Fritz Lang’s Fury is based on the same small-town California news story, but this is the real deal. Instead of an innocent man threatened by a lynch mob, Try and Get Me has returning GI (never saw combat) Frank Lovejoy struggling to make ends meet for his wife and child, falling in with startling sociopath Lloyd […]
TCM Classic Film Festival: ‘La Traversée De Paris’ (Dir. Claude Autant-Lara 1956)
Beloved in France but little known elsewhere, La traversée de Paris holds the distinction of being the one film by Claude Autant-Lara deemed acceptable by the young François Truffaut, in his campaign against the prevailing cinèma du qualité in 1950s France. One reason for the exception is that it’s sort of an odd film, […]
TCM Classic Film Festival: ‘The Narrow Margin’ (Dir. Richard Fleischer 1952)
Cheap, tough, and drenched in shadows, The Narrow Margin was the sort of thing that the RKO technicians could knock out in a couple of weeks with no trouble at all, but is raised by particularly tight direction from Richard Fleischer, including terrific use of confined spaces, windows, and yes, lots of shadows (but also, […]
The TCM Classic Film Festival 2013 Is Coming To Hollywood. What’s Happening? What’s Tom Seeing?
The TCM Classic Film Festival, gearing up for its fourth installment and now officially an annual event, gets bigger and better every year. The channel and its hosts, inspire even greater devotion than one would imagine, until you see the queues of people eagerly lined up to touch the hem of Robert Osborne’s garment. For […]
Film Rave (Or Rant?): Pablo Berger’s ‘Blancanieves’
After ten years of working on Blancanieves, writer-director Pablo Berger must have had mixed feelings about the appearance of The Artist last year. That film’s runaway success was undeniably a useful ice-breaker, however, for they are similar beasts, modern silent films made (largely) according to the conventions and constraints of the 1920s. Berger even gives […]