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The curious thing about the 1933 pre-code psychedelic musical extravaganza 42nd Street largely remembered for its dazzling choreography and staging by Busby Berkeley featuring stunning ensemble song and dance numbers is that it helped save not only the studio producing it from bankruptcy but the musical subgenre itself from vanishing into oblivion. 

One of three major films for Warner Brothers that year, all Vitaphone varieties featuring vaudeville performers through the 1920s with spectacular sensory escapism which begin grounded in real world woes before ascending to a kind of heightened reality that can only ever exist in the movies, the musical film was on thin ice with audiences at the time thanks to poorly staged productions with limited camera movement.  However with the emergence of Busby Berkeley who would block all of the still astonishing musical numbers in everything from Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade, Dames and The Gang’s All Here, the musical survived if not flourished into all kinds of fantastical audiovisual imaginings while also cementing the show-within-a-show format so many behind-the-scenes musical showbiz tales would follow.

Based on Bradford Ropes’ 1932 novel of the same name with script revisions by Rian James and James Seymour, the film concerns a cast and crew of a Broadway show intensely rehearsing for a forthcoming program to be staged amid the Great Depression.  Following two Broadway producers seeking to stage a production of Pretty Lady, stage director Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) down on his luck following the 1929 Stock Market Crash is tasked with overseeing the show against doctor’s orders avoiding a high stress work environment.

With five weeks to choreograph and rehearse amid personal tensions flaring between the show’s star Dorothy Brock (Bebe Daniels) and the show’s financial backer Abner Dillon (Guy Kibbee) over romantic relations with her old vaudeville costar Pat Denning (George Brent), the stage is set for inexperienced but talented newcomer Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler) to try her hand at not only landing a role in the show but also the lead itself.  As the clock is ticking towards impending showtime, told between kaleidoscopic montages of whirling superimpositions and rotating camera effects and closeups of legs fiercely tapdancing their feet off, it eventually blossoms into an overwhelming explosion of sensory excess featuring a wide variety of stunningly staged numbers...

View Full Review by Andrew Kotwicki at https://www.spoilerfreemoviesleuth.com/2025/08/ClassicCinema42ndStreet1933Reviewed.html

"Danish maestro Carl Theodor Dreyer, considered among the greatest filmmakers in cinema history, had just come off of his 1928 silent historical drama The Passion of Joan of Arc which is still widely regarded as the director’s finest hour as a purely visual storyteller.  A major critical success despite scissoring by censors, it is perhaps best remembered for Renée Jeanne Falconetti's all-time acting as the titular Joan of Arc who was not a trained professional actress yet nevertheless Dreyer elicited a terrific performance out of her.  Despite positive press, Dreyer nevertheless experienced difficulty in trying to mount production on his next intended project titled Vampyr, a loose adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 collection of short horror stories In a Glass Darkly.

Co-authored by Dreyer and Christen Jul, Dreyer’s gothic horror vision sought financing outside of the studio system, landing on French magazine editor Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg to both finance and star in the central leading role of the film.  Telling the story of a French student of the occult named Allay Gray (Gunzburg) who stumbles upon the French village of Courtempierre which is under the influence of vampirism, it was the director’s first sound feature (reportedly recorded in three different languages) and much like The Passion of Joan of Arc Dreyer resorted to ‘street casting’ of non-professional actors for a kind of proto-neorealist effect.  While hastily working within the sound era including foley effects, occasional dialogue and an original score by Wolfgang Zeller, Vampyr is still very much operating in the vein of the silent era as an expressionist, increasingly surrealist exercise in atmospherics over plot devices. 

The first thing one notices entering Dreyer’s netherworld of Vampyr in addition to the period production design is Polish-Hungarian cinematographer Rudolph Maté’s luminous and fluid camerawork shot in the rare ratio of 1.19:1.  For a time when dolly-tracking or panning or lifting the camera from one angle up to the next was limited, Maté’s camera is alive and occasionally hyperactive when it isn’t mannered and slowly methodically traversing about the room.  There’s a wealth of wild superimpositions and hyperkinetic editing techniques employed both by Dreyer and his co-editor Tonka Taldy creating effects where a vampire is staked through the heart and mid-shot their body fades and dissolves into a skeleton.  The set design and decoration leaves viewers unsure of what plane of reality they’re in as the protagonist enters creepy rooms filled with infant baby skeletons.  A recurring image of a man donning a scythe seems to forecast a doom that’s almost medieval.  And as with The Passion of Joan of Arc, there’s much emphasis on the thousand-yard gaze of the protagonist and some of the side characters including a truly creepy moment where a possessed woman grins evilly bug-eyed at the camera..."

