God bless public television. The public funded, by-the-bootstraps programming of the ’80s and ’90s, produced a seemingly endless wonderland of high-caliber, star-studded productions that, oh-so-cleverly, had education, not mere entertainments, at its core. From that […]
Orson Welles once said, “I prefer the old masters; by which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford.” My Darling Clementine is considered the director’s crowning achievement, and was one of the first […]
Deep vistas. Narrow minds. That’s the visual and thematic takeaway from The Tin Star (1957), one of director Anthony Mann’s finest achievements. Bounty Hunter Morg Hickman (Henry Fonda) rides into town with a dead outlaw slung […]
As remarkable as 1939 is in the history of film, there is only one director who accomplished a hat trick that year. Iconic Western director John Ford crafted three films in that 12 month period […]
For many years, it was popular to shrug off William Wyler’s antebellum melodrama Jezebel (1938) as a rip-off of David O. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind. Fiery, outspoken, bitchy southern belle? Check. A heroine whose modernity […]
Sidney Lumet’s 1964 political thriller Fail-Safe is one of greatest Cold War films to come out of the Cold War era. This bleak, atomic drama is a film on par with Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr. […]
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