Author James Jones exploded onto the literary scene in 1951 with From Here to Eternity, a fictionalized account of his experience in Hawaii before and during the attack on Pearl Harbor. A film version came two years later and was instantly deemed a classic as it swept that year’s Academy Awards, winning eight out of [...]
There is no doubting that during the 1980s, Steven Spielberg was the king of excitement and had a Midas-like touch. When he was in the director’s chair he worked magic, but when he was in the producer’s chair he oversaw wonders. There was certainly something reassuring about the Amblin logo flashing before your eyes while [...]
“Big things have small beginnings” - An imagined slight leads to a fifteen year magnificent obsession during the rise and fall of Napoleon’s Empire, in Ridley Scott’s sublime debut The Duellists. The film (based on Joseph Conrad’s short story The Duel, itself based on reality) charts an obsessive conflict, reluctant on one part, between two officers [...]
Watching Sleuth is like watching two peacocks dancing around on the front lawn of a country estate on a balmy summer’s day, their feathers in full flow, gleaming and sparkling in the hot summer sun – with seemingly no end to their beauty and hauteur. These are two men at the peak of their powers and this [...]
Cooler than a mint imperial, cheekier than a Sid James laugh, the insouciant, geezerish swagger of The Italian Job sums up the fresh frivolity of a late ’60′s British vibe that probably only existed in the film-makers imagination. Yet its appeal is timeless: recently BBC Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson replicated stunt driver Remy Julienne’s attempt to do 360 [...]
On a beautiful Autumn Sunday morning in upstate Connecticut, a middle-aged virile man, Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster) emerges from the trees. Clad only in swimming trunks, he approaches old friends gathered around their back yard pool. Greeted warmly but with some surprise, he announces cheerily that he intends to swim home via a chain of similar pools in [...]
John Boorman’s 1981 fantastical retelling of Mallory’s Le Mort D’ Arthur is, to quote Nicol Williamson’s Merlin in the film, “A dream to some. A nightmare to others!” What some see as an episodic and hammy sword and sorcery tale is a clever and satisfying retelling of a mythical truth, an abstract approach that shows us Arthur’s [...]
It was supposed to be third time’s the charm for director Sam Peckinpah. After two well received small westerns: The Deadly Companion, and Ride The high Country (which went down a storm in Europe and is now considered one of his greatest films), “Bloody Sam” was given a large scope, large budget Horse Soldier [...]
In a world where Jack and Stan’s On The Buses antics are all available on R2 DVD, it is a crime that one of the great underrated films of not only Sir Sean Connery’s career, but that of its director, Sidney Lumet, should still be unavailable on these shores. In this film, British army [...]
In 1978, Sylvester Stallone was riding high on the rags to riches success of his make or break everyman made good script, Rocky. After fighting his corner to play the mumbling underdog as well, he had freedom to pursue a couple of interesting projects, both largely forgotten in the pantheon of his otherwise overblown [...]
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