawling country houses... but in essence it's more like a glib black comedy version of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Raphael had previously adapted the source story (by American crime writer Stanley Ellin) as a TV play, and in expanding it for cinema he threw out the ironic twist of fate that dooms the murderous, social-climber anti-hero, perhaps seeing it as an old-fashioned harking-back to Kind Hearts and Coronets (whose ironic twist was imposed by the censor). Now...

Costa-Gavras, who is still making films at 86, was just a beginner when he made Un homme de trop (a.k.a. Shock Troops) in 1967, and arguably wouldn't hit his true stride until he made the Oscar-winning Z a couple of years later. The '67 movie, a French Resistance drama produced by James Bond mogul Harry Saltzman, was a big-budget flop. But it's also a genuine unknown masterpiece.Speculating as to why the film wasn't a hit, the director supposed that maybe there was "too much action." Action, he said, is easy to do. Well, not for most filmmakers, not the way he does it. The movie is simply incredible—the most headlong film I can think of outside of Mad Max: Fury Road. True, there isn't quite as much fighting as all that—it isn't a single chase one way followed by another chase going back (see also Keaton's The...

I normally try to avoid egregious spoilers, but only one thing really happens in Jacques Deray's La piscine, and it happens quite near the end. Up until then, this 1969 anti-thriller compels fascination and infuriation as events fail to unfold over its two-hour-plus runtime.There's an indefinable tension in the air, some of it erotic. Ad-man Alain Delon and his partner, journalist Romy Schneider, are vacationing at a friend's place in the south of France. They're joined by a friend, possibly her former lover, Maurice Ronet, and his teenage daughter, Jane Birkin. Delon suffers pangs of jealousy and suspicion. He decides to "retaliate" against Schneider's perceived unfaithfulness by seducing Birkin. That's it for the first ninety minutes, but it's less eventful than I'm making it sound.The film coasts along, a tanned flesh-scape augmented by rippling water and searing blue skies. It has the pace of a holiday, maybe one...

The final film is King Hu’s “Inn Trilogy”, and the follow-up to his highly-acclaimed A Touch of Zen, The Fate of Lee Khan once again shows the master filmmaker’s impeccable talent in creating drama out of a single setting. An espionage thriller with a unique wuxia twist and shades of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, the film chronicles a tense showdown between warriors on opposing sides of a civil war in a rural inn.

When Lee Khan a dangerous and cunning Mongol official, and his equally deadly sister Lee Wan-erh (Hsu Feng; A Touch of Zen), arrive at the Spring Inn to obtain a battle map that reveals the location of the Chinese rebel army, a group of resistance fighters, including an all-female group of ex-convicts plan to recapture the map, whatever the cost.

As much a pre-cursor to the ‘hangout’ movie as it is an action packed wuxia adventure,...

Razzia is a rather snazzy German police thriller from the post-war years, covering comparable territory to Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair and Carol Reed's The Third Man: it deals with the then-current European crime wave known as the black market.The director Werner Klingler's career might well repay study, as it leaps around so oddly. In 1929 he was in America and acted in Von Sternberg's Viennese-set melodrama The Case of Lena Smith, now seemingly a lost film apart from one ten-minute fragment. He also played Germans for James Whale in Journey's End and Hell's Angels. Returning to Germany he became an assistant director (S.O.S. Iceberg) and then a director, mainly of lightweight thrillers, passing from the Hitler era through to the post-war denazification seemingly without a hitch.Klingler would make Eddie Constantine vehicles and a Mabuse sequel (when the once-feared embodiment of the zeitgeist...

At Il Cinema Ritrovato, the festival of restored and rediscovered films in Bologna, one intriguing item was a short season of the films noir of Felix E. Feist, with Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951) advertised as the best of these. A couple-on-the-run movie in the melancholy vein of Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night, it benefits from strong performances from its unusual leads, and Feist, intermittently a striking stylist, seems fully engaged.From the start, when anti-hero Steve Cochran is paroled from the prison he's spent eighteen years in since killing his brutal father as a teenager, low angles make the hero hulking and threatening. But then, released into an uncaring and alien society, he wanders for silent minutes, observed by a crafty newsman, but not speaking, merely staring in bewilderment at the modern cars and fashions.Then he wanders into a diner and orders three different types of pie,...

