There are not that many British films from the 1930s and 1940s about ghosts and haunted houses and the ones that do stand out are primarily comedies like The Ghost Goes West (1935), The Ghost Train (1941), Blithe Spirit (1945) and Things Happen at Night (1948). Still, there have been a few U.K. features that took a more serious approach to the genre and A Place of One’s Own (1945) is a good example, even though it is largely overlooked and forgotten today.
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BJ is not a typical private detective by anyone’s standards. He doesn’t own a car and walks or jogs everywhere. Nor does he carry a gun (although he might steal one from any thug that threatens him) or play the tough guy in the brutal manner of Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly). In fact, when he is first introduced in Yokohoma BJ Blues, directed by Eiichi Kudo, he seems like some eccentric drifter who occasionally moonlights as a singer in an after-hours club, where he works for tips. But working as a private detective is his main gig and this 1981 feature is certainly one of the most offbeat and low-key detective dramas you will probably ever see and, even for Japanese viewers, it could be an endurance test or a fascinating hybrid.
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In the Spring of 1974, French archeologist Francoise Claustre along with a young aide and a German doctor and his wife were captured by rebel forces in Chad, Africa while exploring pre-Islamic tombs. The doctor’s wife was killed during the attack but her husband was quickly released after West German officials paid his ransom. The aide later escaped but Claustre remained a hostage of the Maoist rebel leader Hissene Habre and his clan for 33 months. During that time, her husband Pierre, a French official, tried to bargain with the rebels when his government proved inept at handling the situation but he too ended up being captured and held in a different camp in Chad. Renowned photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Raymond Depardon was allowed to interview Francoise during her ordeal for his non-fiction shorts, Tchad 2: L’ultimatum (1975) and Tchad 3 (1976), which were broadcast on French TV and provoked a major public outcry over the entire situation. Finally in January 1977 Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi brokered a deal with the Chad rebels and the French couple was released and returned to Paris. Interestingly enough, Depardon would return to this subject again in 1990 with La Captive du Desert (Captive of the Desert), a fictionalized account of the Claustre affair which remains one of his few forays into feature film making.
Long before airplane disaster films such as The High and the Mighty (1954) and Airport (1970) with their lavish budgets and all-star casts became the norm, this particular genre was the province of the B-movie. One of the best examples and possibly even the prototype for all future airplane disaster flicks was the 1939 RKO production, Five Came Back. Produced on a shoestring and distributed to theatres as a standard programmer, it turned out to be a surprise hit that quickly amassed an enthusiastic word-of-mouth campaign among moviegoers.
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When Saturday Night Fever opened in theaters in the U.S. in 1977 and went on to become the third highest grossing film of the year, the disco craze was near the end of its popularity. That style of dance music that started in the early 1970s had effectively played out its popularity by 1980. There were plenty of movie musicals with disco soundtracks that followed in the wake of Saturday Night Fever like Thank God It’s Friday (1978), Roller Boogie (1979), Can’t Stop the Music (1980) and Xanadu (1980) but nothing that approached the success of John Travolta’s breakthrough role with the possible exception of the belated sequel, Staying Alive (1983), directed by Sylvester Stallone with Travolta returning as the main character, Tony Manero. Flash forward 25 years to 2008 and Tony Manero is once again a cultural touchstone from the most unlikely of places – Chile. Directed by Pablo Larrain, Tony Manero is the tale of Raul Peralta (Alfredo Castro), a 52-year-old second rate entertainer/dancer who is so obsessed with the title character of Saturday Night Fever that he builds his nightclub routine around it and dreams of winning an upcoming Tony Manero dance competition. It sounds like the premise for a goofball comedy featuring Adam Sandler, Kevin Hart, Paul Rudd or some other popular comedian but Larrain’s film, despite some moments of pitch-black comedy, is a dark and disturbing portrait of someone who is a sociopathic outsider in his own country and culture.
Continue reading*This article originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, Turner Classic Movies’s official blog in September 2007 (The blog was discontinued years ago and is no longer available available)
The show banners have come down and the patrons have scattered in all directions but many thoughts and impressions linger from this year’s festival. As always, Telluride was the first to host U.S. premieres of several films which are being showcased in the Toronto Film Festival, which began Sept. 6th and runs through September 15th. Among them were the 2007 Cannes festival favorites, Secret Sunshine (South Korea), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Romania), plus Jar City (Iceland), Persepolis (France), Juno (U.S.), Brick Lane (UK), Blind Mountain (China), The Band’s Visit (Israel), and several others.