View Full Review by Andrew Kotwicki at 

https://www.spoilerfreemoviesleuth.com/2025/07/EurekaEntertainmentVampyr1932Reviewed.html

Patty Dean’s 1986 period coming-of-age novel Mermaids about a neurotic fourteen-year-old teenage girl struggling to coexist with their wayward mother in 1960s New England saw something of a shaky journey from text to silver screen.  Originally envisioned as the English language debut of Swedish director Lasse Hallström before going to work instead on Once Around, Frank Oz was hired as a replacement before he too would leave the project over creative differences with Cher and Winona Ryder.  In their hands, the film would’ve been closer to the source including a bleaker coda.  But in hiring actor-turned-director Richard Benjamin of My Stepmother is an Alien and All the Queen’s Men screenwriter June Roberts adjusting the script to tailor the screen personas of Cher and Winona Ryder, the film ends up being not quite what its producers initially intended yet is nevertheless an entertaining romp somewhere between the timeless quirk of Edward Scissorhands and the small town American sixties landscape of Matinee.

Opening in 1963 Oklahoma, our story narrated by teenager Charlotte Flax (Winona Ryder) living with her nine-year-old swimming class sister Kate (Christina Ricci) consists of constantly being uprooted and relocated by their carefree quirky thirty-one-year-old single mother Rachel (Cher) whenever a romantic relationship sours.  Between serving meals consisting of junk food and getting into affairs with her employers, her inability to properly parent either child results in unchecked growing anxieties within Charlotte who is at once obsessed with Catholicism but also yearns to be romantically spirited away by a knight in shining armor who appears before her in the form of twenty-six year old convent caretaker Joe Peretti (Michael Schoeffling).  

All the while, Rachel meets a shoe store owner named Lou Landsky (Bob Hoskins) and quickly forges romantic relations with him.  As he warms up to her family, the assassination of John F. Kennedy takes place, propelling the weepy Charlotte and Joe into a kiss that all but stirs within her sinful thoughts of love as she begins acting out in neurotic ways like convincing herself she’s pregnant and stealing her mom’s car.  As her anxieties threaten to spiral out of control, there invariably comes a point in which this troubled mother-daughter dynamic will come to a head, perhaps even with tragic consequences...

View Full Review by Andrew Kotwicki at https://www.spoilerfreemoviesleuth.com/2025/08/ClassicCinema42ndStreet1933Reviewed.html

"L. Frank Baum’s The Oz Books series consisting of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz and many others, were the genesis behind what became an extensive overarching multimedia experience starting with a 1902 Broadway stage production as well as a beloved 1939 MGM black-and-white/color phantasmagoria The Wizard of Oz.  Centered around a Kansas farm girl named Dorothy (played by Judy Garland in the film), she finds herself waking up in the mythic Land of Oz after a tornado has swept her and her little dog Toto away from home.  Forming a group of fantastical friends including a Scarecrow, a Tin Man and a cowardly Lion, she sets out to defeat the nefarious Wicked Witch of the West in exchange for her safe return back home to Kansas.  Both the books and the film were blockbuster trendsetting successes which paved the way for numerous iterations either loosely or directly based on the texts such as The Wiz,Zardoz, Wild at Heart and more recently Oz the Great and Powerful and Wicked.

One which doesn’t get brought up often in the conversation regarding Oz lore is Academy Award winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch’s 1985 dark fantasy sequel hybrid Return to Oz, a plainly terrifying horror film made for kids whose theatrical release poster of Dorothy flying happily with her old and new friends in a half-couch, half-deer head creature sneakily hides the bleak horrors contained therein.  Originally beginning with Walt Disney’s purchase of the rights to the subsequent L. Frank Baum books in 1954 before the proposed The Rainbow Road to Oz never came to fruition, the film came up again in 1980 when Walter Murch who just won the Best Sound Academy Award for Apocalypse Now suggested to Disney they try again.  With the rights to Baum’s books set to lapse, the project was greenlit at a budget of $28 million with screenwriters’ Murch and Gill Dennis forming an amalgamation of Baum’s sequel books The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz into one cohesive film now entitled Return to Oz.  A chunk of the budget going to pay off MGM for rights to use the 1939 ruby slippers and subsequent managerial changes within the Disney company compounded with falling behind on schedule briefly terminated Murch from production.

