Journeys in Classic Film Halloween 2016
Halloween is right around the corner and I want your input on which ghosts and ghouls we’ll be looking at. I’ve included a poll at the bottom but don’t hesitate to include other suggestions.
Ticklish Business Episode 6: The Killing (1956)
This week I sit down with Jacob Haller to talk about Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 film noir, The Killing. Send suggestions, questions and comments to ticklishbiz@gmail.com. Feel free to leave me a comment on iTunes and be sure to follow Ticklish Business on Twitter, @Ticklish_Biz. NEXT WEEK: You’ll be getting a special minisode as I talk…
Fallen Angel (1945)
Fallen Angel is certainly the perfect title for a film noir; the term, attributed to the ultimate fallen angel, Lucifer, immediately conjures up images of Hell, sin, and dark dames leading you astray. Those are all elements peripherally in Otto Preminger’s film, but screenwriter Harry Kleiner ends up taking a wrong turn into domestic drama…
Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles (2014)
Certain stars are larger than life, and with that reputation comes a tendency for documentaries and biographies to glamorize or deify their subject, placing them in a league above men entirely. Chuck Workman’s documentary, Magician, gives reasons for elevating Welles while also saying that Welles himself wouldn’t have been content with anything less than godlike-status.…
Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood
Synonymous with infamy, Roscoe Arbuckle, otherwise known as “Fatty” Arbuckle, is a figurehead for the ushering in of the Hollywood Production Code and the perils of fame. Several books have capitalized on the lurid events that presumably happened in Room 1219 of the St. Francis Hotel over Labor Day weekend in 1921; Greg Merritt’s Room…
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
Certain movies are like the dinosaurs: it’s hard believing they existed and realizing they did. I don’t use this analogy disparagingly, more as a means of emphasizing how special Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow truly is. In our cinematic landscape where turning 35 is practically the end of one’s career, a movie about two elderly…
Where Danger Lives (1950)
You don’t often find noir that is just plain bad. Noir has a formula and conventions, and not every testing of that formula yields gold but it’s hard to get coal outright. Where Danger Lives contains a polished pedigree with Robert Mitchum and Claude Rains, even B-list actress Faith Domergue isn’t awful, but Charles Bennett’s…
Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door
Doris Day is an interesting figure in classic cinema. Appointed as the personification of the 1950s cult of domesticity, Day’s career and work as an actress has her labeled as chaste and wholesome, her movies indicative of an oppressive standard for women. In watching her films, and as deconstructed in David Kaufman’s biography, these suppositions…
