Season One of The Outer Limits was first released to Blu-ray by Kino in March 2018 with an SRP of $99.95. The set was reissued in September, though not significantly reduced in price, to $89.95. Usually when TV shows are reissued on DVD or Blu-ray their price drops dramatically and the packaging often changes, so it's not clear what Kino's reasoning is here. Regardless, it has been reissued and thus worth reviewing.

For the unacquainted, The Outer Limits was a one-hour (primarily) science fiction anthology series that ran on ABC for a season-and-a-half, from September 1963 to January 1965. At the time ABC was by far the least-watched of the major TV networks; its shows rarely won their time slots and only two ABC programs, The Patty Duke Show (at #18) and The Donna Reed Show (at #16) made the Top 20, ratings-wise. Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone had ...Read the entire review

The Counterfeit Traitor (1962), a World War II espionage film written and directed by George Seaton and starring William Holden is, at 140 minutes, overlong and rather stodgy in its direction, but the film has unusual, almost unique qualities for a film of this kind. Instead of a glorified, high-tension escapist adventure story like The Guns of Navarone (1961) it personalizes the terrible cost of war as a series of intimate tragedies only partly offset by likewise small but meaningful moments of compassion and empathy. Superficially it resembles dozens of other espionage films but, for those paying attention, the film surprises by digging much deeper than the usual studio picture.

Based on the 1958 biography of the same name by Alexander Klein, Th...Read the entire review

(Too) loosely adapted from the 1941 hit play by Joseph Kesserling, Frank Capra's movie version of Arsenic and Old Lace, filmed later in 1941 but contractually not released until September 1944, is fondly regarded by critics and audiences. It even ranked #30 on the American Film Institute's list of "100 Years...100 Laughs," but the movie is almost a complete bust. Frenetic instead of funny, it offers a small handful of amusing performances, but Cary Grant is downright awful in the lead, and the adaptation is wrongheaded in myriad ways, at times perversely so. Its mostly positive reputation seems to at least partly stem from the reputations of Capra, the cast, and the fact that Kesserling's play is still among the most popular among community theater groups and high schools, and probably therefore more frequently seen by audiences normally averse to old black-and-white Hollywood movies.

...Read the entire review

"Not even you could dream up a story like this!"

Even measured against the low bar set by independently made horror films of the early ‘70s, Doctor Death, Seeker of Souls (1973) is quite bad, but also so loopy that it has a dogged charm. John Considine's amusing performance as the title character is equal parts Vincent Price and Dwight Schrute, while producers Sal Ponti (who wrote the script) and Eddie Saeta (who also directed) must have called in some favors, as they cast a dizzying mix of talent, most memorably and oddly Three Stooges front man Moe Howard in his final film appearance.

Laura (Jo Morrow), the beautiful, beloved wife of Fred Saunders (Barry Coe), dies in hospital, despite the best efforts of his doctor friend, Greg Vaughn (Stewart Moss)...Read the entire review

It took 44 years, but here I've finally gotten around to seeing Irvin Kirshner's Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), whose creepy poster and effective coming attractions trailer long intrigued me. Though often described as a neo-noir, the movie is really a slick, big-budget Hollywood stab at the giallo genre, the visually stylish, intricately-plotted Italian thrillers, often-gory whodunits, that flourished earlier in the decade. The story was John Carpenter's first major studio credit, though it was altered by others so whether he, later writer David Zelag Goodman (Straw Dogs) or others were consciously drawing from Italian giallo is unclear.

Visually, Eyes of Laura Mars is enormously effective, though let down profoundly, house-of-cards style, by its ruinous ending. Where the best giallo are puzzles that neatly and cleverly come together at the end, Eyes o...Read the entire review

Unlike 99% of reviews of DVDs and Blu-ray discs I write here, Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project No. 4 is a boxed set most of us will approach with virtually no frame of reference. The six feature films in the set emanate from Angola (though made with French money and shot in Congo), Argentina, Iran, Hungary, India, and Cameroon. I've seen other Indian and Iranian films, but am hardly an expert of those country's cinemas, and never before experienced movies from the other four that I can remember. I'm also unfamiliar with the filmmakers behind them save Hungary's Andre DeToth, who eventually had an extensive career in Hollywood.