Debatably the poster child of the Walt Disney Company’s short-lived Dark Era which saw The Black Cauldron earn the first PG rating for a Disney animated feature as well as The Black Hole which predated the horrors of Event Horizon by decades, Return to Oz follows Dorothy Gale (Fairuza Balk from The Worst Witch and The Craft in her screen debut) suffering from insomnia constantly talking about the fabled Emerald City.  Thinking she might be crazy, Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) hastily decide to take her to see Dr. Worley (Nicol Williamson) and his assistant Nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh) to administer electroshock therapy to the little girl.  On a dark and stormy night however, lightning knocks the power out and another mysterious little girl sets Dorothy free where she floats away on a chicken coop..."

View Full Review by Andrew Kotwicki at 

https://www.spoilerfreemoviesleuth.com/2025/07/SecondSightReturntoOz1985Reviewed.html

"Renowned science-fiction novelist H.G. Wells of The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The Time Machine is widely regarded as among the greatest authors in the history of the literary subgenre.  Often functioning as futurist sociopolitical allegory while introducing a number of fantastical concepts rarely used in fiction up to that point, his stories have been adapted into radio plays, stage theater and even the musical rock opera.  The film adaptations of his work including Things to Come which Wells himself rewrote for the screen across the board have included some of the most visionary and timeless science-fiction vistas in cinema history including several screen versions of The War of the Worlds and The Island of Dr. Moreau.  But for every good effects-heavy imaginary wonderment Wells’ fiction dreamt up for the silver screen, falling in between the cracks are delightful (depending on your tastes) examples of his work reimagined as silly if not preposterous high-camp.

Which brings us to schlock B-movie sci-fi effects purveyor Bert I. Gordon of Tormented and Earth vs. the Spider who went on to make not one but two adaptations of H.G. Wells’ 1904 novel The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth.  A fast-working director who often cranked out as many as two to three films per year who also served as producer, screenwriter and visual effects supervisor, Bert I. Gordon i.e. BIG was a filmmaker who often played around with oversized monsters such as The Amazing Colossal Man and War of the Colossal Beast, making him an easy fit for a B-movie spin on Wells’ giants tale.  In the text, it told the story of a team of scientists who develop an artificial food which enlarges the creature ingesting it.  Initially tested on plants, insects and animals, eventually children get their hands on it and become giants threatening to overthrow contemporary adult society by force, sparking a counter-attack by the ordinary sized human populace and to destroy the so-called Food of the Gods.

Reimagining the story in 1965 as an effects-heavy beach-party dancing teensploitation camp comedy entitled Village of the Giants, Bert I. Gordon’s film with an opening credits montage of scantily clad women dancing in slow motion to Jack Nitzsche’s funky opening cue (later sampled in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof) announces itself as maybe the most thoroughly tongue-in-cheek beginning to a monster movie since Irvin Yeaworth’s The Blob.  Set in the fictional California town of Hainesville, the film zeroes in on a group of teenage party animals whose car crashed into a roadblock doesn’t stop them from getting out and dancing in the rain.  Comprised of four couples, following a mud wrestling fight they venture into the small town where a young lad nicknamed ‘Genius’ (a preteen Ron Howard) is playing with his chemistry set when he inadvertently creates a substance he calls “Goo”.  When the family cat eats some of it, the animal enlarges to giant size, prompting them to enlarge ducks and even the family dog..."

View Full Review by Andrew Kotwicki at 

https://www.spoilerfreemoviesleuth.com/2025/07/KinoLorberVillageoftheGiants1965Reviewed.html

"Monty Python member and chief animator Terry Gilliam is synonymous with fantasy adventure fiction typically involving dreamers like himself brimming with boundless wild imagination and an impish almost childlike playful impish desire.  Influenced by everyone from Federico Fellini to Ken Russell and particularly the Polish animation of Walerian Borowczyk, Gilliam is something of a dystopian science-fiction provocateur whose films are often Orwellian with a dash of Ray Harryhausen childish wonderment.  Satirical, sardonic and sensorily excessive in terms of opulent set pieces and outlandish costumed characters, Gilliam is in a class all by himself.  Starting out in 1975 having co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Terry Jones before mounting his first standalone feature with 1977’s fantasy comedy Jabberwocky, Gilliam’s unique aesthete hadn’t really struck a chord with mainstream audiences yet until his third feature in 1981 with Time Bandits which all but catapulted him to the forefront of the US and Canadian box office and cemented his reputation as an idiosyncratic fantasy-fiction game changer that didn’t play by the studio standard rules and expectations.

