If you haven’t seen it, D.O.A. is a film noir classic with a twist – the victim solves his own murder. And if that does sound familiar, it’s possible you might have seen the recent remake of this, starring Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, but the original 1949 version is somewhat different – and arguably, perhaps, better. …read more »
A couple of weeks ago we pointed you towards Mitch Benn‘s excellent reading of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol“. Well, today, what with it being Christmas Day and everything, we’d like to point you in the direction of the first sound version of that same tale – 1935′s Scrooge. …read more »
The inventor of spread spectrum radio and the radar guided torpedo undoubtedly shortened World War 2 by a few years. Of course, there is also work in this area that is still classified – and still state of the art. So it’s perhaps surprising that quite a good deal of this inventor’s work was widely seen and disseminated at the same time. Take for example, this film – “Dishonored Lady” – where Hedy Lamarr stars as Madeleine Damian, a fashion editor set on the right road after a suicide attempt.
Dishonored Lady is a psychological drama, and Lamarr proves that her day job as an actress was worth the game, and she could indeed act as well as inventing course-of-history changing radio elecronics in her spare time. While it’s perhaps a little more morally uptight than today’s standards, it’s still an interesting view …read more »
In support of local cinema, those nice folks at Volkswagen are sponsoring some screenings of classic films, near where they were shot. The next screening will be Get Carter (the original 1971 with Michael Caine, not the remake). …read more »
In celebration of Sebastian Vettel becoming Formula One’s youngest world champion of all time, I thought it would be nice to have a movie about motor racing. So for some reason, I thought about Charlie Chaplin.
Chaplin’s second film, Kid Auto Races At Venice, was the film in which he debuted his “Little Tramp” character. …read more »
George Romero’s 1968 “zombie” horror, Night Of The Living Dead, is rightly considered a horror classic. All zombies since (with the possible exception of recent “reboots” such as the excellent “Dead Set”) have taken their undead-brain-eating cues from Romero’s works: the shuffling, moaning, eating people – it’s all there.
However in this film – and most subsequent “zombie” films afterwards – they’re not true zombies. At least, not in the traditional Haitian sense.
Anyway, Night of the Living Dead is now available from the Internet Archive, guys and ghouls. Enjoy…
Fritz Lang’s 1925 classic, Metropolis, is a masterpiece of German expressionist cinema. While some of the acting, particularly that of the hero, may look a little theatrical and over the top today, the sheer scale of the production cannot be denied. Better yet, the impressive performance by Brigitte Helm as both heroine Maria and the villainous robot, marked her out as a future star. (Sadly, when they attempted to cast her in horror classic The Bride Of Frankenstein, she refused to travel to America, and retired to Switzerland to escape Hitler, never to even talk about her film career again.) …read more »
