For me, being trapped in the house brings on an odd kind of nostalgia.  It isn’t that I’m wistful for when I had the flu and was bedridden for two weeks.  It’s just that the isolation makes my mind wander to little moments of great import from longer ago than I usually like to consider....

George Lucas once said that it was easy to get an audience to cry.  All you had to do was put a kitten onscreen then have the bad guy strangle it.  What one cannot come up with, though, is an equally surefire way to get a laugh. As any writer, actor or director will tell...

The western is the most muscular and malleable of all genres and, as such, it has attracted great directors over the years.  Some, like John Ford, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher are so linked to the western that it comes as a surprise to see movies with these names attached that have nothing to do...

War movies run in relatively predictable cycles during post-war years.  Conventional wisdom holds that once the war is over, no one wants to see a movie about combat.  The post-World War II years, for example, produced relatively few war films and those that were made (Twelve O’Clock High, Command Decision, Battleground) were far more interested...

Here is a simple way to think of Billy Wilder’s 1960 film, The Apartment.  The year before, Wilder made Some Like It Hot.  This well-loved farce was also a sweeping rewrite of the rules of the romantic comedy.  Among other things, it took the form into the realm of behavioral commentary. The detonator for this was the final...

Film noir was the synthesis of a number of movements: an Americanizing of German expressionism and French poetic realism with a little Warner gangster film thrown in for good measure.  More a mood than a genre, these movies hit their full flowering in the postwar years because the gloom on display perfectly suited the existential...

Howard Hawks was one of those filmmakers whose reputation suffered because he was too good.  For years, film writers tended to keep him out of the top ranks of movie makers because he was too hard to categorize.  An artist, they believed, was to be lauded for their rigid adherence to a specific genre or...