Time Bandits begins with a young English lad named Kevin (Craig Warnock) enmeshed in historical studies of Ancient Greece, largely ignored by his parents addicted to buying household appliances.  One night as the boy is sleeping, a knight in shining armor on horseback crashes through his wardrobe before disappearing into his bedroom wall.  Shortly thereafter a group of six dwarves come out of the wardrobe commandeered by Randall (David Rappaport) who reveal they’ve stolen some kind of map with the ability to travel through the spacetime continuum in order to steal treasure from different points of history.  All throughout the film, landing in spots like Italy during Napoleon’s (Ian Holm) reign or Robin Hood’s (John Cleese) thieving and particularly Agamemnon’s (Sean Connery) Minotaur grappling, they’re being pursued by a giant floating head only known as the Supreme Being which demands a safe return of the map.  Unbeknownst to the titular Time Bandits, they’re being watched by a malevolent force only known as Evil (David Warner) who seeks the map for his own nefarious purposes.

When Terry Gilliam wasn’t able to mount production on his cherished dystopian dream project Brazil(later made in 1985), he proposed a more broadly appealing family fantasy adventure epic that still managed to inject many of his bureaucratic utopian satirical comic elements that characterized many of his subsequent works.  What would become the fourth feature produced by HandMade Films, a production company initiated by Monty Python manager Denis O’Brien and ex-BeatleGeorge Harrison prominently featuring members of the comedy group, Time Bandits became Gilliam’s most expensive project up to that time.  Budgeted at around $5 million, the film was shot partially in Morocco, Wales and Greece with some sequences shot at the standing Raglan Castle and often shot from a low-angled point-of-view perspective lensed by Pink Floyd The Wall cinematographer Peter Biziou and a suitably rousing adventure score by Michael Moran with song contributions from George Harrison, it unfolds onscreen as a shape-shifting Chinese box of fantasy wonderment mixed with real bullet points in historical time..."

View Full Review by Andrew Kotwicki at 

https://www.spoilerfreemoviesleuth.com/2025/07/CriterionCornerTimeBandits1981Reviewed.html

"Following the 1964 critically acclaimed commercial hit The Beatles rock film A Hard Day’s Night by American comedy director Richard Lester which coincided with the band’s album of the same name, the Fab Four consisting of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were forever synonymous with cinema.  Considered to be one of the greatest rock comedies in film history playing off of a day in the life of the personalities of The Beatles, it was only natural a year later they’d reunite with director Lester again for the more patently absurdist and satirical spy musical comedy Help! also connected to the album of the same name.  Moving from black-and-white to color over the course of the two Beatles-Lester screen collaborations and on the heels of their 1967 psychedelic album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Paul McCartney envisioned an experimental film involving unscripted local (and widely popular) coach bus tours called Magical Mystery Tour.

Intended to paint a portrait of Liverpool with hallucinatory leanings, the film was put on hold while they worked on recording songs for the upcoming animated The Beatles film Yellow Submarine.  But when their longtime manager Brian Epstein died of a prescription drug overdose, in the process of grieving the band went ahead with recording the music for what ultimately became their next double-EP (released as LP in the US) with Magical Mystery Tour.  Following this, the band proceeded with what became the Fab Four’s first set of directorial credits with the 1967 short television film of the same name.  Inspired by Ken Kesey’s 1964 American bus tour Furthur with the Merry Pranksters and by the impetus to replace stage shows with television broadcasts, the largely improvised BBC TV film made up by the bandmates, few cast and crew members on board went into production. 

Co-written by their road manager Mal Evans who plays himself in the film alongside the bandmates and featuring uncredited direction by Norman Conquest filmmaker Bernard Knowles, Magical Mystery Tour more or less follows Richard B. Starkey (Ringo Starr) and his widowed Auntie Jessie (Jessie Robins) on their sojourn through England on a surreal and unpredictable bus tour.  Among the members on the bus include the tour director Jolly Jimmy Johnson (Derek Royle), hostess Miss Wendy Winters (Miranda Forbes), conductor Buster Bloodvessel (Ivor Cutler) and the other bandmates.  Over the course of the thinly veiled quasi-surrealist “documentary” film, peculiar things begin to happen as five magicians played by The Beatles and manager Mal Evans start pulling pranks on the unsuspecting tourists.  Making pit stops along the way, the tour includes everything from makeshift drag racing, a drill sergeant instructing in the ways of attacking a stuffed cow and a waiter played by John Lennon shoveling endless piles of spaghetti onto a plate..."

