Tag Archives: Burl Ives

Living Large in Texas

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Director William Wyler had spent most of his film career trying to gain creative control of his pictures but kept falling short of his goal in his dealings with Paramount and other studios. In 1956, he attempted to remedy that situation by entering into a joint venture with his good friend, Gregory Peck, to create an epic western called The Big Country (1958). In Wyler’s words, the film was “about a man’s refusal to act according to accepted standards of behavior. Customs of the Old West were sort of debunked.”

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Cinema Interruptus

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All of us have probably walked out on a movie at the theatre at some point in our lives but how often have you been forced to leave a film due to circumstances beyond your control? The few times this has happened to me are ingrained in my memory probably because it was such a rare occurrence…and because the interrupted scene and the movie itself never received the proper closure. In other words, a simple case of cinema interruptus (the Latin word for interrupted). The films in question are Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Don’t Give Up the Ship (1959) and Cat Ballou (1965).

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Down and Out in Chicago

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At the end of the 1949 Nicholas Ray film, Knock on Any Door, juvenile delinquent Nick Romano, played by John Derek, is sentenced to die in the electric chair for killing a cop, despite the attempts of his attorney, Andrew Morton (Humphrey Bogart), to save him. The story didn’t end there, however, and African-American novelist Willard Motley wrote a sequel to his original 1947 bestseller in 1958 entitled Let No Man Write My Epitaph. It was adapted to the screen under that same title in 1960 and focused more on the ghetto drug problem than urban gang violence although the latter is still an omnipresent concern.

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