Oh, the green light. If you have read the novel “The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, you are well aware of the green light, and everything it stood for in the story. It exists in the most recent film adaptation by director Baz Lurhmann, The Great Gatsby, coupled with an exaggerated quality of decadence […]
Entertainment
Touch Of Noir: The Noir Loser Loses His Mind In ‘Barton Fink’
The films of the Coen brothers present strangely familiar yet bizarre and inexplicable characters. Just as their films subvert conventions, their protagonists are average people driven to extremes, and frequently exaggerated and surreal extremes. Although the Coens’ films typically defy genre, this characterization is clearly influenced by the classic noir loser – an ordinary man […]
TCM Classic Film Festival: ‘Scarecrow’ (Dir. Jerry Schatzberg 1973)
Scarecrow would have been a very different film had it starred, as originally intended, Bill Cosby and Jack Lemmon. As it is, it allowed up and coming Al Pacino and Gene Hackman to give two of the best performances of their careers, and it remains a mystery why the film has remained so long under […]
TCM Classic Film Festival: ‘The Swimmer’ (Dir. Frank Perry 1968)
The films of husband-and-wife team Frank and Eleanor Perry are amongst the most undervalued of the wave of semi-independent American films of the 70s. In titles like Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) and Play It As It Lays (1972) they tackled a specifically contemporary sense of malaise and neurosis, on both coasts, in a […]
TCM Classic Film Festival: ‘Try And Get Me’ (aka ‘The Sound Of Fury’, Dir. Cy Endfield 1950)
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 […]