Le professionnel is essentially a 1981 version of The Bourne Identity, oddly enough, with Jean-Paul Belmondo in the lead role. Robert Ludlum's novel was brand new at the tune, but Le prof is based on a 1976 book by Patrick Alexander that Ludlum, I'm guessing, may have read.Sent to assassinate an African despot, Jpb is betrayed by his own people, brainwashed, and jailed in a hellish prison camp, but escapes after two years, returns to Paris and announces his determination to finish the mission (with the secret service no longer want carried out) when the despot is on a state visit to the French capital.So, it's called The Professional and it's about a crazy but ruthless state killer gone rogue, and it's shot by Melville's cameraman, Henri Decae. But at some point, somebody decided it needed some yucks also, so Belmondo gets to grin a lot and make quips in a Roger Moore style.

"The genius of the system" is a contradiction in terms, but it seems to have stuck as an alternative to the auteur theory in explaining how the Hollywood studio system made so many good films. Yet René Clair, specialist in comic-romantic soufflés, reported that he was offered a project developed for Fritz Lang, and where was the sense (or genius?) in that?Still, the system was maintained by men possessed, if not of genius, then of horse sense: when someone proposed that Raoul Walsh direct, as a change of pace, a tender love story, Darryl F. Zanuck of Twentieth Century Fox swatted the idea down, saying, "Raoul Walsh's idea of a tender love story is to set fire to a whorehouse."This month, the Museum of Modern Art in New York is offering another great season of films from Fox (before it merged with Twentieth Century), including five from Walsh...

There must be thousands of old TV movies that would reward viewing if they were being screened anywhere... although the odds of finding anything good at random are even more slight than when you go trawling through old cinema releases without a guide. The much-discredited auteur theory can come to the rescue: a show with a director known for other interesting work has a far higher chance of rewarding attention.TV was Joseph Sargent's bread and butter, from relatively highbrow stuff to The Man from Uncle, but he also made several decent cinema films, including at least one masterpiece, The Taking of Pelham 123. When I found a DVD entitled Hiroshima with his name spelled incorrectly on the back, I decided to take a chance on it, and indeed the film, originally it seems a mini-series from 1989 called Day One, has a lot going for it. What immediately cheered me,...

James B. Harris is still with us, still wants to make films I believe, but has slipped below radar. His odd, discontinuous and peripatetic directing career, which has resulted in some remarkable works, has been consigned to footnote status below his early period as Stanley Kubrick's producer on The Killing, Lolita and Dr. Strangelove.I met Mr. Harris briefly at a party on a boat during the Lumière Film Festival in Lyons, but didn't get a chance to talk much as he was soon up on his feet dancing to Blondie. He was around 85 at the time. If "Heart of Glass" still gets you on your feet, there should be a rule that says you're still allowed to make movies.The Bedford Incident (1965) was Harris's directorial debut, and also the first film where Sidney Poitier plays a role in which his race is not mentioned or relevant to the plot.

Director Joseph H. Lewis’ So Dark The Night (1946) will be available on Blu-ray From Arrow Academy February 19th

Like his contemporaries Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder, Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy) dabbled in many genres, but excelled in the film noir tradition. A Hitchcockian tale of mystery and intrigue, So Dark the Night was one of his finest pictures.

Inspector Cassin, a renowned Paris detective, departs to the country for a much-needed break. There he falls in love with the innkeeper s daughter, Nanette, who is already betrothed to a local farmer. On the evening of their engagement party, Nanette and the farmer both disappear. Cassin takes up the case immediately to discover what happened to them and who is responsible.

As with his celebrated noir masterpieces My Name Is Julia Ross and The Big Combo, Lewis elevates the twisty, pulpy material with some of the finest noir touches the genre has to offer,...

