Scarecrow would have been a very different film had it starred, as originally intended, Bill Cosby and Jack Lemmon. As it is, it allowed up and coming Al Pacino and Gene Hackman to give two of the best performances of their careers, and it remains a mystery why the film has remained so long under […]
Film Festival
TCM Classic Film Festival: ‘The Swimmer’ (Dir. Frank Perry 1968)
The films of husband-and-wife team Frank and Eleanor Perry are amongst the most undervalued of the wave of semi-independent American films of the 70s. In titles like Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) and Play It As It Lays (1972) they tackled a specifically contemporary sense of malaise and neurosis, on both coasts, in a […]
TCM Classic Film Festival: ‘Try And Get Me’ (aka ‘The Sound Of Fury’, Dir. Cy Endfield 1950)
Fritz Lang’s Fury is based on the same small-town California news story, but this is the real deal. Instead of an innocent man threatened by a lynch mob, Try and Get Me has returning GI (never saw combat) Frank Lovejoy struggling to make ends meet for his wife and child, falling in with startling sociopath Lloyd […]
TCM Classic Film Festival: ‘La Traversée De Paris’ (Dir. Claude Autant-Lara 1956)
Beloved in France but little known elsewhere, La traversée de Paris holds the distinction of being the one film by Claude Autant-Lara deemed acceptable by the young François Truffaut, in his campaign against the prevailing cinèma du qualité in 1950s France. One reason for the exception is that it’s sort of an odd film, […]
TCM Classic Film Festival: ‘The Narrow Margin’ (Dir. Richard Fleischer 1952)
Cheap, tough, and drenched in shadows, The Narrow Margin was the sort of thing that the RKO technicians could knock out in a couple of weeks with no trouble at all, but is raised by particularly tight direction from Richard Fleischer, including terrific use of confined spaces, windows, and yes, lots of shadows (but also, […]