By Tony Williams. Despite McBride’s fortune in having a closer involvement with Welles than most critics, this book is never reverential. Instead, it presents a balanced and complex picture of an extremely talented but difficult personality whose personal flaws are less important than what he attempted to achieve.” What Ever […]
Researcher Beware! – Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra by Joseph McBride
June 8, 2019
A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Joseph McBride’s latest mammoth book, well-written and copiously documented as usual, is an unusual production in the field of cinema studies. It is a companion volume to his earlier 1992 text, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, which took issue with the traditional estimation of […]
From a Longtime Insider/Outsider – Two Cheers for Hollywood: Joseph McBride on Movies
October 24, 2018
A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Joseph McBride, currently Professor of Film Studies at San Francisco State University, has had a long and varied career both in the film industry and as an independent critic for many decades. Soon we will finally get to see his long-awaited role as […]
Rediscovering a “Lost Art”: How Did Lubitsch Do It? by Joseph McBride
A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Any book or article by Joseph McBride is worth reading, especially in this era of mostly dismal films and an unqualified plethora of ignorant internet film reviewers. The author’s latest book (Columbia UP, 2018) on a director who should be more well-known represents […]
New Transmissions: From the Inner Mind to The Outer Limits: Scripts of Joseph Stefano, Volume 1
“The Form of Things Unknown,” 1.32 (4 May 1964) By Tony Williams. Stefano was a master writer for the screen and capable of doing better things had circumstances allowed, as this revealing limited edition collection shows.” For those who have watched The Outer Limits either from its first transmission in […]
Lubitsch’s Last Bow: Cluny Brown (Criterion Collection)
By Tony Williams. Cluny Brown belongs to that lost realm of Hollywood cinema that combined expert and unique direction with distinctive acting and a humor that critiqued arbitrary patterns of imposed behavior….” Ernst Lubitsch’s last completed film, Cluny Brown (1946), represents a fitting conclusion to that director’s special version of […]
From Straight to Hell Comes Jack Ford: Straight Shooting (1917) and Hell Bent (1918)
Straight Shooting By Tony Williams. These two magnificent Blu-ray restorations reproduce the way the films were originally seen and also contain audio-commentaries and video essays by two pioneering Ford scholars: Joseph McBride and Tag Gallagher.” Following on the trail pioneered by the 2016 re-release of John Ford’s Three Bad Men […]
“What Might Have Been”: The Magnificent Ambersons (Criterion Collection)
March 14, 2019
By Tony Williams. “Anybody who does things their own way while they’re working with a corporation is going to be problematic.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, audio-commentary, The Magnificent Ambersons Criterion Collection DVD When Criterion rises to the appropriate occasion of combining the best type of digital restoration with the most appropriate supplementary features, […]
Beyond Genre to the Other Arts: King Hu’s Dragon Inn (1967) from the Criterion Collection
July 18, 2018
By Tony Williams. For those really interested in the art of cinema, the achievements of King Hu (1932-1997) are comparable to others such as Bela Tarr and Andrei Tarkovsky – to name but a few. Yet, the achievements of this great Chinese-born director who left us far too early are […]
New Directions Emerging: Orson Welles in Focus, Edited by James R. Gilmore and Sidney Gottlieb
A Book Review by Tony Williams. During and since the time of Welles’s Centenary, many fine books and articles have appeared re-evaluating the work of a director once popularly regarded as a failure since making Citizen Kane, for one reason or another. Over the past few decades a dedicated group […]