Films featuring
Peter Boyle

The Shadow

In the midst of the current boom of comic book movies, it’s easy to forget that was similar, but smaller Hollywood infatuation with the genre in the wake of the Tim Burton Batman movies. Most of the them were quickly and deservedly forgotten but this take on the old radio serials probably deserves to be remembered better than it has been.

The Shadow catches Alec Baldwin at the height of the leading man phase of his career, before his personal life became a bigger story than his acting. Continue reading

Taxi Driver

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This story of a lonely man isolated from the millions of people around him could have been told in any city but Martin Scorcese’s movie could only have been made in New York City, and only in the city of the mid-seventies. Travis Bickle is as much a product of that time and place as he is a creation of screenwriter Paul Schrader’s imagination.

The New York City of Taxi Driver is definitely not today’s “Disney-fied” city. This is the pre-Giuliani Big Apple, the domain of pimps and drug dealers. Continue reading

Young Frankenstein

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Young Frankenstein remains the most consistently self-assured film of Mel Brooks‘ career. Not as audaciously funny as Blazing Saddles or The Producers, it is still a pitch-perfect send up of the Universal monster movies of the 1930s. Filmed entirely in glorious black-and-white, the cinematography sets the perfect mood for lovingly satirizing those classics.

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