For his follow up to the magnificent All That Heaven Allows, Douglas Sirk was determined to crank all his themes, styles and his genre to the highest output with Written on the Wind. Though I ultimately prefer last week’s film...
I’m going to make a bold assumption that the average reader of Battleship Pretension hasn’t watched a Douglas Sirk film — even though in my mind that seems impossible. It may be partially that Sirk is seen as a maker...
Many of the films from this series on American films of the 1950s have been concentrated in the most important genres of the decade. We’ve seen a few instances of film noir, a war film, a classical western and a...
Up until this point in the 1950s film series, a specific demographic had been completely unrepresented — strangely enough, the demographic that is the largest target of Hollywood films. Though it has been mostly unexplored, the decade may perhaps the...
The wonderful opening to Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It serves two purposes. We see Tom Ewell, who plays the male lead in the film, on a performance stage, looking directly at the camera, delivering a monologue which sets...
If you were to say that Samuel Fuller was the most underappreciated film auteur, I wouldn’t argue. Though his work has certainly gained more accolade over the past few years, with the attention brought on by the Criterion Collection and...
Of all the films in the Siskel Film Center’s series on the American 1950s that I had previously seen, I must admit that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was the selection I was least excited about revisiting. That’s not because I think...
What is there to say about Vertigo that hasn’t already been said? Even given the context of this film series, looking at films from the 1950s in their historical and sociological context, I simply feel dwarfed by the film and...
Through the first two weeks of the series we were already subjected to great film masterpieces, and there will be many more in the coming weeks (see: next week and the greatest film of all times, or so they say),...
The first thing I learned in the first film class I took in college is that films set in the past are really about two different times — the time in which they are set, of course, but also the...