I was doing some research into Incredible Shrinking Movies, as you do, when I stumbled upon Pierwszy pawilon, or First Pavilion, a curiously useless title for a miniaturization film. It's a 1968 Polish short made for television by director Janusz Majewksi, a fairly prolific director still at work today, or at least fairly recently.My pleasure in this film and my disappointment may both be rooted in the fact that I started watching it not realizing that it's a short subject. I was thrilled by the speed and economy with which it got its story going: the hero, a scientist, is forcibly recruited by hired goons to participate in clandestine shrinkage experiments, and that's scene one. The experiment is conducted in a stark, warehouse-like space in which a miniature barracks houses a troop of tiny soldiers who, alarmingly, don't know they're only an inch tall. Only their commander is in on the gag.

If you've used up all the available Douglas Sirk melodramas, why not try The Restless Years (1958), directed by Helmut Kautner (pronounced "Koit-ner")? It's a small town tale, focusing mainly on the teenage populace, but spreading out to follow their interaction with parents and teachers."This is a dirty, little, gossipy small town. And I ought to know because I was born here. People here are jut like a herd of sharks that turn on a crippled one and kill it." So says salesman James Whitmore to his son, a fresh-faced John Saxon, and he appears to be right, giving the film the social criticism dimension that Sirk's films likewise weave beneath their emotionally turbulent tales.The producer is the flamboyant Ross Hunter, who needs to be considered a kind of co-auteur of many Sirkian tales, only he should be credited for the dumber, soapier elements, his writers and directors for the irony and subtext,...

“Before #Metoo There Was…The Apartment”

By Raymond Benson

One wonders if Billy Wilder’s magnificent comedy-drama, The Apartment, could be made today in the age of #MeToo. Probably not, despite its brilliant script, exceptional cast and performances, perfect direction, and its positive message against sexual harassment in the workplace.

Even so, in some circles The Apartment was considered controversial upon its release in 1960. Hollis Alpert in the Saturday Review called it a “dirty fairy tale.” Then again, The Apartment was coming off the heels of the hugely successful and popular Some Like it Hot, which the more-Puritan side of America may have called illicit and tawdry, too. Or perhaps co-writer and director Wilder was simply good at telling grown-up tales for adults within the context of a rapidly-maturing culture that was on the verge of a decade known for its freedom of expression. The 1960s was an explosion in...

Okay, it's not earth-shaking, but So Young, So Bad (1950) kept me watching, sometimes goggling. It's the penultimate film of quota quickie master Bernard "Mad" Vorhaus, who made cheap and often very skilled work in the U.K., moved to the U.S. and made The Amazing Mr. X, a really stylish and entertaining thriller shot by the great John Alton, then made this, and got blacklisted the following year. He had already left the U.S., having seen the way the wind was blowing, but aside from shooting second unit on William Wyler's Roman Holiday, Vorhaus made only one more movie, an Italian flick called Finishing School which seems to be impossible to get at present. He went into house renovation back in the U.K. and did alright at it, I believe.So, one doesn't necessarily expect earth-shaking from a B-movie talent like Vorhaus, but he was capable of splendid work,...

King and Country (1964) is a major transitional work for director Joseph Losey and star Dirk Bogarde. Both had been compelled to work in genres that didn't particularly suit them: though Losey had made some strong thrillers, Bogarde had been typed in light comedies from the Rank Organisation or else rather anemic period movies. This Wwi drama offered stronger meat.The story reached the screen circuitously: J.L. Hodson wrote a war memoir from which playwright John Wilson extracted and expanded one narrative, then adapted as a screenplay by regular Losey collaborator Evan Jones. An ordinary soldier, Private Hamp, (Tom Courtenay) is tried for desertion. It's obvious to his defending officer, Bogarde, that Hamp has suffered a breakdown and shouldn't be held responsible for his actions. It's obvious to us, sitting on our 21st century couch a hundred years later, that this is a case of Ptsd: Hamp simply walked away from...