On the other hand, all but one of the films offer stories with universal themes of family relationships, love relationships, and most deal with issues of economic class and people in positions of power exploiting the nearly powerless. And even if one goes i...Read the entire review

I'm not sure what I expected of He Who Must Die (Celui qui doit mourir, 1957), a French film directed by Connecticut-born Jules Dassin. Something like Dassin's other signature films, movies like Rififi (1955) or Topkapi (1965), perhaps? Or maybe I was expecting a plot along the lines of Stanley Kramer's later The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969), about a remote village in Nazi-occupied Italy hiding its valuable cache of wine. The hardly apt plot synopsis on Wikipedia describes He Who Must Die in similar terms, as being about a post-World War I Turkish-occupied Greek village staging a Passion Play, inspiring a rebellion, which misses entirely what the movie is really about.

Instead, the picture is one of the best explorations of Christian hypocrisy and corruption I've ever encountered. The opposite is also true: far better than Christian epics like T...Read the entire review

Atom Egoyan's Exotica (1994) is a puzzle film of sorts, in some respects similar to Paul Thomas Anderson's later film Magnolia (1999). Both pictures introduce a gaggle of people midstream in their lives. They mostly appear disconnected from one another, and initially it's unclear what we in the audience are supposed to make of them. How these disparate characters eventually converge is part of what makes both films interesting, but that's not really what either is about. Nevertheless, it's best to approach these films cold, with no knowledge of what their stories are about ahead of time. You definitely don't, for instance, want to visit Wikipedia's entry on Exotica beforehand. While its plot synopsis is undeniably accurate, it's from the post-viewing perspective that gives absolutely everything away.

Exotica received rave reviews and did good (arthous...Read the entire review

Filmmaker-writer-activist Michael Moore's only non-documentary film to date, Canadian Bacon (1995) is a broad political satire that, despite many amusing ideas and a fine cast, is curiously mirthless and, 27 years later, with the world spiraling into the abyss as it is, now plays especially toothless and even naïve. Why it's not better than it ought to be has, at least for me, always been a bit of puzzle, but watching MVD Visual's new Blu-ray I think I've been able to unravel some of the film's many problems.

In Niagara Falls, New York, laid off workers from a weapons manufacturing plant owned by billionaire R.J. Hacker (G.D. Spradlin) unenthusiastically greet the unpopular Democratic U.S. President (Alan Alda), his trip intended to console the unem...Read the entire review

One of the very few Hollywood movies made during the Spanish Civil War about the Spanish Civil War, The Last Train from Madrid (1937) is a real curio. Cribbing elements from Grand Hotel (1932) while anticipating other story aspects later incorporated into Casablanca (1942), it's both a good and bad movie, though even the worst aspects of the picture are fascinating in their own way.

American opinion was deeply divided about the war. FDR-New Deal liberals, American communists, and many of those concerned about the rise of fascism in Europe generally supported the Republicans in Spain, while American conservatives, particularly Catholics, including the Vatican leadership, supported the Nationalists led by Francisco Franco. The Republicans received military support from Mexico but also the Soviet Union, while the Nationalists had Italy and Nazi Germany on their side. ...Read the entire review

A good, not great film noir-crime drama directed by William Dieterle and starring William Holden, Edmond O'Brien, and Alexis Smith, The Turning Point (1952) is handsomely made if overly familiar. Its story revolves around an independent investigation and hearings concerning organized crime in an unnamed American city, a premise so popular in the 1950s that it became a kind of sub-genre all its own. Because such films were not expensive to produce, they became fodder of myriad B-pictures (notably by Columbia and Allied Artists), especially later in the decade, and even turned up on TV shows like Deadline and M Squad.

The Turning Point is pretty good but not on the level of the best such films, such as Robert Wise's The Captive City (also 1952) and The Enforcer, a superior Humphrey Bogart vehicle released the year before with a similar plot and concerns...Read the entire review

French director Jacques Deray's Symphony for a Massacre (Symphonie pour un massacre, 1963) is an engrossing, well-acted crime thriller despite its sometimes sluggish pacing and the fact that attentive viewers will be able to accurately predict its major plot developments well in advance. Best remembered for the classic film La Piscine (1969), the best of many films he made with star Alain Delon, Symphony for a Massacre was Deray's third feature as director, its screenplay co-written by another French master, Claude Sautet (Classe tous risques, 1960).

