Essays

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...

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...

If we are to believe what the small town melodramas tell us, then every village and burg dotting the map is filled with deviants, hypocrites and mothers pretending to be their child’s aunt to hide the “shame of illegitimacy.” To mix a metaphor, these stories are all about ripping the lid off small town America...

Whenever a movie star dies, it is both expected and natural to use the occasion to reflect on the times that that actor helped to define.  After all, we have a natural human need to look back, and the nostalgic pull of movie stars – particularly the passing of one – offers us a doorway...

It’s Always Fair Weather, Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen By Ron Falzone Why is It’s Always Fair Weather, available on Amazon, always left in the backwater when talking about the great MGM musicals?  The failure of It’s Always Fair Weather at the box office signaled the beginning of the end of the glorious Arthur Freed unit...

Fewer things drive me crazier than the notion that some stories are so “important” that they demand to be serialized.  As much as I love the first two parts of The Godfather, the third one does nothing to improve the story (or my life, for that matter). The Lord of the Rings quickly becomes repetitive, while Star Wars takes narrative...

There are a lot of rules when it comes to comedy: “Less is more.”  “Never play the joke.”  “Small and smart is better than big and dumb.”   “It’s not a job for amateurs,” or, as the great tragedienne Edmund Keane put it, “Dying is easy.  Comedy is hard.” Of course, good filmmakers can occasionally get...