Guest blogger Howard Curle follows up his previous account of William K. Everson’s class on British Cinema at New York University with an in-depth look at one of the movies Everson introduced him to: John Baxter’s Love on the Dole (1941). John Baxter & Love on the Dole (1941) By Howard Curle One of the […]
If I’m in a room talking to someone and there happens to be a bookcase nearby, or a shelf of DVDs, I become easily distracted from the conversation as I try to read titles to get some idea of the other person’s tastes and interests. A similar thing happens when I watch a movie: if […]
Rapidly developing video technologies are altering not just our expectations but also our responses to the experience of watching movies. Blu-ray, hi-def TVs, the digital technologies which are used more and more in production – all have helped to create particular standards which many viewers now apply to virtually everything they watch. A lot of […]
Sad news this weekend. The inimitable Googie Withers has died at the age of 94 after a long and varied career in film, theatre and television. Although she worked with directors like Alfred Hitchcock (a small part in The Lady Vanishes [1938]), Michael Powell (a member of the resistance in One of Our Aircraft Is […]
When my friend Howard Curle offered to write a guest post for my blog, I was happy to accept. Howard has taught film here in Winnipeg for many years, initially at the University of Manitoba and now at the University of Winnipeg, and we occasionally get together to watch and discuss movies from my collection […]
Christopher Smith is an English director whose first feature, Creep (2004), was an attempt to emulate Gary Sherman’s Raw Meat (aka Deathline, 1973) and Douglas Cheek’s C.H.U.D. (1984); it had a woman trapped overnight in the London Underground, pursued by the mutant remnants of some medical experiments in a hidden lab, but it never quite […]
British TV has always been primarily a writer’s medium; since the ’50s, the biggest stars have tended to be the writers, with writers’ names attached possessively to projects. Television production was often built around writers such as Alan Bennett, Alan Bleasdale and Dennis Potter, who was one of the biggest, with each of his new […]
Alexander Mackendrick (1912-1993), who was born in the United States but grew up in Scotland from the age of five, made only nine features between 1949 and 1969, when he took up a teaching position at the California Institute of the Arts. But within that limited output, he managed to create several masterpieces, including his […]
In my rather long film-going life, I have often been out of sync with generally held opinions. I didn’t much like the Star Wars movies when they transformed popular culture, I found myself laughing at Titanic while surrounded in a crowded theatre by sniffling people who bought into it completely … So it doesn’t surprise […]
British director Michael Reeves was only 25 when he died of a drug overdose in 1969. This fact has placed quite a burden on the work which he left behind – three low-budget features made in three years. For a long time fans in particular of his final film, Witchfinder General, lamented the loss of […]