View Full Review by Andrew Kotwicki at https://www.spoilerfreemoviesleuth.com/2025/05/CultCinemaMagicalMysteryTour1967Reviewed.html

"Emmy-award winning television director Ralph Nelson best known at the time for directing both the 1956 Playhouse 90 teleplay and the 1962 feature film version of Rod Serling’s boxing drama Requiem for a Heavyweight maintained steady work in television until 1963 when he began more extensive feature film directing.  Drawing from his economic television experience and working in as many as two pictures per year between 1963 and 1970, the prolific microbudget filmmaker not needing heavy means to make a picture worked quickly yet effectively as he swept numerous film festival awards circuits with his extensive yet quickly rendered oeuvre.  Ultimately Nelson who also served as a part-time character actor would generate two films in 1963: the Jackie Gleason/Steve McQueen buddy comedy Soldier in the Rain and the Oscar winning Sidney Poitier starring dramedy Lilies of the Field.

Based on William Edmund Barrett’s 1962 of the same name which was partially based on the author’s own experiences with the Benedictine nuns of the Abbey of St. Walburga in Colorado, it tells the story of black handyman Homer Smith (Sidney Poitier) who is drifting through an Arizona desert when he makes a pit stop at an isolated farm looking for water for his car.  There he meets a group of nuns who have emigrated from former East Germany, spearheaded by the headstrong Mother Maria Marthe (Austrian architect Lilia Skala in a semi-autobiographical role) who are wanting to build a chapel for the Mexican American population nearby.  Initially reticent to commit to the task as Mother Maria refuses payment after quoting the Bible’s Sermon on the Mount, Smith eventually meets with a local café manager named Juan (Stanley Adams) and agrees to construct the chapel after learning of Mother Maria and the sisters’ escape from the Nazis.  As he offers free English lessons at the dinner table and tries to form camaraderie with the Mexican populace, Smith finds himself clashing with Mother Maria’s stern worker-bee outlook on life, threatening to jeopardize completion of the chapel.

Heartwarming, charming and straightforward, Lilies of the Field is very much an actor’s film largely resting on the shoulders of Sidney Poitier who imbues the character of Homer Smith with a larger-than-life presence.  Almost leaping off of the screen spectacularly with energized and wholly confident delivery, it came well into the actor’s filmography following Blackboard Jungle and The Defiant Ones.  While the dramatic conflict of the story itself is somewhat lighthearted if not playfully whimsical, what is hinted at regarding the German nuns’ wartime experiences lands heavily.  Almost equaling Poitier’s prowess is Lilia Skala as the determined and stern Mother Maria who shows no fear of backing down from Poitier as he tries to lay down the law of how he should be compensated for his time.  Stanley Adams as the Mexican bartender, having started out playing that role in Death of a Salesman before moving onto Ralph Nelson’s adaptations of Requiem for a Heavyweight, is a comforting presence and serves up comic relief opposite Poitier when they start dueling over whether or not he’ll accept outside help building the chapel..."

View Full Review by Andrew Kotwicki at https://www.spoilerfreemoviesleuth.com/2025/06/KinoLorberLiliesoftheField1963Reviewed.html

"Belgian film writer-director and teacher Patrice Toye isn’t well known in the global film community but has nevertheless maintained a steady output of stirring dramas usually about disaffected or delinquent youths since the early 1990s.  Still working today including on an upcoming project still trained on the morally nebulous arena of adolescence, Toye’s filmography is posited somewhere between the youth experience of François Truffaut and the contemporary Eastern European alienation of Lukas Moodysson.  Her first real screen breakthrough arrived in 1998 with her disturbing adolescent character study Rosie, a film originally picked up for New Yorker Films for US theatrical distribution and videotape release that has long since been lost to time.  Without a DVD or digital release to speak of save for some VHS cassettes still kicking around, what exactly is this scrappy gritty Flemish language female driven coming-of-age drama?  A difficult, intentionally troubling character study whose closest antecedent is undeniably Peter Jackson’s still searing Heavenly Creatures.