Writing a spoiler-free review of the film is virtually impossible as its major qualities are in its plotting; the first half of the film has the audience guessing what its main chara...Read the entire review

Teaming Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte for a Western focusing on the still largely-untold story of former black slaves in the American West sounds irresistible and seemingly unmissable. Unfortunately, Buck and the Preacher (1972), co-executive produced by the actors and directed by Poitier, isn't very good.

Working from this premise, it would seem the filmmakers could have gone in one of two directions: a classical Western that just happened to star African-American actors, or a more probing, enlightening and historically accurate film about freed slaves and their struggles in the American west. Instead, the undernourished, almost sketchy script by Ernest Kinoy, primarily a television scribe of the Paddy Chayefsky/Rod Serling generation, tries to have it both ways, failing to satisfy on either count. Poitier, who took over the direction (his debut as such) after firing Joseph Sarge...Read the entire review

Watching Rod Serling's Night Gallery's second season (1971-72), virtually all of the same plusses and minuses of the first season apply here, too. There are some qualified strong segments, with decent scripts and/or performances, but they're jumbled in with a greater number of weak and sometimes awful ones. To wit, this review to a large extent covers the same issues as my review of Season 1.

Back in the 1970s, when Serling's Twilight Zone was a substantial hit in syndication, like many others I watched its reruns obsessively. When Night Gallery joined Twilight Zone in syndication sometime later, initial excitement quickly turned to disappointment, even heartbreak. Randomly select any 10 episodes of Zone and chances are you'll end up with a couple of great ones, six pretty good episodes, and maybe one or two stinkers. By comparison, you were lucky to get one...Read the entire review

Now largely forgotten, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) is a very pleasant surprise. I was only vaguely aware of the film, and what I'd read about it suggested the film danced around Wilde's homosexuality (or bisexuality) to the point of absurdity, refraining from addressing directly the very premise of the story and its main character.

In fact, at a time when homosexual acts were still illegal in Great Britain (it would not be decriminalized in England and Wales until 1967), the film makes no bones about the charges levied against the celebrated Irish poet and playwright, or his feelings toward Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, the source of Wilde's downfall. Indeed, the film appears to be quite accurate historically (trial scenes are lifted directly from its transcript) and though star Peter Finch looks nothing like Wilde, his performance is exceptional.

Further, the movie itself is ha...Read the entire review

The 3-D Film Archive's long-awaited 4K scan and restoration of Abbott & Costello's Jack and the Beanstalk (1952) is, predictably, a revelation. The movie looks far better than it has looked since its original release and, more surprisingly, sounds infinitely better. I first became enamored of the team with early Sunday morning airings of their films, but whenever Jack in the Beanstalk was shown, a 16mm black-and-white print was used, the local ABC affiliate super-imposing "originally filmed in black-and-white" during the opening titles, which included a credit for SuperCinecolor and didn't fool elementary school-age me. Years later, during the early days of home video, the market was flooded with inferior color copies. Last year, the VCI label released its own "4K restoration" which I reviewed; that release can now safely be tossed in the trash bin.

This releas...Read the entire review

Fiddler's Journey to the Big Screen (2022), about the making of director Norman Jewison's classic adaptation of the smash Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof (1971), is entertaining if a bit disjointed. It's as if editor-producer-director Daniel Raim envisioned a more narrowly-focused work but got sidetracked during filming and the result became a jumble of themes and anecdotes that, while enjoyable, aren't exactly cohesive.

Raim, who studied under Fiddler production designer Robert F. Boyle and through him met Jewison, states in a statement included as an insert with the Blu-ray that he "wanted to make a documentary about the power of the creative process, exploring Jewison's artistry, compassion, and humanity as well as his spiritual and creative quest directing Fiddler on the Roof. The movie is certainly that part of the time, but it veers off into other areas ...Read the entire review

Back to the Beach (1987) took audiences and critics by surprise. A reunion/sequel/throwback to AIP's "Beach Party" movies of the 1960s, movies starring Annette Funicello and/or Frankie Avalon, this quasi-final series entry's achievements are modest but the fun-factor is undeniable. Director Lyndall Hobbs infuses its unambitious broad satire with several outstanding set pieces. It captures the spirit of the original films while mostly successfully updating it for the 1980s. The original movies were noted for their celebrity cameo appearances, and the cameos in this one are well-chosen and mostly delightful, though best appreciated if the viewer is not aware of them beforehand.