Frank Tuttle, the man who made a star of Alan Ladd with the twisted film noir This Gun for Hire (1942), began as a comedy specialist, churning out three or more films a year as vehicles for Eddie Cantor, Edgar Bergen and his knee-pal Charlie McCarthy, Burns & Allen et cetera. Pleasure Cruise (1933) is a pre-Code farce centered on improbably couple Roland Young and Genevieve Tobin.Young plays a penniless author working as house-husband to the gainfully employed Tobin, while seething with jealousy at the thought of the young blades romancing her in the office. In one of many unusual stylistic touches, we see her portrait come to life and watch as she mingles with the staff, none of whom looks to be under sixty, and they're not exactly silver foxes. The stage is set for a film mocking male paranoia and jealousy and questioning notions of fidelity, virtue, and honesty.Young is his usual self,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.Recommended VIEWINGFinally, it’s here: Netflix’s trailer for their restoration and reconstruction of Orson Welles' final and previously unfinished The Other Side of the Wind, starring John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich.A dreamy, sun-bathed trailer for Carlos Reygadas's Our Time, about a Mexican family that raises fighting bulls, and a young horse trainer who enters and disrupts their lives. The Venice-bound film is Reygadas's first since his 2012 Post Tenebras Lux. Behold, the official trailer for Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria, cut with an erratic rhythm that blurs the line between violent bodily contortions and interpretive dance. The film has been acquired by Mubi to show in UK cinemas on November 16.The trailer for Rialto Pictures's new 4K restoration of Jean-Pierre Melville's little-seen When You Read This Letter (1953). The film, which...

Luigi Comencini's oeuvre is just bulging with goodies, a cinematic Santa-sack encompassing multiple genres and tones, in a career running from the late forties to the early nineties. I recently sang the praises of his desperate gambling comedy The Scientific Card Player, but he also made films about Casanova's boyhood, virtual reality and, in Italian Secret Service (1968), the then-resurgent espionage genre, Italian and world politics, and the decline of Italian idealism since the war.Just as Pietro Germi's Divorce: Italian Style was about murder, and De Sica's Marriage: Italian Style took in adultery, betrayal and uncertain parentage, so Comencini's title contains a bitter joke: we know this intelligence service is going to be sordid, stupid and utterly lacking in the accustomed James Bond lifestyle.But we first meet our hero, dashing Nino Manfredi, in the happier times of WWII, saving an English commando (Clive Revill) from a fascist...

Luigi Comencini's The Scientific Cardplayer is an unusual entry in both the commedia all-Italiana genre, and the careers of its two American stars, Bette Davis and Joseph Cotten. Times were hard for many of the Forties biggest stars by 1972: Cotten would appear in Mario Bava's cheap-and-cheerful Baron Blood the same year, and Bette Davis had already taken the unusual—for a star—step of advertising for work ten years earlier. Happily, the film offers the pair dignified and entertaining roles which build on their status rather than demeaning it.The true heroes of the film, however, are Italian comedy legend Alberto Sordi and glamor icon Silvana Mangano, incidentally the wife of producer Dino De Laurentiis. They play an unbelievably impoverished couple with four kids to support, who supplement their various awful jobs (the youngest son literally scrapes a living shaving corpses at the local funeral parlor) in...

I only recently became aware of Bonzo the Dog, also known as Bonzo the Pup, a British newspaper strip cartoon character who made the leap into animated shorts in emulation of America's Felix the Cat. New Era Films Ltd. launched the character onto the screen in 1924, proudly standing up for Britannia's right to make drawings of animals do silly things.Sadly, the above short is poorly transferred (via VHS?), cropped, misframed, and suffers from fungal print damage, but you do get to enjoy the lovely sepiatone that distinguishes Bonzo's adventures. It's like he's been drawn on brown wrapping paper.Bonzo was the creation of George Studdy, and such was his fame that he made appearances on stage (played by a man in a costume) and lent his fame to the Crosley Pup, a brand of Am radio, as well as appearing in 26 cartoons, only two of which are on YouTube...