Thirteen-year-old Rosie (Aranka Coppens) has just been placed in a reform school for young girls. What actions could’ve landed her here?  Through a series of flashbacks both real and largely imaginary, we join with Rosie on her self-reflexive journey inward trying to make sense of her situation.  Zeroing in on her dysfunctional, impoverished and broken home life, we find Rosie living with her twenty-seven-year-old “sister” Irene (Sara de Roo) who is in fact her biological mother but that’s their little secret.  Hovering over them is Irene’s deadbeat gambling addict brother Michel (Frank Vercruyssen) who himself has a dubious history with them.  However when Irene meets and takes a liking to well-to-do Bernard (Dirk Roofthooft), it leaves Rosie feeling lonely and jealous.  On a chance bus meeting with a young punk teen named Jimi (Joose Wynant), Rosie starts acting out and getting into trouble leading towards her current stint in juvie hall.  Cross-cutting back and forth between her present situation and the actions that led her there, it becomes an increasingly disturbing portrait of the impact a dysfunctional situation can have on a minor and how people can mix fantasy and reality together to cope.

Heartbreaking, occasionally harrowing and often hard to look at, Patrice Toye’s Rosie is something of an elliptical, Malick-y tapestry of gloomy impoverished youth growing up too fast in a broken home and the degrees with which children will do anything to get the attention of others.  When the titular Rosie is largely ignored by Irene who prefers they maintain that they’re sisters, she pours all her energies into trying to form some kind of connection with Jimi including dolling herself up with makeup like an underage prostitute.  It could well have ballooned into exploitative fare but Patrice Toye keeps the situation innocent and from the misaligned perspective of Rosie who is caught in a difficult transitional period between childhood and young adulthood.  Much of the film’s gloomy power arises from Love & Friendship cinematographer Richard Van Oosterhout’s ornate camerawork of squalid industrial environments such as her apartment building and the barren landscapes and train tracks of Belgium.  Then there’s Past Imperfect composer and The Sum of All Fears songwriter John Parish’s moody soundtrack which underscores the film’s somber environment...

View Full Review by Andrew Kotwicki at https://www.spoilerfreemoviesleuth.com/2025/06/NewYorkerFilmsRosie1998Reviewed.html

"The story of gunslinging Texas American outlaws Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut “Champion” Barrow began in the 1930s amid the Great Depression.  With their crimes amassing everything from burglary to kidnappings, bank robberies and even murders of civilians and/or police officers on their trail, they captured the imagination of American press readership at the height of the ‘public enemy’ era involving a list of criminals wanted by the FBI.  Among them were John Dillinger, George ‘Baby Face’ Nelson, Bonne and Clyde, ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd, ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly and Alvin Karpis.  With the notion of the ‘notorious fugitive gangster’ coined by the FBI and used throughout the 1930s by J. Edgar Hoover, the crime sprees committed by America’s #1 public enemies no doubt inspired a whole wave of crime cinema throughout the 1940s and 1950s including but not limited to Gun Crazy and The Honeymoon Killers.

Between those movies began the emergence of what would later called the New Hollywood movement and among their first successes came in the form of The Miracle Worker director Arthur Penn’s biographical crime saga Bonnie and Clyde.  A biographical period piece chronicling the meeting and exploits of Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway), the true crime epic was one of the first to kick the countercultural door wide open for openly blasting away at numerous screen taboos including but not limited to sex and graphic violence.  Unleashed on unsuspecting moviegoers right before Sam Peckinpah’s carnage infested The Wild Bunch sprayed crimson across the screen, the film had a shaky start to the screen with mixed critical reception before word of mouth turned it into a major success in 1967.  Garnering ten Academy Award nominations including two wins for Best Supporting Actress Estelle Parsons and Best Cinematography Burnett Guffey, it eventually moved into the ranks of the Library of Congress as well as coming in at number 27 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest American Films of All Time.

Though featuring composite characters like C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard, a mashup of W.D. Jones and Henry Methvin from the Barrow gang) and some embellishments of the events for dramatic effect, Bonnie and Clyde starts off small with the two Texan based future criminals chance meeting at a restaurant as a half-bored waitress Bonnie decides to shack up with Clyde for their eventual crime spree.  Meeting up with C.W. Moss, his older brother Buck (Gene Hackman) and his wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons) who harbors deep seated contempt for the Barrow gang, the group sets out on a cross-country crime spree that catches up with them in Missouri when they attempt a bank heist and getaway from the ongoing pursuits of Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (Denver Pyle).  From here, it becomes something of a crime road movie following the pit stops the Barrow gang makes trying to evade capture and fend off unexpected police ambushes.  Oh and there’s an aside featuring a then-unknown Gene Wilder as a kidnapping victim...."

