In 1975, film critic Pauline Kael wrote that the 1974 film noir Chinatown, written by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski, was originally supposed to have a different ending.

In the script by Robert Towne (who also wrote the screenplays for The Last Detail… Read full post »

Karl Malden and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire

Karl Malden was the kind of actor whose whose voice would make me stop flipping the channels and watch whatever he was on. Especially if it was a movie from the fifties and sixties, before he made… Read full post »

Saboteur, starring Bob Cummings and Priscilla Lane, is Alfred Hitchcock's film about twenty-first century terrorism, even though it came out in 1942.

The evil terrorist mastermind is Charles Tobin, played by Otto Kruger, an actor you sort of remember from other roles in forti… Read full post »

The Toronto Globe and Mail reports that Archie Andrews is getting married!

The self-absorbed red-headed teenager, until now unable to decide between smart blond Betty Cooper and intellectually lazy brunette Veronica Lodge, will propose to . . .

. . . VERONICA!!!… Read full post »

Christopher Lee, Actor

Today is the eighty-seventh birthday of Christopher Lee. If you understand why this is worthy of commemoration, I don't have to go into a lot of biographical detail about Lee's life, or tell you how he and Peter Cushing (along with hundreds of other… Read full post »

Do you have to have gone to Catholic school to appreciate nun movies?

First, let's get this one out of the way. I'm sure it's the first one you thought of. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that it's everywhere—on TV, on… Read full post »

Tomorrow my favorite movie will be a different film, but tonight it's The Godfather, for the following dialogue:

“I love America.”… Read full post »

“You don't waste time, do you?” John Oldman's friends ask him as he's loading his pickup truck, getting ready to leave his friends and his job teaching history.

The film The Man from Earth (written by Jerome Bixby) will seem familiar to connoisseurs of Rod/… Read full post »

3-D in the 1960s: The education of a young film critic

 3-D in the 2000s: Harry Potter's friend Luna Lovegood

3-D movies are getting a lot of attention lately, but they go back at least fifty years to the Warner Bros. horror film… Read full post »

Inside Daisy Clover (1965): Directed by Robert Mulligan, Starring Natalie Wood

When I read that movie director Robert Mulligan had died, I checked the Internet Movie Database to see how many of his films I had seen. (I remembered that Mulligan directed To Kill a Mockingbird, an… Read full post »

The Compromiser or the Idealist: Claude Rains and Jimmy Stewart in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

The story goes that someone came to movie producer Jack Warner with the idea for a movie where Ronald Reagan plays the president of the United States. “No, no,”… Read full post »

Who am I and what movie was I in?

The first Open Saloner to identify me will receive a guaranteed timeslip to travel back to my film's premier and live out his or her life in a time when giant ant nests mutated in the desert, and radiation from nuclear tests… Read full post »

Imagine John Ford's The Searchers set in a neon collision of the 1950s with the 1980s, set to rockabilly music. That is Walter Hill's “rock and roll fable” from 1984, Streets of Fire.

As The Blasters sing, “If he wants your baby, you can kiss your baby goodbye.&… Read full post »

Hal Phillip Walker: Maverick or Change We Can Believe In?

When Democrat Jimmy Carter began getting attention in the the 1976 presidential primaries, he was called “The Nashville Candidate.” Not because he was from Tennessee (he had been governor of Georgia), but because he r… Read full post »

John Carpenter's The Thing (1981) is rare - - a remake as good as the original. Unfortunately for Carpenter, his version of Howard Hawks's The Thing from Another World came out at the same time as Steven Spielberg's E.T., and people wanted cute, not horrifying.

Carpenter's image… Read full post »

The invaders. Alien beings from a dying planet.

Their destination: the Earth.

Their purpose: to make it their world.

Unlike a lot of TV shows from the 1960s now out on DVD, the first season of The Invaders is as good as I remember it being. The… Read full post »

Henry Fonda as candidate: The Best Man

The movie based on Gore Vidal's play The Best Man (1964) is an old-fashioned film about an old-fashioned event - - the U. S. political party convention that decided who the party's nominee would be.

The party reforms after… Read full post »

Woody Allen comes across his doppelganger in Oviedo, Spain

The consensus of movie critics and fans is that Woody Allen's movies in the last few years haven't been as good as his earlier work. I can agree with that. The last Woody Allen film I saw was Scoop,… Read full post »

The Sticky Fingers of Time: Time travel is like eating pie.

 What's your favorite non-blockbuster time travel movie?

I don't mean big hits like Terminator, Back to the Future, or Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. It's not that I don't like them, it's just that I wa… Read full post »

Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs 

Dustin Hoffman is older than I am but I feel like I've grown up with him.

He started out as The Young Man in The Graduate (1967), as The Young Punk in Midnight Cowboy (1969), and as The Young Failure in Straw Dogs… Read full post »

Gloria Grahame and Lee Marvin in The Big Heat. 

 Fritz Lang has been in the news lately. As The Guardian reports, a complete print of Lang's 1927 silent film Metropolis has been found in Argentina.

Metropolis may be the first dystopian masterpiece. It certain… Read full post »

A few weeks ago Thomas Rogers complained he hadn't been truly scared by a movie in a long time. He asked for people to blog about what the scariest movie they'd seen in the last few years was, and recollections of some interesting films resulted.

A couple of days… Read full post »

The movie website Twitchfilm has the trailer for the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, directed by Scott Derrickson.

In a way, the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still may not be the first Robert Wise movie that Derrickson has remade. Derrickson/… Read full post »

To someone who's seen the Saw or Hostel movies, the image of Christopher Lee from almost fifty years ago, fangs dripping blood as Hammer Films' Dracula, might seem more humorous than terrifying.

But, as David Pirie tells in his new history of English Gothic… Read full post »