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Science fiction and fantasy films have always been a popular staple of Russian cinema but, during the first half of the 20th century, very few of these genre films found theatrical distribution in the U.S. Among the handful that did make to American screens are Yakow Protazanov’s Aelita, the Queen of Mars (1924), Vasily Zhuravlyou’s Cosmic Journey (1936), Planeta Bur aka Planet of Storms (1962), which producer/director Roger Corman raided twice, using footage from it for Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965) and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), and Ilya Muromets (1956), an epic fairy tale adventure from director Aleksandr Ptushko that was released in an edited, English-dubbed version entitled The Sword and the Dragon. Some Russian fantasy titles later popped up on American television and second-run houses in poor quality English language dubs like Sampo aka The Day the Earth Froze (1959) but my all-time favorite from this period is Chelovek-Ambibiya (English title: Amphibian Man, 1961), co-directed by Vladimir Chebotaryov and Gennadiy Kazqanskiy.
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When it comes to equality between the sexes, do you think life has improved for women over the past 100 years? According to a June 2023 poll by CNBC, the best countries for women in terms of equality and work opportunities are (in this order) Iceland, Norway, Finland, New Zealand and Sweden. The UK is further down in the 15th position and the U.S. is surprisingly ranked at the 46th slot out of 146 countries. Of course, the places where women are treated like second class citizens or worse is no surprise. A poll on the Global Citizen website in 2021 shows the ten worst places for gender equality led by Afghanistan and followed by Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, the South Sudan and other African countries. And what about Japan? Despite its reputation as a sophisticated culture and a major world power, the country is still a patriarchal society where women continue to serve the men who hold the power. Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi has often examined and critiqued the kind of society that forces women to give up any independence and make constant sacrifices for their men which is why the director is often considered a proto-feminist in cinema circles. Yet, in Mizoguchi’s long career of almost 100 features and short films, the demeaning patriarchy of Japan has often been a running theme in his work and it created considerable controversy in his country early in his career, emerging most strongly in two of his finest movies, Naniwa Hika (English title: Osaka Elegy, 1936), which was banned by censors in 1940 for displaying “decadent tendencies,” and Gion no Shimai (English title: Sisters of the Gion, 1936), which is even angrier and more despairing than the later.
How does a filmmaker begin to craft an autobiographical film of his or her own life? Many renowned directors have tackled it but usually by using a fictionalized version of themselves under a different name though many of the incidents depicted are true. Francois Truffaut did it with The 400 Blows (1959) as did George Lucas with American Graffitti (1973) and Sam Fuller in The Big Red One (1980). Even more recently Steven Spielberg re-imagined his childhood and teenage years in The Fabelmans (2022). But no one has ever made a more personal and dreamlike meditation on their roots than what Guy Maddin accomplishes with My Winnipeg (2007), which is set in the city where the Canadian director was born and resided for much of his life. Narrated by Maddin in a voice that sounds half asleep, half awake, our somnambulistic guide creates his own mythology about himself, his family and his home town that is utterly unique. Plus, his narrator approach is totally fitting for a city that allegedly has more sleepwalkers among its residents than any other major city.
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In their increasing eagerness to capture a wider viewing audience for their annual awards ceremony, you would think the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences would create a few more categories that could generate some genuine interest with the average moviegoer. How about Best Title Credits? It’s an art form in its own right. Graphic designer Saul Bass certainly proved that years ago with his innovative opens for the films of Otto Preminger (Carmen Jones, The Man With the Golden Arm, Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse, Anatomy of a Murder, Advise and Consent, Exodus, The Cardinal and several more) and Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho). Other title designers you might recognize are Stephen Frankfurt (To Kill a Mockingbird, Rosemary’s Baby), Pablo Ferro (Dr. Strangelove, Being There) and Maurice Binder (Dr. No, Charade). Even before them, opening title credits were a key component of the film, often setting the tone and even encapsulating the movie’s theme or storyline into a compact visual nugget.
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Cinema Sojourns 