Sep 3
Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood is an oft-hilarious comic horror picture that satirizes beatnik culture and the affected art world. Corman made the flick for just $50,000 over five days, but he never wanted to make a frank horror movie. Along with screenwriter Charles B. Griffith, the director hit the coffee house circuit on the Sunset Strip and the vein began to gel.
Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergey Urusevsky only worked together on three films, but each has left an indelible impression in the film world. The Cranes Are Flying (1957) and I Am Cuba (1964) are the more well-known, but Letter Never Sent (1959), also known as The Unsent Letter, is well worth a look, too.
You can check out the rest of this review at Letter Never Sent Criterion Collection DVD Review: Kalatozov’s Take on Man Vs. Nature at Cinema Sentries.
When I think of some of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, like The Ugly Truth or The Back-up Plan, I always come back to Plan 9 from Outer Space. This 1959 sci-fi horror from Ed Wood is largely included in discussions of the worst movies ever made, but there’s something unflappably fun about the whole experience – even if it was originally intended to be taken seriously. That’s more than I can say for a lot of today’s tripe.
Aug 22
Sleeping Beauty is the sixteenth animated feature in the so-called Walt Disney Classics collection and remains one of the most disappointing pictures of the bunch. The 1959 film didn’t do too well at the box office either, making enough of a negative impression on the Disney company to lead them to swear off of fairy tales until 1989′s The Little Mermaid.
The movie was a labour of love for the Disney company, as the animators and directors worked on it throughout the 1950s while Disneyland was under construction in California. Sleeping Beauty marks the last time that a Disney film would use hand-inked cels and it is a relatively good-looking movie, even though most of the detail is in the backgrounds. The use of Super Technirama 70 meant that the film could include more detail in the background than any other animated feature of the time.
Tennessee Williams’ one-act play Suddenly, Last Summer is given grand cinematic treatment by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in the 1959 film adaption. The picture is stunning from beginning to end, filled with staggering performances and terrific cinematography from Jack Hildyard. The Buxton Orr score, complete with the foundation laid by Malcolm Arnold, also helps increase the movie’s tension and overall mood.
The screenplay was penned by Williams and Gore Vidal, although there appears to be some dispute about how much work both parties did and whose work was more represented in the finished product. The production was a difficult one, with a number of personality clashes reportedly occurring behind the camera. Fortunately this does not play out on screen and the resulting performances are tremendous.
