Category Archive: Classic Film
The Apartment
(Dir. Billy Wilder) (1960) David Shipman (“The Great Movie Stars” 1982) wrote the best thumbnail review for this: “bitter-sweet, tragical-comical, sordid and sad”. Jack Lemmon gives an immortal performance as the heel who finds his spine in the last reel, an insurance schmuck who lets superiors use his handily located apartment for sexual rendezvous, till he falls in love with Big Boss Fred MacMurray’s latest conquest. Only when midnight chimes on New Year’s Eve does she realize she loves him back. Features great, authentic playing by MacMurray as the ogre (Mr Sheldrake), a lovely turn by Shirley MacLaine as the…
Continue Reading →The Hustler
(dir. Robert Rossen) (1961) A tough, raw, hard-hearted story of Eddie Felsen (Paul Newman) who wants to move up from two bit hustling at pool to beat the best, Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). Great pool scenes: Fats’ seven- ball in the corner is a shot Eddie Charlton would be proud of. Newman is also highly competent, although he joked of shooting some pool decades later when a youth approached, declaring he’d seen The Hustler dozens of times and that watching Newman play pool was one of the great disappointments of his life. Perhaps Eddie does shoot good but also lucky….
Continue Reading →Vale Mike Nichols
NOVEMBER 19, 2014 VALE Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky (Mike Nichols) November 6, 1931 – November 19, 2014 Nicholls was multifaceted, building a career in live comedy, theatre, films and television. Though he had a reputation as a golden boy (making his film debut Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? directing Burton and Taylor, cleverly innovating techniques to enhance the claustrophobic intimacy of that night from hell, and winning a best director gong the next year by casting against stereotype in The Graduate) he had as many flops as hits but they remained interesting. His routines with Elaine May in the 1950s and…
Continue Reading →Sunset Boulevard
(dir. Billy Wilder) (1950) Creepiest of black comedies as wisecracking opportunist from Ohio (William Holden) encounters Old Hollywood (Norma Desmond, aka Gloria Swanson) with her major-domo, Erich von Stroheim, with fatal results. This Paramount classic with a sensational script is still the very best film ever made about Hollywood. After this classic, the pictures got smaller. From Schwabs to the golf course at Bel Air, to Norma Desmond’s crumbling palazzo, this faded Sunset grandeur is vindication alone for olden golden Hollywood…
Continue Reading →It’s A Wonderful Life
(dir. Frank Capra) (1946) Utopian dreamer George Bailey (James Stewart) receives a Dickensian gift as he prepares to jump off a bridge; a glimpse at local conditions if he’d never been born. Full of sentiment but not sentimental, TVC challenges you not to be reaching for your hankie by the conclusion.
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