Celluloid Heroes

I got a hunch he brung something in.

Jack Palance makes a big impression in his film debut about a New Orleans street thug exposed to a deadly strain of plague in Elia Kazan’s lean, gritty story of an obsessively determined health official (Richard Widmark) who only has two days to head off an epidemic.

(more…)

Oh, wake up, Norma, you’d be killing yourself to an empty house.

Billy Wilder’s poison-pen valentine to Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard, could easily be made today without much modification. There’s always another generation of former stars clinging to their lost fame and a new generation on the make. Instead of simply pining her years away awash in faded glory, Norma Desmond might be doing info-mercials at two in the morning, but the basic story could be reused today.

(more…)

Young man, are you sure you’re trying it on the right foot?

Cinderella no doubt deserves to listed among the Walt Disney Company’s classic animated features. It is lushly and handsomely drawn and genuinely heartwarming. Songs like “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes” are not the most famous to emerge from the Disney canon, but they are worthy of being called minor classics.

None of that disguises the simple fact that Cinderella is in many ways two shorter films shoehorned into one. The actual tale of the young scullery maid abused by her evil stepmother and vain, selfish step-sisters is too slight even to fill Cinderella’s not-quite-feature-length running time of 74-minutes. (more…)