By Richmond B. Adams. John Ford’s Will Rogers vehicle has yet to receive the full credit for the complexities of its cultural commentary…. the present examination will argue that Judge Priest undermines the world it supposedly affirms.” From the middle-1920s through his death in 1946, my maternal grandfather, the Reverend […]
Round Like a Circle in a Spiral: The Poster Art of Film Noir (Preview)
By Marlisa Santos. As the movie-viewing public was becoming more comfortable with these kinds of filmic depictions, poster art, never to shy away from marketing hooks, aimed to tantalize prospective audiences with images that promised entrance into a suspenseful world of increasingly commonplace criminality and subversion of systemic stability…. University […]
Hollywood’s Star of Stars – Ferocious Ambition: Joan Crawford’s March to Stardom
A Book Review Essay by Jeremy Carr. More than a mere biography with chronological touchstones and historical anecdotes (though there are plenty of those, and they’re fascinating), it is also a psychological profile delving into the inner motivations of its subject, and a lavishly illustrated assessment of how a Golden […]
The Grand and the Personal – King Vidor in Focus: On the Filmmaker’s Artistry and Vision
A Book Review by William Blick. Informative, erudite, and comprehensive in several ways, with exhaustively precise details of Vidor’s career.” When I opened the pages of Kevin Stoehr and Cullen Gallagher’s new book, King Vidor in Focus (McFarland, 2024), I was immediately drawn to Vidor’s “Creed and Pledge” in the […]
Notes on Anatole Litvak’s City for Conquest (1940) and the Tough Vulnerability of James Cagney
By Theresa Rodewald. City for Conquest revitalizes the sports drama formula: losing does not break Danny.” Danny is a truck driver, a boxer, a brother to Eddie (Arthur Kennedy) and a boyfriend to Peggy (Ann Sheridan). He drives a truck to earn money, to pay the rent and put food […]
Everyone’s Cinema Scholar: Remembering David Bordwell (1947-2024)
Film International editors, contributors, and correspondents offer personal tributes and commentary on the late scholar of cinema. I regret never having the pleasure of meeting David Bordwell. My only interaction with him was a lively email exchange little over 10 years ago. I was planning an article on the early […]
Say Goodbye to Hollywood: John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust (1975)
By Jeremy Carr. There has never been a self-referential Hollywood feature quite like 1975’s The Day of the Locust, a twisting and twisted tale of sullied lives, desperation, and, ultimately, sheer madness.” Hollywood has always been rather good at building itself up, generating films that flaunt the glamour of Tinseltown, […]
Recognizing Belafonte
By Robert K. Lightning. If Poitier’s films frequently situate him as an integrationist hero, successfully negotiating the rocky path to white acceptance, Belafonte’s films typically chart a very different path where acceptance is not always the goal, making him often Poitier’s cinematic antithesis.” With the announcement of Harry Belafonte’s death […]
An Ardent Appreciation – Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges
A Book Review by Jeremy Carr. While Klawans routinely sings the praises of Sturges, he also expresses an evenhanded awareness of certain shortcomings, making this critical analysis from Columbia University Press a perceptive, exceptionally well-composed and earnest evaluation.” Lest there be any doubt about Stuart Klawans’s regard for the subject […]
Between Compliance and Resistance: Mapping the Careers of Wallace Fox and Nipo Strongheart in Early Hollywood
By Andrew H. Fisher. Taken together, their careers allows us to see Hollywood Indians as agents of film history, rather than merely as objects of the cinematic gaze.” During the early decades of the twentieth century, Hollywood seemed to be full of chiefs but not enough Indians. Thanks to the […]