Tumbling, tumbling, the man falls further and further into destitution and failure. It started with a game of cards: win a few hands, get enough money to buy the wife that black dress she’d always […]
By the 1960s, director King Vidor ’s star had largely faded. During his decades-spanning career, Vidor helmed a filmography at once both intensely personal and enthusiastically catered for mass appeal. His was a cinema of […]
One of the most uncomfortable sub-genres of the Western is the assimilation narrative. Broadly defined as a story wherein a white person joins a Native American people and adopts their ways, assimilation narratives are heavily […]
As one of the films made before his disastrous, life- and career-altering testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in April 1952, Elia Kazan ’s Boomerang! (1947) has long been treated as a footnote in the […]
If I had to pick a single theme to characterize Billy Wilder’s work, it would be the individual trapped by unusual circumstances. Sometimes his protagonists would fall victim to traps set up by society (the […]
Many of the greatest movie stars had not one, but two film debuts. First, there were the debut roles; the films that placed the phrase “and introducing” in front of their names in the opening credits. […]
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