Listing his favorite directors for me one time—among them John Ford and Howard Hawks—Orson Welles concluded: “… And Jean Renoir! I’ve loved him most of all. …” In the 1950s, the Young Turks of the French New Wave—Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, etc.—acclaimed Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock but reserved the highest place in their pantheon for Read More
Sometime in the late 1960’s, I asked Jean Renoir what he thought of Ernst Lubitsch. He raised his eyebrows and said, enthusiastically, “Lubitsch!? But he invented the modern Hollywood.” By “modern Hollywood,” Renoir meant American movies from about 1924 to the start of the ’60s. Before Lubitsch’s arrival to California from Germany in 1922 (to Read More
The idea for Rio Bravo (1959) began with Howard Hawks hating High Noon (1952). In 1962, Hawks explained this to me, referring to High Noon as that picture “in which Gary Cooper ran around trying to get help and no one would give him any. And that’s rather a silly thing for a man to Read More
Between 1914 and 1928, people laughed longer, louder and more often than at any other time in history. The reason why is that during those 14 extremely turbulent years around the world, a group of comic geniuses did things on the movie screen that were more elaborately conceived for comedy, more brilliantly constructed for laughs, Read More
One of my favorite movie titles is also, as Andrew Sarris has said, probably the most romantic title in pictures, and names a film directed by an Italian-American from Salt Lake City who is responsible for several of the most intensely affecting love stories made: Frank Borzage's 1937 European triangle tale, HistoryIsMadeatNight [Tuesday, Nov. 9, Read More
When asked which directors he liked best, Orson Welles famously said, "I like the old masters … by which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford." The comment continued: "With Ford at his best, you get a sense of what the earth is made of–even if the script is by Mother Machree." I Read More
Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week
Among the most entertaining of non-"auteur" star vehicles-made at a time when stars often were not only good actors but unique personalities as well-is the first pairing of America's innocent James Stewart (as he was always billed in pictures, never Jimmy) and Europe's worldly Marlene Dietrich, out in the Read MoreIf you miss Cary Grant as much as I do-and I mean not only the movie star, the actor, the man, but also the kind of civilized style and ebullient, urbane and witty persona the name calls to mind-there are two good opportunities to see the original article. Both were made by Grant's favorite director Read More
Just about everyone knowledgeable seems to agree by now-nearly two decades since his death-that Frenchman Jean Renoir, youngest son of the great Impressionist Auguste Renoir, is the best film director the Western world has known (I'd vote for the Japanese Kenji Mizoguchi as the Eastern world's finest), and so it's a very Happy New Year Read More
It's now an absolutely perfect holiday season because the funniest and at the same time most beautiful comedian of the American screen will be represented by eight-count 'em, eight!-of the most wonderful movies ever made (shown on AMC), mostly directed by, mainly written by, and all of them starring the one and only Buster Keaton. Read More
Three quintessential works in American film history this week, two by an Englishman, one by an Irishman: (1) Charlie Chaplin's classic 1925 comedy The Gold Rush [Monday, Dec. 8, AMC, 46, 6 A.M.], the first full-length feature to star his internationally indelible creation, the Tramp. I was sort of weaned on this, seeing it first Read More
Alfred Hitchcock's first American film was originally going to be about the Titanic , but instead, in 1940, he did an admirable adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's novel, Rebecca [Thursday, Nov. 27, Bravo, 11 A.M.] , which won the Academy Award for best picture-the only time a Hitchcock film won that prize, though of course Read More
In the 50's and 60's, my European parents would sometimes talk about the powerful antifascist theme-especially timely and valuable in 1941-expressed in Frank Capra's film of that year, Meet John Doe They used to, at the same time, lament the loss of the kind of America that produced such a picture. Barbara Stanwyck gives one Read More
