I’m not sure how I missed the news back in December, but Gerry Anderson died on the day after Christmas. Although he eventually did several live action series and one live action theatrical feature, Anderson was inextricably associated with the string of television fantasy projects he produced using puppets and elaborate miniature effects throughout the […]
Michael Winner, who died on Monday, didn’t get a lot of respect as a filmmaker. Best known for his Death Wish movies and other violent thrillers starring Charles Bronson, he seemed like a crass commercial opportunist. The Death Wish films, particularly the first, were efficient appeals to the audience’s baser instincts, which, like Clint Eastwood’s […]
I was surprised to read over the weekend of the death of Kurt Maetzig. He was 101. Maetzig began his career in film in the ’30s with work on film technologies and animation. After the rise of the Nazis his work permit was revoked because of his mother’s Jewish heritage, and he spent the war […]
In light of what I posted here yesterday about my discovery of the films of Theo Angelopoulos, it comes as a particular shock today to hear that the great director died yesterday in a road accident while working on his latest feature. This represents the loss of a towering talent, one of that select group […]
TCM once again offers a very elegant video tribute to those movie people who died during the year — actors, writers, directors, producers. Seeing so many familiar (and a few unfamiliar) faces in this brief assembly causes a sense of shock — news of many of these deaths somehow passed me by during the year. […]
Although I no doubt had read about Ken Russell‘s film of D.H. Lawrence’s Women In Love (1969) when it was released, I didn’t see it until some years later. My first real memory of him is from late 1970 or early ’71. I was living in Newfoundland then and my mother still subscribed to a […]
Italian journalist and filmmaker Gualtiero Jacopetti died August 17, at age 91. Together with co-director Franco Prosperi, Jacopetti invented what became known as the “mondo” movie – after the title of their first collaboration, Mondo Cane (Dog’s World, 1962). The essence of the genre was shock – documentaries that displayed strange, disturbing aspects of human […]
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 […]
Peter Yates died in London on January 9, aged 81. His two best-known films were Bullitt (1968) and Breaking Away (1979), and that perhaps indicates why he was not as widely known as many of his contemporaries. He directed a wide range of movies in many different genres, and for that reason never established a […]
A friend recently sent me a link to Turner Classic Movies’ annual tribute to people from the film industry who died this past year. It’s an elegantly assembled montage (far superior to the similar annual Oscar tributes): (Unfortunately, TCM doesn’t appear to archive these videos, so the link no longer functions.) I was surprised to […]