newcritics

Over at my place we’ve had several lively discussions of the Production Code Administration, so the Siren was eager to read Hollywood’s Censor, Thomas Doherty’s biography of PCA honcho Joseph I. Breen. Doherty is a good writer and the book is intelligent and amusing. He obviously developed a real affection for his subject, and if […]

He isn’t often mentioned in the same breath with great male heartthrobs such as Gary Cooper or his contemporaries Marlon Brando and Gregory Peck, but Charlton Heston was one of the most breathtakingly handsome men in the annals of American cinema. To get his first major role in a big-budget movie, all he had to […]

Can it be that after 30 years of having one book following a few paces behind any discussion of Joan Crawford, it is finally time for a revival?
A real revival, as an actress and screen presence, and not as some embalmed artifact of camp?
Could be, could be. Witness this new boxed set, with some movies […]

Pauline Kael once broke up with a man because he loved West Side Story and she hated it. Twitted about this on a talk show years later, she said unapologetically, “well, taste IS the great divider.” Most of us aren’t quite that drastic, but it’s distressing to have someone hold in high regard what you […]

Rehearsals of Marathon Man in New York. Dustin Hoffman and Roy Scheider are about to rehearse their first scene together. Hoffman has the vehicle role and is the more important of the two, but Scheider, coming off the lead in Jaws, is not chopped liver.
In the story, they play brothers. Hoffman is a graduate student. […]

(Brief excerpt from the story by Victor Schertzinger and screenplay by Austin Parker)
Terry Rooney (James Cagney), a bandleader, has gone to Hollywood to take up a contract and make a picture. The crooked studio people are conspiring to make him think he’s lousy, when in fact Rooney is dynamite and a surefire hit. (Small wonder […]

One of the reasons that the movies of today aren’t as much fun as those made in the first two decades of Talkies is because they jettisoned their great army of supporting players. At one time when people reminisced about movies, they were more likely to be talking about Eve Arden than Doris Day or […]

The Siren has seen only a handful of movies recently and two, by pure coincidence, were connected to Vichy France. One was Le Corbeau, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film about the effect of a poison-pen writer. Made during the occupation for the German-controlled Continental Films, it pinpoints mob psychology and collaboration so effectively that it managed to […]

The Siren hasn’t seen Brian De Palma’s Redacted yet. Have you? No? Well, don’t feel bad. Neither have Debbie Schlussel, Roger Simon, Confederate Yankee, Victor Davis Hanson, Michelle Malkin or the guys at Libertas. But they want you to know it’s wicked, evil, designed to make our boys look bad and the Iraqis look like […]

Today, July 16, marks the 100th anniversary of Barbara Stanwyck’s birth. There was a time when the former Ruby Stevens of Brooklyn was familiar mostly as a white-haired matriarch on television series like The Big Valley, The Colbys or The Thorn Birds. Thank god those days seem to be fading, and now Stanwyck’s movie career […]

My father was a constant reader, a wicked prankster and something of a film buff. His film tastes were pretty eclectic–we went together to see The Pope of Greenwich Village, for example–but his real reverence was for the classics. I remember his description of a scene in The Gold Rush, to give his daughter a […]

Many critics have a terror of going down in history like Bosley Crowther, as the relic who looked at a seminal moment in movie history (in Crowther’s case, Bonnie and Clyde) and reached for the smelling salts. The Siren has no such anxiety. She wears her fuddy-duddiness with pride. Describe her taste as 1950s and […]

Not content with his career as a political prognosticator and analyst, Mark Steyn makes occasional forays into film criticism. The death of Bernard Gordon, a blacklisted screenwriter of the 1950s, reminded Steyn of an old grievance, and led to his reprinting a 2003 Atlantic Monthly defense of Elia Kazan. “The arts have little time for […]

Conventional wisdom about John Ford’s The Informer goes something like this: The Informer is released, wildly overpraised, wins Oscars for Ford and star Victor McLaglen. It spends a couple of decades on everybody’s All-Time Ten Best List. Post-war, however, people look again, find it creaky, overwrought, and stickily sentimental about the ruthless IRA. Its reputation […]

“I lost to a fucking actor. And then I lost to another fucking actor.”
Thus, according to the Siren’s source, did Martin Scorsese sum up his decade-bracketing Oscar nominations for Raging Bull and Goodfellas. When he lost the 2004 Oscar, the Siren could only think, oh no, a third actor–although watching Clint Eastwood climb to […]

Arrowsmith (1931) is a fine example of the fact that, auteurism notwithstanding, you can’t judge a film by its pedigree. This one, based on Sinclair Lewis’s Pulitzer-winning book, had John Ford directing, Sidney Howard writing the screenplay, Samuel Goldwyn producing and a cast that included Ronald Colman, Helen Hayes, Richard Bennett and Myrna Loy. And […]

When you see Ace in the Hole (and the Siren does hope that is “when”), you will immediately understand why, upon its first release, the movie stiffed colder than Harry Cohn’s heart. Austrian-born Billy Wilder always claimed affection for his adopted country, but you would never know it from this very great movie and its […]