View Full Review by Andrew Kotwicki at https://www.spoilerfreemoviesleuth.com/2025/05/ClassicCinemaBonnieandClyde1967Reviewed.html

Peter Bogdanovich's masterpiece of small town Americana circa 1951 is the perfect conclusion to our fall season. At once a film of its time, released as it was in 1971, but also a timeless reflection of not just a long gone Hollywood, but of what has been lost by the 'wal-martification' of small town America itself. Created with a cast of actors who were relatively unknown, but with many who would rise to greatness, the films evocative shadow, both literally and figuratively, was cast by western legend Ben Johnson. Having worked for directors John Ford, Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, to name just a few, Johnson had to be cajoled into taking the part of Sam the lion by Bogdanovich, feeling the language and subject matter was at times obscene and 'there are too many lines.' Once he took the role, making it his own within the first minute on screen, Johnson was able reflect the honor, the gravitas and the sorrow of a man whose life was well lived. As Bogdanovich promised in the last of his three separate pitches to Johnson to take the role, Johnson did indeed win an Oscar for his performance.

Worth Reading:

Reprint of Rolling Stone article by Grover Lewis.  The Stacks:  How Peter Bogdanovich Shot "The Last Picture Show"

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls:  How the Sex-Drugs-And-Rock N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.  Peter Biskind.

Worth a Listen:

"You Much Remember This-Polly Platt Series" Podcast by Karina Longworth

"The Plot Thickens-Peter Bogdanovich Series" Podcast by Josh Mankiewicz 

Neorealism is Just the Beginning

Italian film has historically moved through cycles, swayed by popular attendance, international acceptance or political scrutiny, each contributing to international cinema in a meaningful way. The spaghetti westerns that began in the mid-sixties, bursting on the international scene, followed the more insular sword and sandals epics that drew filmmakers from Hollywood to catch the wave of popularity. Similarly, the giallo horror films that influenced a generation of filmmakers the world over, overlapped with the spaghetti westerns, but were a wholly different generation of Italian filmmakers. Even while auteurs like Fellini, Rossellini, Monicelli, and Visconti were imprinting their unique visions outside of or adjacent to these movements, Italian film evolved on the world stage. It is even more impressive, then, that one movement shines brightest amongst them all and that is Italian Neo-Realism, which still impacts world film some 75 years after its beginnings.Created through a desire to depict life as it happened, where it happened, and reflecting the poor and working class in Italy after World War II, Neo-realism was unique in its beginnings and its practice. Using location shooting with mostly non-professional actors, Neo-Realism changed the way filmmakers looked at their art. Not only could film depict a non-glamourous environment, based in pure reality, but the people and the stories were personal, yet universal at the same time. Beginning as the French New Wave would a generation later, Neo-realism began within the pages of a magazine Cinema, among critics, in the immediate aftermath of WWII, even though the first neo-realist film is largely credited to Luchino Visconti's groundbreaking interpretation of James M. Cain's noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice, called Ossessione, from 1943. Rossellini's Rome, Open City, released in 1945, really began the cycle in earnest, however, even garnering an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay.It was Vittorio De Seka's, Bicycle Thieves, released in 1948, however, that quickly became viewed as not only the best of the cycle, but as the best film of all time. Just 4 years after its release the British Magazine named it the top film in its inaugural poll of international film critics.

William Hurt and Kathleen Turner, in her feature film debut, heat up the screen in writer/director Lawrence Kasdan's steamy Neo-Noir, Body Heat! In a film that has been credited with reigniting the Neo-Noir movement in the 1980's, Body Heat is a loose reimagining of Double Indemnity, this time without the weight of the puritanical Production Code. While Kasdan shot more sex scenes than made the final theatrical cut, don't think he took short cuts in crafting a twisty plot, with fully drawn out supporting characters, wonderful imagery and whip smart dialogue. Richard Corliss wrote in his initial review that "Body Heat has more narrative drive, character congestion, and sense of place than any original screenplay since Chinatown." While Kasdan may have borrowed, or at the very least paid homage to Wilder's classic, his film all but eliminates empathy for the femme fatale, as she not just ensnares the unsuspecting attorney into her sexual trap, but preys on his professional laziness and ego to seal his fate. Her telling line from an early meeting, "You aren't too smart, are you? I like that in a man," says all we need to know about him and her knowledge of him.

Body Heat helped begin the 1980's Neo Noir cycle that included films like Body Double, Angel Heart, To Live & Die in LA, Blood Simple, Blade Runner and Blue Velvet, among many others. It also foreshadowed a broader cycle of 1980's films with more explicit sexual content, in some cases for better in others for the worse. Perhaps when it was released, just 7 months into the Regan administration's first term and the beginning of a decade filled with political pressure on culture and sexuality, places the film as both a harbinger and a sign post for what would come in an assuredly reactionary environment in America.

