Author Archives: JStafford

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About JStafford

I am a writer for The Travel Channel, ArtsATL.com, Burnaway.org and other publications. I am also a film researcher for Turner Classic Movies and a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle. This blog is dedicated to overlooked, obscure or underrated movies and other cinema topics that I want to share.

Easy Rawlins: Private Eye

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Denzel Washington plays Easy Rawlins, an amateur detective in the 1995 film adaptation of the Walter Mosley crime novel DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, directed by Carl Franklin.

For avid readers of mystery and crime novels, the stories of African-American novelist Walter Mosley featuring his detective hero Easy Rawlins were a unique and welcome addition to an overly familiar genre. And it was no surprise when Devil in a Blue Dress, the first of a quartet of novels featuring Rawlins, was optioned by a Hollywood studio and later brought to the screen in 1995 by director Carl Franklin and Denzel Washington, who not only played the lead but helped finance it; it was the first film for his production company, Mundy Lane.

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Intertwined Destinies

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The American West as seen through the eyes of a French filmmaker provides a curious and offbeat approach to the genre in Another Man, Another Chance (1977), directed by Claude Lelouch, whose most famous film remains his breakout 1966 art house hit, A Man and a Woman; it also won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Unlike most Hollywood produced Westerns, Another Man, Another Chance relies less on the traditional attributes of the form and presents instead a slow burn love story shaped by the turbulent events of the 1870s in both Europe and the U.S. Similar to the narrative structure of A Man and a Woman and other Lelouch films such as And Now My Love (1974) in which fate brings together two people over the passage of time, the movie provides parallel narratives in which the story’s two main protagonists eventually emerge and find each other.

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Joe Orton’s Impolite Farce

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Black comedy may be an acquired taste but it still takes a clever and wickedly funny practitioner of the form to pull it off and Joe Orton was one of the best. The enfant terrible of British theatre in the sixties, Orton’s promising career was cut short in 1967 when he was bludgeoned to death by his lover Kenneth Halliwell. This final curtain, along with the events that led up to it, were covered in detail in John Lahr’s excellent biography of the acclaimed playwright Prick Up Your Ears, which was adapted to the screen in 1987 by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Alan Bennett and featured Gary Oldman as Joe Orton. While Frears’ biopic was a fascinating character study, it didn’t really delve into the nuts and bolts of Orton’s craft or why such stages farces as Entertaining Mr. Sloane and What the Butler Saw became such popular and scandalous causes celebres among theatre critics and playgoers. The only thing that can really do justice to Orton’s particular brand of outrageous comedy and satire is a first rate production of one of his plays. A film adaptation would be much trickier because so much of Orton’s humor involves language – its proper and improper usage, double entendres, slang, class accents and other specifics. Of course, that didn’t stop filmmakers from attempting to bring his work to the screen and Loot became the second Orton play to receive the big screen treatment in 1970 (Entertaining Mr. Sloane, another Orton play adapted to film, had been released earlier in 1970).

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Man of Mystery

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The German film poster for THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER aka Every Man for Himself and God Against All (1974).

In May 1828 a young man appeared in a town square in Nuremberg, Germany carrying a prayer book and two letters written by his former caretaker. He spoke very little and was unable to answer any questions about his identity, where he came from or why he was there. One of the letters stated that he had come to the city to meet the captain of the 6th cavalry regiment with the hope of becoming a cavalryman. The other letter claimed he had been born in 1812 and had been raised in complete isolation from other people although he had been taught rudimentary reading and writing skills. His name was Kaspar Hauser but his mysterious nature and childlike presence baffled the townspeople and he was housed as a vagabond at the local prison until he was made a ward of the city and put under the protective care of Lord Stanhope, a wealthy aristocrat. Stanhope devoted himself to Hauser’s further education and re-entry into society and the young man’s bizarre demeanor aroused the curiosity of the public as well as doctors, professors and members of the clergy. Unfortunately, Hauser’s life came to an abrupt end in April 1833 when the mysterious man who first brought him to Nuremberg returned and stabbed him to death, escaping without a trace. The case has been a source of fascination for years in Germany and numerous films, television series and made-for-TV movies have been made about him but The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser aka The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser aka Every Man for Himself and God Against All (German title: Jeder fur Sich und Gott Gegen Alle, 1974), directed by Werner Herzog, is probably the most famous and critically acclaimed of all the versions made to date.

