Sirk, Hollywood and Genre
The Douglas Sirk discovered by criticism has gone through numerous phases. For me, the most telling is the one which has excavated from his work not only an extended and devastating critique of the...
View ArticleBringing the War Back Home: An Interview with Jonathan Teplitzky on The...
A $16 million Australia-UK co-production, Jonathan Teplitzky’s The Railway Man tells the story of Second Lieutenant Eric Lomax, a Signal Corps engineer from Edinburgh who was captured when Singapore...
View ArticleThe Adaptation and the Remake: From John M. Stahl’s When Tomorrow Comes to...
Raising Cain: Setting the Record Straight Douglas Sirk shot Interlude in 1956, between Battle Hymn and The Tarnished Angels. Starring June Allyson and Rossano Brazzi and implicitly acknowledged in the...
View ArticleOn John Flaus: Marines, Let’s Go
I’ve known John Flaus for more than 40 years. Remarkably, he still looks almost exactly as he did when we first crossed paths at La Trobe University in 1969. Back then he used to be mostly a beard,...
View ArticleObsessions, Imitations & Subversions, Part One – on Magnificent Obsession
In the beginning was the Lloyd C. Douglas novel (1), published in the immediate wake of the 1929 stock market crash, when the author was 52. It was the then Protestant minister’s first foray into...
View ArticleThe Bleakness of the Happy Ending: Sirk’s Uncomfortable Comedies
Both in Europe and the US, Douglas Sirk’s best-known work was done in the realm of the melodrama, from Zu neuen Ufern (To Distant Shores,1937) to Imitation of Life (1959). It was as if he was drawn to...
View ArticleGlimpses of Life: An interview with Albert Maysles
Albert Maysles, who died on March 6 at the age of 88, was an American treasure, a documentary filmmaker for whom anything was a potential subject, simply because it happened, and who discovered poetry...
View ArticleObsessions, Imitations & Subversions, Part Two – on Imitation of Life
“It’s not a remake as such, it’s a new take.” Michael Boughen, producer of the TV series, Tomorrow When the War Began 1 The subject here is Imitation of Life, but it’s important to be clear about one...
View ArticleErrol Morris Interview
Discovering that Morris' favourite American film of all time is Detour is just one thing you take away from this comprehensive and fascinating interview. The post Errol Morris Interview appeared first...
View ArticleDouglas Sirk
b. Detlef Sierck b. April 26, 1900, Hamburg, Germany d. January 14, 1987, Lugano, Switzerland filmography bibliography web resources Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is...
View ArticleMaking History: Errol Morris, Robert McNamara and The Fog of War
Matters of truth and perception, style and representation, ethics and political responsibility, history and human error all come to the fore in Morris' latest documentary, and are discussed here. The...
View ArticleJosh Hartnett Definitely Wants to Do This…: True Stories from a Life in the...
He didn’t know it at the time, but, in October 2003, Australian film director Bruce Beresford (The Adventures of Barry McKenzie [1972], “Breaker” Morant [1980], Driving Miss Daisy [1989]) was about to...
View ArticleRichard Franklin: Director/Producer
An extensive interview originally published in 1980 with the director of the classic road-movie thriller Roadgames. Written by Everett de Roche and starring Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis. The post...
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