The original series began with Beach Party (1963), gaining steam with up to t...Read the entire review

A character-driven comedy-drama based on a true story, The Duke (2020) is a pleasant little film reminiscent of the type of British picture that was commonplace during the story's setting, the early 1960s. Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren star, with Broadbent in especially fine form.

Kempton Bunton (Broadbent) is a 60-ish pensioner living in Newcastle with his wife, Dorothy (Mirren), an elderly housekeeper for a local councilor and his wife. Years before their 18-year-old daughter died in a bicycling accident, Dorothy suppressing her grief to the point of hiding away all photos of her late daughter and refusing to visit her grave. Kempton, meanwhile, drives his wife to distraction with his inability to hold onto a job, his community activism, and his television...Read the entire review

Dementia (1953), equally known under a later title, Daughter of Horror (a 1957 release), is a difficult film to describe. Originally conceived by writer-producer-director John Parker as an experimental short with no spoken dialogue, it was expanded to 58 minutes and played few theatrical bookings in 1953 and '55 before it was acquired by producer-distributor Jack H. Harris, who cut several minutes and added some narration by a young Ed McMahon, who is briefly, murkily glimpsed in added footage, at least it appears to be him. That version, Daughter of Horror, also had few bookings. However, scenes from the reedited Daughter of Horror turned up as the movie playing at the movie theater in the Harris-produced The Blob (1958). The identity of that film-within-a-film was a mystery for many years.

Then as now, critics and audiences are sharply divided about Dem...Read the entire review

It was one of those strange ripples in movie history. Think of it: Robert Duvall, fresh off the set of Godfather, Part II, joins Randy Quaid, he having recently finished The Last Detail, and John Huston, who had both just directed The Man Who Would Be King and co-starred in Chinatown - all get together to make a Charles Bronson movie.

The film was Breakout (1975), produced during Bronson's brief fling as an A-list Hollywood star. He had, of course, been enormously popular in Europe and Japan for nearly ten years but, like contemporary Telly Savalas, Bronson was more familiar than popular back in the states. But his European films developed a loyal following in American grind houses, and when Death Wish (1974) earned a sur...Read the entire review

Kino has been doling out Blu-ray discs of older TV-movies for the last few years, most of which have been disappointing, but The UFO Incident (1975) was, for me, a gobsmacking surprise. I was expecting some kind of variation of the speculative "documentaries" about UFOs and other mysteries popular at the time, anticipating a too-literal recreation of an alleged alien abduction in this case. Instead, Hesper Anderson and S. Lee Pogostin's teleplay, from John G. Fuller's book, dramatizes the real-life story of Betty and Barney Hill and their 1961 close encounter with remarkable intelligence and ambiguity, while simultaneously broadening its scope into themes of racial identity, repressed fears stretching back to childhood, physical violation, stress brought on by the Cold War and fear of nuclear annihilation and much more. As Barney and Betty Hill, James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons are ou...Read the entire review

They don't make ‘em like this anymore. The exotic Technicolor adventure films produced by Universal starring Maria Montez and Jon Hall were among its biggest hits of the 1940s, but today, when they're remembered at all, they're mostly regarded as camp classics, particularly Cobra Woman (1944), with thick-accented, Dominican Republic-born Montez as South Seas island priestess Naja performing a somehow-got-it-passed-the-censors phallic snake dance.

Universal at the time was primarily though not strictly a B-movie studio, churning out double-feature fodder for the masses. Even the company's few big stars like Deanna Durbin and Abbott & Costello made films just good enough, rarely given the directors, screenwriters and supporting casts accorded big stars at big studios like MGM, Paramount, and Fox. Montez rose quickly through the ranks after a modest 1940 debut. Clearly, Universal pe...Read the entire review

It came as a bit of a shock to learn that Orson Welles detested the movies of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (as told to Henry Jaglom in My Lunches with Orson). You'd think if any American filmmaker would appreciate the artistry of this producer-writer-director powerhouse duo, it would be Welles. Why he disliked their work so much I cannot say, but I have a hunch Welles' distaste might have stemmed from the team's "composed" films: The Red Shoes (1948), The Tales of Hoffman (1951), and Oh…Rosalinda!! (1955).

