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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Eight

Dan Seeger

#8 — Letter to an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948) Max Ophüls worked on five films during his aborted tenure in Hollywood, including Vendetta, which would have been his U.S. debut had he not been fired from it (one of several directors who passed through the troubled shoot). The moody, elegantly visual style favored by the European director fit awkwardly into the stateside model, even as it had obvious connections to the deliberate film noir approach that prevailed at the time. His movies were too deliberate, too cerebral, too firmly serious to truly succeed in a U.S. market that, even … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Eight

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Oh don’t lean on me, man, ’cause you can’t afford the ticket

Dan Seeger

There’s no disparaging the intent of the film Suffragette. To a large degree, the sterling motivation is spelled out by a crawl ahead of the closing credits which details when various countries across the globe first extended women the right to vote, including more than a few territories that did so only ridiculously recently. In depicting the harrowing track women had to follow to win suffrage in England, which was granted in compromised fashion in 1918 and then more in line with what was afforded men ten years later, director Sarah Gavron and screenwriter Abi Morgan strive for a echoing … Continue reading Oh don’t lean on me, man, ’cause you can’t afford the ticket

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Nine

Dan Seeger

#9 — The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948) I find it weirdly wonderful that one of the greatest films about the corrosive greed at the core of the United States identity doesn’t take place within the nation’s borders at all. Instead, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre finds broken citizens scuffling around within a northern neighbor, looking to make their fortunes by yanking out some of the gold they just know is up in them thar Mexican hills. The story artfully explores basic human emotions that range across vast swaths of people in very different cultures, but it … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Nine

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From the Archive: Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare

Dan Seeger

After several weeks of copying and pasting for this weekly feature, I pledged to myself that I’d dig out the bin of old, old reviews again. Since it’s Halloween, I also decided I’d open a folder and choose the first horror film I could find. Which brings us to what was theoretically the last installment in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Back when my old radio show cohort was regularly posting at his horror blog, Heart in a Jar, I suggested that he could write a really interesting essay on how the listeners to our show in the … Continue reading From the Archive: Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare

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We’ve heard this little scene, we’ve heard it many times, people fighting over little things and wasting precious time.

Dan Seeger

Aaron Sorkin is setting himself as the preferred cinematic chronicler of the major figures of the digital age. So far, that’s working out pretty well. Following The Social Network, Sorkin turns his keyboard to the one person who commands more attention and fascination than anyone else who’s made their millions (or, rather, billions) off of circuit boards fueling nearly miraculous tools of communication and information processing. The late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple and brilliant orchestrator of modern age cult of personality, has already been the subject of enough film treatments that it’s possible to create a considered list of … Continue reading We’ve heard this little scene, we’ve heard it many times, people fighting over little things and wasting precious time.

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Ten

Dan Seeger

#10 — Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) Back when I was writing and editing for Spectrum Culture, I had a few little victories that I treasured whenever I was a participant in building one of our semi-regular lists. None of these was more satisfying than leading the campaign to anoint Barbara Stanwyck’s turn as Sugarpuss O’Shea as the Best Comedic Performance of 1941. Despite my booming pride, I don’t think it was all that tough of a fight. Arguably, Stanwyck’s stiffest competition came from her other justly loved comedic acting turns from the same year: as Ann Mitchell in Meet … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Ten

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Eleven

Dan Seeger

#11 — Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) So much of the cinema of the nineteen-forties needs to be approached with the contextualizing recollection that the active engagements of World War II consumed around half of the decade-long span. It’s useful when considering the very different weight that war films must have carried — especially given how reticent filmmakers have been to build fictions that run in chronological proximity to contemporary wars in more recent decades — but it adds shading to so many films outside of that genre, even — or especially — tough-minded dramas that emerged in the aftermath of … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Eleven

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We don’t know the meaning of fear, we play every minute by ear

Dan Seeger

Amazingly for a director who used to routinely face a barrage of critical darts for a supposed inability to progress past the childish stuff of frothy fantasy, Steven Spielberg has become one of the most dependable cinematic chroniclers of the planet’s tumultuous history. Across the last decade, with the odd exceptions of a misguided Indiana Jones sequel and a diversion into computer animation, Spielberg has been filming in the past. That’s not an entirely newfound preoccupation, of course. Even before Munich, which I’m using as the dividing line ahead of this era of Spileberg’s filmmaking, Spielberg kept cycling back to historical … Continue reading We don’t know the meaning of fear, we play every minute by ear

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Oh, now I don’t hardly know her

Dan Seeger

Guillermo del Toro takes a clear, unbridled pleasure in sharing the wildest worlds of his imagination. Like Wes Anderson — and this is probably the sole cinematic instinct the two directors have in common — del Toro loves to spread his favorite playthings all over the screen. While Anderson presents them meticulously arranged, under glass, and with an implicit instruction that they must not be touched or moved even a millimeter, del Toro upends the toy box and romps delightedly as the colorful contraptions come raining down. It’s not that he has no control. The film that remains his finest proves decisively … Continue reading Oh, now I don’t hardly know her