Celluloid Heroes

I’m not taking the vows. I’m only going to play the organ.

There is low-budget, ultra-low-budget and no-budget. I don’t know what term you’d use for a movie that could have been made with the change you dug out of your seat cushions. This is the only dramatic film made by industrial documentary filmmaker Herk Harvey, and you could be forgiven if you think you’re watching a lost episode of Twilight Zone. This simple but moody tale is as long on atmosphere as it is short on production values and running time.

Made for a paltry $30,000, Carnival of Souls was built around the dilapidated Saltair amusement park, which had been built by the Mormons on the shore of the Great Salt Lake during the late 19th Century. After decades of misfortune, fire, depression and war, it finally closed in the late 1950s. When Harvey spotted it while driving past, he thought the lonely structure, perched hundreds of feet from the receding shoreline it had once straddled, would make the perfect setting for a horror movie. He might have been on to something there.

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I tell you, Flanagan, there are some pretty peculiar blokes on this beach.

Darryl Zanuck’s multi-national epic occasionally plays like an academic lecture on the events of June 5 and 6, 1944, albeit an interesting lecture with some really cool film. The Longest Day covers the first twenty-four hours of the invasion of France from American, British, French and German perspectives, employing separate directors for each nationality and shooting in the native languages of those involved. This gives the film a level of authenticity that was fairly atypical of war movies of the time.

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It’s a terrible thing to hate your mother. But I didn’t always hate her. When I was a child, I only kind of disliked her.

The Manchurian Candidate has always seemed like it was in a class by itself among cold war political thrillers. Maybe it was just the mystique that came with being unavailable for so many years, but maybe it was the simply fact that this is a damn good movie. Smart and laced with liberal doses of McCarthy Era satire, The Manchurian Candidate still stands as the pinnacle of John Frankenheimer’s directing career.

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Macomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it.

To Kill a Mockingbird is an indeliable portrait of courage and principle seen through the eyes of three children in small, Depression-era Southern town. It is also a lovingly faithful adaptation of Harper Lee’s classic novel.The early part of the film focuses on the two children of windower Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), Jem (Phillip Alford) and especially Scout (Mary Badham), a precocious tomboy who only begrudgingly exchanges her coveralls for a dress when its time to start first grade. While their father is off to work, leaving them in the care of their nanny, Calpurnia (Estelle Evans), the two children and their friend, Dill (John Megna), go about the business of being kids, which for them revolves around getting a glimpse of the neighborhood boogey-man, “Boo” Radley (Robert Duvall). They’re curious about their father’s work as attorney, but they don’t let it intrude on the truly important things in life.

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