The 1973 Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winning Scarecrow is an under seen and under appreciated film from 1973 starring Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. Directed by Jerry Schatzberg, Scarecrow is the story Max and Lion, two drifters, one an ex-con and the other a former sailor, as they travel across the US towards Pittsburgh to open a car wash. A film once compared to Of Mice and Men and Midnight Cowboy, in both story and tone, Scarecrow becomes a heartbreaking tale of friendship and tragedy, as it careens through Denver and Detroit on its way towards a melancholy, yet redemptive conclusion.

Scarecrow was born of the Hollywood studios desire to find low budget, yet marketable films, during the New Hollywood era (1967-1974), each looking to recreate the box office and profitability of Easy Rider (1969). Director Schatzberg was a former fashion photographer who had made Panic in Needle Park with Pacino in 1971. At the time of its release the film attained fully mixed reviews and bombed at the box office, but has since found a cult following and renewed regard for the performances of Pacino and Hackman.

French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema called The Night of the Hunter the 2nd greatest film of all-time in 2008, but it was a critical and audience flop when it was released in 1955. What has changed? It's simple really. The appreciation for the lyrical and expressionistic style of the film, compliments of first time director Charles Laughton (Witness for the Prosecution, Spartacus) and cinematographer Stanley Cortez (The Naked Kiss, The Magnificent Ambersons), was overlooked or viewed as out of fashion in its initial release. Robert Mitchum's iconic portrayal of misogynistic serial killer/preacher Harry Powell wasn't fully appreciated for its depiction of evil and the combination of elements of Film Noir, Southern Gothic and horror confused audiences and marketers alike. In retrospect none of this was surprising because the film has the look and feel of nothing that came before or has been released since. it is wholly unique, even as it has inspired several generations of imitators and admirers, including Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, The Coen brothers, and Robert Altman, to name a few.

While Laughton was insecure shooting his first and only film, he relied on technical experts like Cortez to execute his vision and complete shooting in a mere 36 days. Noted film critic and screenwriter James Agee (The African Queen) is credited with writing the screenplay, but in truth Laughton worked with source novelist Davis Grubb throughout filming to weave a filmable whole from the various pieces of the novel and Agee's writing. When the film flopped commercially Laughton blamed himself, sending him into a months long depression and vowing to never direct a film again.

Crafting a fairytale structure of good versus evil, children in peril, and a fairy godmother savior, The Night of the Hunter works on an incredible number of levels, not simply relying on its stunning visuals, haunting performances, and sometimes disturbing black humor, but on a human level crafted by the simple pacing and pitch black story. Mitchum's performance stands alone, but it truly is the detail of everything else that makes this film one of the greatest ever made!

In honor of Producer/Director Roger Corman's death on May 9th, Motor City Cinema Society is proud to present Dementia 13, Francis Ford Coppola's directorial debut! Coppola doubled as the film's screenwriter, riffing on a 'Psycho rip-off' producer Corman demanded. Using sets from the recently completed The Young Racers, Coppola created a gothic infused story, complete with brutal murders, a coverup and the potential for riches doled out in an old ladies will. Shot in Ireland on a budget of less than $150,000, Corman determined the film unreleasable and demanded changes be made. William Campbell (All the Pretty Maids in a Row), Patrick Magee (A Clockwork Orange) & Luana Andrews (Easy Rider, The Last Detail) star in a film that has all the touches of B-movie maven Corman, with flashes of Coppola's autuerism, splashed with blood, gore and a little sex!!

Can anyone ever guarantee that nobody will be disappointed by a movie? Of course not, but if we could tell you this might be the ONLY time to see this movie on this film stock (16MM), you'd be intrigued, right? Well, that's where we are for Monday's mystery movie!! it's not a movie with a mystery, it's a movie that once the credits role you will likely recognize right away, but we're not telling you what it is. No clues, no guesses, no nothing, until we fire up the projector!! It's going to be lots fun and Nick will, of course, have some surprises in the pre-show!! Come out and join us!!

Join us for a mind-bending journey through some of the most rare and dazzling animated wonders not seen anywhere else! Motor City Cinema directors Nick, John and Darian have curated an assortment of animated shorts ranging from early 20th century stop motion to mid-century propaganda and trippy 1970's dazzlers!! You won't be disappointed and you're sure to be pleasantly surprised ad the shear array of styles and subjects!!