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Fotoromanzi Fantasy

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“With Paisan, I knew that I wanted to be a film director. I thought maybe this was where my future was, not as a journalist. It was with The White Sheik that I knew I was a film director.” – Federico Fellini (from I, Fellini by Charlotte Chandler)

In The White Sheik (Italian title: Lo Sceicco Bianco, 1952), Fellini’s first solo directorial effort (he co-directed Variety Lights with Alberto Lattuada the previous year) he drew upon his experiences as a journalist and script writer to tell a bittersweet story about a provincial newlywed couple vacationing in Rome for their honeymoon. Wanda (Brunella Bovo), the young bride, is a naive romantic, prone to impulsive behavior and passionate fantasies. She is also an avid fan of fotoromanzi (a comic book with photo captions instead of cartoon drawings) and is secretly infatuated with “The White Sheik,” the hero of her favorite series.

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The Pairans Are Among Us

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A promotional still from the Japanese science fiction film Uchujin Tokyo ni Arawaru (1956), which was released in the U.S. in 1963 as WARNING FROM SPACE.

The early 1950s is generally regarded as the time when science fiction truly became a popular and profitable film genre thanks to a number of pioneering efforts from Hollywood such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Thing from Another World (1951), The Man from Planet X (1951), It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Invaders from Mars (1954). Other countries quickly followed suit producing their own sci-fi entries but Japan was a latecomer in this regard. It wasn’t until 1956 when Daiei Studios released the first Japanese movie to address the subject of UFOs and extraterrestrials – Uchujin Tokyo ni Arawaru aka Spacemen Appear in Tokyo, directed by Koji Shima. The film was a commercial failure and quickly vanished from cinemas before turning up seven years later on American television screens in an English-dubbed version known as Warning from Space. Unfortunately, this altered version for TV syndication with its pan-and-scan format deviating from the original presentation was intended for juvenile audiences. The original 1956 Japanese version, however, is a fascinating and important genre entry in the development of the science fiction film and deserves to be better known today. (When I refer to Warning from Space throughout the following article, I am talking about the Japanese version).

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Basketball Jocks and Pom Pom Girls

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Jane Fonda (in her film debut) and Anthony Perkins appear in a publicity still for the 1960 romantic comedy TALL STORY, directed by Joshua Logan.

The film debut of a soon-to-be-major movie star is not always an event of any significance when it first occurs. Nor is it often a movie with any artistic merit that can stand the test of time and become an important topic for analysis among film scholars. Jane Fonda’s movie debut, Tall Story, will surely never make the AFI’s top 100 films list and it wasn’t a commercial or critical success upon its release in 1960. Yet the film is important in the career arc of Ms. Fonda. It’s also an enjoyable, often witty romantic comedy that plays much better today than when it first premiered.

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Adolf, Eva and Guests in Bavaria

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Still shrouded in mystery and speculation by historical experts, the final days of Adolf Hitler remain a subject of endless fascination for many. It’s certainly been the focus of several films such as the 2004 German production Downfall (Oscar nominated for Best Foreign Language Film) and Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973) starring Alec Guinness, but Moloch (1999), from Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov, is not a typical biopic or dramatic reenactment but an unconventional and startling chamber piece, closer in style to an off-Broadway ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ production.

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The Godfather of New York Street Art

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When did grafitti drawings and spray paint signage graduate from being considered vandalism to a recognized art movement? Pop culture historians pinpoint the late 1960s as the time that subway art and other movements began appearing in major cities with Philadelphia and then New York City paving the way. Some believe that grafitti taggers Cornbread aka Darryl McCray and Top Cat 126 from Philadelphia were among the first to elevate spray paint signage out of its defacement stigma. And by the late seventies/early eighties grafitti art had become much more elaborate and pervasive, thanks to the pioneering efforts of cult figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, who eventually made their brand of street art wildly popular and collectible. What most people don’t know is that a Canadian artist named Richard Hambleton created a public art series between 1976 to 1978 in major cities across America and Canada that were inspired by real life crime scenes. These homicide victim street portraits actually prefigured the spray paint artists movement in New York City and Shadowman (2017), a documentary by Oren Jacoby, delves into the elusive figure of Hambleton, who was famous before contemporaries Basquiat and Harring, but is the least known of the three today.

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Violenza al Sole aka Blow Hot, Blow Cold

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An Italian film poster for the 1969 film BLOW HOT, BLOW COLD.

During the peak years of the Italian film industry in the 1960s and 70s, there were numerous films released which never received a theatrical release in the U.S. and are completely unknown to American audiences. Of course, some of these are forgettable but there are several that deserve a second chance at being re-discovered and Violenza al Sole (English title: Violence in the Sun aka Blow Hot, Blow Cold aka Hot Blood in the Veins, 1969), directed by Florestano Vancini, is a prime example. It is also a fascinating anomaly in the careers of the four main actors, Giuliano Gemma, Rosemary Dexter, and two stars who are most often associated with director Ingmar Bergman, Bibi Andersson and Gunnar Bjornstrand.

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