"Too much beauty is disgusting," said Robert Bresson, a dictum put to the test in Carosello Napolitano (Neapolitan Carousel), Ettore Giannini's 1954 history of Neapolitan song, 130 minutes of beautiful music, singing, costumes, set design, cinematography, direction and people (Sophia Loren alone could cause beauty-overload). It's just screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato in a dazzling new restoration.As Hollywood was responding to The Red Shoes by inflating its musicals with longer and longer "ballets," suspending the plot and allowing Gene Kelly to strut his stuff, Giannini went a stage further, following Tales of Hoffmann by making a film in which song and dance threaten to overwhelm narrative altogether.But there are actually three kinds of interwoven story in this film: first, we meet a family of show people, homeless and impoverished, scraping a neo-realist existence in post-war Naples, living on the songs of the past. Then we dive into stylized renditions of history,...

The Italians love clowns, and have always had their own cinematic breed of capering fool. A hundred years ago, when Chaplin ruled the earth, comics like Cretinetti, Polidor and Arthème held their own in Europe.Early Chaplin looks pretty crude compared to late Chaplin. The French and Italians, with the elegant exception of the great Max Linder, are kind of crude by any standards. But worth seeing: these comics are vigorous, rambunctuous and inventive. They're even, sometimes, funny. But that's not the main attraction to me. The past isn't another country. It's another planet. Cinema is a space and time machine that gives us glimpses of distant worlds, impossible to reach by other means.These buffoons had their heyday before the great war, but lingered on in spectral form afterwards. Polidor was remembered by Fellini and cast in Toby Dammit as an old actor receiving an award. Cretinetti (real name...

The perpetrator of the radio hoax of the century, the voice of Unicron—nemesis of Primus in the battle for 4-wheeled multiverse domination—or the director of the ex-best movie of all-time. Who is Orson Welles?Both his laudable first attempt at movie making (Citizen Kane) and his last essayistic masterpiece (F for Fake) are plagued by similar concerns. As a director, whether in the act of mythmaking and mythbusting, or forging and faking, Welles’ career stands as a living testament to the obsession with putting truth under a lens and exploring the lies told through film. As an actor, Welles embraced the lie, shape shifting back and forth between numerous roles, from the Shakespearean Othello, MacBeth or Falstaff, to the slippery Harry Lime from The Third Man. Alas, the bulk of the roles he played were modified versions of himself or his public persona, hiding in plain sight, often...

Stars: Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Ralph Bellamy, Cecil Cunningham, Armand Duvalle | Written by Viña Delmar | Directed by Leo McCarey

Cary Grant plays Jerry Warriner, a New York socialite who’s just returned from a Florida vacation. We meet him bragging in the locker room: “What wives don’t know won’t hurt them!” Jerry’s Wife, Lucy (Irene Dunne), has also been away, supposedly to visit her aunt. So why has she strolled in with a handsome French gentleman? Jerry’s jealousy – not to mention his double standards – sends him into a fit of rage. They argue and Lucy files for divorce.

The rest of the film covers the months before the divorce goes through, as Lucy meets a new suitor and Jerry can’t leave her alone, always finding a reason to gatecrash her life. It’s the proto-rom-com stalker setup, although lovesick Lucy winds up behaving just as badly.

The Awful Truth

Blu ray

Criterion

1937 / 1:33 / 91 Min. / Street Date April 17, 2018

Starring Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Ralph Bellamy

Cinematography by Joseph Walker

Written by Viña Delmar

Edited by Al Clark

Produced and directed by Leo McCarey

Thanks to Louis Armstrong and his fellow geniuses, the Jazz Age transformed a generation and dominated pop culture for close to two decades; Vanity Fair and Life recorded the nightlife of hot-to-trot sophisticates while early risers followed the seesaw romance of a willowy flapper named Blondie Boopadoop and her paramour Dagwood Bumstead, a lovesick Dick Powell wannabe.

It was Powell who helped popularize the uptempo rhythms pervading the fast and loose musicals of the era, in particular Paramount’s raucous output which flaunted hot jazz on the soundtrack whether it starred Crosby as a college crooner or W.C. Fields as a double-dealing misanthrope. Even Norman McLeod’s Alice In Wonderland began with a bouncy...