During the 1940s and ‘50s, a handful of very talented filmmakers tried fusing the classical arts with cinema. Walt Disney famously attempted a merging of classical music and animation with Fantasia (1940), while Gene Kelly merged classical dance in films like Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris (1951) and especially the Kell...Read the entire review

Political corruption ties together all three entries in Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema, Volume VII, with all three from the United Artists catalog: The Boss (1956), Chicago Confidential (1957), and The Fearmakers (1958). As before, the labeling of some of these titles as "noir" is debatable, but it's a good mix. One is intriguing for its ethical issues, another boasts a fine cast, and the third, despite a fatally miscast lead, is a valiant effort.

The Boss is a historical drama of political corruption with the main character, M...Read the entire review

When the impetus driving the production of a movie is leftover film stock, it's unlikely the resulting work will rival Citizen Kane. The story goes that after making Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956), hardly cinematic gold itself, producer-writer-director Curt Siodmak found himself with 10,000 feet of unused color film stock, and built Love Slaves of the Amazons around this unexpected surplus. Under those circumstances, and with a title like that, mediocrity would seem inevitable, and so it is.

It's odd that Kino would release Love Slaves and not Curucu, at least not yet. That film is reportedly one of the great disappointments of 1950s fantasy cinema, with its notorious cop-out dénouement. Still, one imagines a die-hard if tiny audience for Curucu and a virtually nonexistent one for Love Slaves, though the movie is not without interest. It's...Read the entire review

Before he became famous as Charlie Chan, Swedish actor Warner Oland had already been playing Asian characters (and other "exotic" types) for years, Chinese and Japanese roles in dozens of silent films as early as 1917. Just prior to commencing his signature part as Charlie Chan, Oland starred as Sax Rohmer's archetypal villain Dr. Fu Manchu in three features, the first two of which are paired in Kino's new Blu-ray double-feature disc: The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929) and The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (1930).

While these early, pre-Code talkies require a bit of an adjustment by the viewer, and their "Yellow Peril" stereotypes are decidedly politically-incorrect, the movies themselves are quite enjoyable if one is able to watch them on their own terms. The video transfers are very good for movies more than 90 years old, and each film is accompanied by an audio commentary track by film h...Read the entire review

I don't have that much to report about Howard Hawks' late-career comedy Man's Favorite Sport? (1964). In this case, the consensus is correct: Hawks's reworking of 1930s screwball comedy classics, of which he was a major contributor, is pleasant enough with some big laughs here and there, but overall it's one of his lesser comedies, though better than some others (e.g., 1952's Monkey Business). Rock Hudson and Paula Prentiss ably fill the screwbally shoes of past genre stars, though Rock's part all too clearly was written for Cary Grant (who opted to make Charade instead, a wise decision) and the picture is overlong at 120 minutes. (Hawks's preferred cut was even longer, about 135 minutes; it doesn't appear to survive.)

Still, it's not a bad way to spend two hours. I'd seen nearly all of Hawks's sound films and most of Hudson's starring films, but somehow I had missed this...Read the entire review

I saw actor-turned-director Robert Redford's film of Ordinary People (1980) several times in the 1980s but not since, and was pleased to find it just as powerful and superbly acted as it struck me then. Adapted from Judith Guest's 1976 novel, the movie is a family drama grappling with subject matter very difficult to pull off cinematically: deeply repressed feelings of anger and guilt, mental illness with no easy fixes, conflicting desires to face and bury fundamental family problems. The film is not perfect, as it's a little pat here and there, and its depiction of psychotherapy is clinically realistic but also idealized. But it was a startlingly good directorial debut for Redford, who never topped it, and it fully deserved the box-office success and critical acclaim it received.

Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/75225 Wed, 04 May 2022 18:18:39 UTC Highly Recommended

Kino's Edgar G. Ulmer Sci-Fi Collection is a welcome three-movie set for fans of that genre. The Man from Planet X (1951) had been released to Blu-ray before, but The Amazing Transparent Man and Beyond the Time Barrier (both 1960) are new to Blu-ray; I don't recall ever seeing a video version of Time Barrier that didn't look terrible, so this is good news for sci-fi fans.

