Tag Archives: Leonard Maltin

Leprechauns, Pookas and Banshees

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When you think of the many accomplishments of animation pioneer and studio mogul Walt Disney, producing horror films is not one of them. At the same time, several Walt Disney films have featured horrific moments that made strong impressions and scared children such as the boys-into-donkeys transformation scene in Pinocchio (1940) or the fire-breathing dragon at the climax of Sleeping Beauty (1959). A few Disney productions even flirted with the supernatural and creepy folk tales such as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949) and Dr. Syn (1964) with its title character disguised as a demonic-looking scarecrow who haunts the marshes at night. Nothing, however, can top Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959) when it comes to merging the ordinary with the fantastic. The film plunges the viewer into a fairytale Ireland where magical and terrifying things occur and some scenes could actually give the kiddies nightmares, making this my favorite Disney live-action film.

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Edward G. Robinson is Wolf Larsen

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Edward G. Robinson on the set of THE SEA WOLF (1941), in which he plays the maniacal captain Wolf Larsen from the Jack London novel.

Among the many tales about ill-fated ocean voyages, obsessive and tyrannical sea captains are usually at the root of the trouble. Some of the more memorable ones include Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, and Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. But none of these misguided authority figures can match the sadism and brutality of Wolf Larsen, the megalomaniac captain of Jack London’s novel, The Sea Wolf, who was famously portrayed by Edward G. Robinson in a 1941 Warner Bros. production directed by Michael Curtiz.

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Memories of the 2011 TCM Classic Film Festival

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*This article originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, Turner Classic Movies’s official blog in May 2011 (The blog was discontinued years ago and is no longer available)

In the event-packed hurly burly of TCM’s second annual Film Festival in Los Angeles from April 28-May 1 of 2011, I didn’t have a chance to blog about all of the films or attending guests that I saw but here are a few that linger in the memory and deserve to be singled out –cinematographer/director Haskell Wexler, who participated in a Q&A with Leonard Maltin before a screening of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(1966), Hayley Mills, who appeared after a screening of Whistle Down the Wind (1961) with interviewer/author Cari Beauchamp, a midnight screening of The Mummy (1932) introduced by Boris Karloff fan Ron Perlman, Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928) accompanied by a live orchestra score by Vince Giordano and His Nighthawks, the MoMA restoration print showing of 1933’s Hoopla (Clara Bow’s final film) and the underrated Ernst Lubitsch Pre-Code delight Design for Living (1933).

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