The self-described "Capra of PRC," Ulmer had a reputation for making good movies on absurdly low budgets, many for Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC). In the years between his last movie in 1964 and death in 1972, his work was rediscovered and reappraised by influential critics like director Peter Bogdanovich, though praise for Ulmer is usually overstated. He did bring masterly direction to a handful of titles, notably the film noir classic Detour (1945), Bluebeard (1944), ...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/75220 Mon, 02 May 2022 17:24:05 UTC Highly Recommended

Writer-producer-director Preston Sturges (1898-1959) was one of the all-time great artists of American film comedy. He began writing for movies in 1930 but his career as a director was short-lived: he directed just 12 movies and, with one exception, all his best films were released during a five-year period, 1940-44. Most critics regard The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels (both 1941) as his masterpieces, though I'd argue that The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) is his best work, and Unfaithfully Yours (1948) and The Palm Beach Story (1942) are right up there, too. His approach to film comedy was uniquely his, and no one, not even the great Billy Wilder and his various writing partners, wrote funnier dialogue.

During the first half of the 1940s, Sturges was under contract at Paramount, and constantly battled both that's studio's front office and keepers of t...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/75217 Fri, 29 Apr 2022 16:37:40 UTC Highly Recommended

In 1934 child-star Shirley Temple's movie career was in the early stages of its meteoric rise. She gets third billing in Now and Forever after Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard, they also on the ascent. Neither of them made the list of top box-office attractions that year, but Temple placed seventh. By 1935 she was an international sensation, Hollywood's biggest star, a position she held onto for the next several years.

Temple was under long-term contract at Fox, soon to merge with Twentieth Century Pictures, but for Now and Forever she was loaned out to Paramount. The studio wouldn't loan her out again until 1941.

Now and Forever is a particularly interesting Shirley Temple vehicle, similar to the Fox films but notably darker in tone. A particularly grim conclusion was planned and even screened for critics before the studio changed their minds, reshooting and softening u...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/75214 Wed, 27 Apr 2022 14:46:16 UTC Rent It

Although not made by Universal, the studio behind the Airport films, Starflight One (original title: Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land, 1983) very much has the flavor of that quasi-series, and was even helmed by Jerry Jameson, director of the third and arguably best one, Airport ‘77. Starflight One is a tad boring and highly illogical at times, but it's not all that terrible and certainly superior to the last of the Universal films and has better special effects besides, even though it was made on a TV-movie budget.

Even faster and more luxurious than the Concorde, Starflight, financed by brooding billionaire Q.T. Thornwell (Ray Milland) - with that name what else could he be? - is the first of an intended new line of hype...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/75206 Tue, 12 Apr 2022 19:41:11 UTC Highly Recommended

I snapped up The Devil Strikes at Night (1957) from our screener pile expecting this manhunt for a serial killer would be something like an earlier, more serious Edgar Wallace movie, less campy than those West German productions that soon followed. The first surprise was that The Devil Strikes at Night was not set in contemporary West Germany, but rather Nazi Germany in 1944. The setting added unexpected interest, as the movie's depiction of everyday life in late-wartime Hamburg and Berlin is very different from what one usually sees in movies set in that time and place. What I was really unprepared for was that, about two-thirds into the picture, the focus shifts away from the search for the murderer and instead becomes a very intelligent, even unique political thriller.

Dresden-born director Robert Siodmak (1900-1972) began his career in Germany, then flourished in Fren...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/75203 Thu, 07 Apr 2022 16:42:33 UTC DVD Talk Collector Series

Douglas Sirk's great Southern Gothic melodrama Written on the Wind (1956) is one of the most over-analyzed movies in all of cinema. As with Sirk's other ‘50s melodramas, Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, etc., critics and audiences feel obliged to justify its lasting appeal and critical success. Modern writers and audiences often seem mildly embarrassed that the movie's magic works so well, damning Sirk's films with faint praise, qualifying with terms like "high camp" and "glorious kitsch." A related approach is viewing these 1950s movies through a 21st century prism, sometimes reading far more subversiveness than is actually there, or retrospectively finding irony in Rock Hudson's manly and very heterosexual heroes. For gay audiences especially, the Sirk-Hudson films are howlers on the order of John Waters's wild satires.

Better, I think, is to put movies ...Read the entire review

]]>