This great, unheralded western is divorced from the usual concerns of law and order and gunslinger protocol. As in most every film by Jacques Tourneur, we feel a strong empathy for characters that behave like real people working out real problems. The Oregon Territory is pioneered by imperfect people — opportunists, knaves and hopeful dreamers — all rich in personality. Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward lead a large cast in a tale with just as much conflict and violence as the next western, but with an integrity one can feel. The icing on the cake is the presence of ‘troubadour’ Hoagy Carmichael and his beautiful music.
Canyon Passage
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1946 / Color / 1:37 flat Academy / 92 min. / Street Date March 10, 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Dana Andrews, Susan Hayward, Brian Donlevy, Patricia Roc, Ward Bond, Hoagy Carmichael, Fay Holden, Stanley Ridges, Lloyd Bridges, Andy Devine, Victor Cutler, Rose Hobart, Halliwell Hobbes, James Cardwell,...
Canyon Passage
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1946 / Color / 1:37 flat Academy / 92 min. / Street Date March 10, 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Dana Andrews, Susan Hayward, Brian Donlevy, Patricia Roc, Ward Bond, Hoagy Carmichael, Fay Holden, Stanley Ridges, Lloyd Bridges, Andy Devine, Victor Cutler, Rose Hobart, Halliwell Hobbes, James Cardwell,...
- 2/22/2020
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Jacques Tourneur’s ‘big sky’ western gives us the beauty of Colorado mountains plus stunning color images (originally Technicolor) of his attractive cast: Robert Stack, Virginia Mayo, Ruth Roman. North-South antagonisms break out in Denver City, before the Civil War begins, and Robert Stack’s loner opportunist must choose a side. The Wac’s disc includes four Jacques Tourneur short subjects, with mystery themes.
Great Day in the Morning
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1956 / Color / 1:2 widescreen (Superscope) / 92 min. / Street Date November 26, 2019 / available through the WBshop / 21.99
Starring: Virginia Mayo, Robert Stack, Ruth Roman, Alex Nicol, Raymond Burr, Leo Gordon, Regis Toomey, Carleton Young, Donald MacDonald, William Phipps, Peter Whitney.
Cinematography: William Snyder
Film Editor: Harry Marker
Original Music: Leith Stevens
Written by Lesser Samuels, from the novel by Robert Hardy Andrews
Produced by Edmund Grainger
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
(Note: none of these images reflect the fine quality of the Blu-ray.)
The...
Great Day in the Morning
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1956 / Color / 1:2 widescreen (Superscope) / 92 min. / Street Date November 26, 2019 / available through the WBshop / 21.99
Starring: Virginia Mayo, Robert Stack, Ruth Roman, Alex Nicol, Raymond Burr, Leo Gordon, Regis Toomey, Carleton Young, Donald MacDonald, William Phipps, Peter Whitney.
Cinematography: William Snyder
Film Editor: Harry Marker
Original Music: Leith Stevens
Written by Lesser Samuels, from the novel by Robert Hardy Andrews
Produced by Edmund Grainger
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
(Note: none of these images reflect the fine quality of the Blu-ray.)
The...
- 11/12/2019
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.
3 From Hell (Rob Zombie)
With 3 From Hell, Zombie is intent on ripping out those sutures, grabbing a hold of the blistered flaps made from that fresh incision, and waving a grisly tapestry that may as well have the red, white, and blue colored on the leathery skin of every casualty we’ve taken to make this country great. This is America let loose, with our violence, trauma, and psychopathy sweeping south of the border in a deluge, our arbiters wearing the indigenous garb of those we’ve already slaughtered to make bedrock. – Mike M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Amazon, iTunes, Google
La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel)
With only a few features,...
3 From Hell (Rob Zombie)
With 3 From Hell, Zombie is intent on ripping out those sutures, grabbing a hold of the blistered flaps made from that fresh incision, and waving a grisly tapestry that may as well have the red, white, and blue colored on the leathery skin of every casualty we’ve taken to make this country great. This is America let loose, with our violence, trauma, and psychopathy sweeping south of the border in a deluge, our arbiters wearing the indigenous garb of those we’ve already slaughtered to make bedrock. – Mike M. (full review)
Where to Stream: Amazon, iTunes, Google
La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel)
With only a few features,...
- 10/18/2019
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
It’s Fritz Lang versus CinemaScope, for the first and last time. The format suited to snakes and funerals effectively hamstrings the great filmmaker’s expressive camera direction, yet the movie is one of the best of MGM’s last-gasp ’50s costume dramas. Corrupt smuggler Stewart Granger is redeemed by the faith of a young boy who believes in him; in this story the words “He’s my friend” take on a big significance. Come see director Lang struggle to adapt the wide-wide screen to accommodate his brand of real cinema.
Moonfleet
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1955 / Color / 2:55 widescreen / 87 min. / Street Date August 13, 2019 / available through the WBshop / 21.99
Starring: Stewart Granger, Jon Whiteley, George Sanders, Joan Greenwood, Viveca Lindfors, Liliane Montevecchi, Melville Cooper, Sean McClory, Alan Napier, John Hoyt, Donna Corcoran, Jack Elam, Dan Seymour, Ian Wolfe.
Cinematography: Robert H. Planck
Film Editor: Albert Akst
Original Music: Miklos Rozsa
Written by Jan Lustig,...
Moonfleet
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1955 / Color / 2:55 widescreen / 87 min. / Street Date August 13, 2019 / available through the WBshop / 21.99
Starring: Stewart Granger, Jon Whiteley, George Sanders, Joan Greenwood, Viveca Lindfors, Liliane Montevecchi, Melville Cooper, Sean McClory, Alan Napier, John Hoyt, Donna Corcoran, Jack Elam, Dan Seymour, Ian Wolfe.
Cinematography: Robert H. Planck
Film Editor: Albert Akst
Original Music: Miklos Rozsa
Written by Jan Lustig,...
- 8/17/2019
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Westerns are all about values: good and bad, law and lawlessness, etc. Joel McCrea and Frances Dee’s ‘bad man’ saga isn’t faith based, exactly, but it’s great for humanitarian values, the simple notion that the good in people should be encouraged. And one important detail may make it unique. Hint: John Milius might be strongly prejudiced against this picture.
Four Faces West
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1948 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 89 min. / Street Date December 19, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Joel McCrea, Frances Dee, Charles Bickford, Joseph Calleia, William Conrad.
Cinematography: Russell Harlan
Film Editor: Edward Mann
Original Music: Paul Sawtell
Written by C. Graham Baker, Teddi Sherman, William & Milarde Brent from the novel Pasó por aquí by Eugene Manlove Rhodes
Produced by Vernon E. Clark, Harry Sherman
Directed by Alfred E. Green
Faith-based westerns exist, but much more numerous are lightly inspirational sagebrush pictures that deal...
Four Faces West
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1948 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 89 min. / Street Date December 19, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Joel McCrea, Frances Dee, Charles Bickford, Joseph Calleia, William Conrad.
Cinematography: Russell Harlan
Film Editor: Edward Mann
Original Music: Paul Sawtell
Written by C. Graham Baker, Teddi Sherman, William & Milarde Brent from the novel Pasó por aquí by Eugene Manlove Rhodes
Produced by Vernon E. Clark, Harry Sherman
Directed by Alfred E. Green
Faith-based westerns exist, but much more numerous are lightly inspirational sagebrush pictures that deal...
- 12/12/2017
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
The Wandering Soap OperaThis year at the Locarno Festival I am looking for specific images, moments, techniques, qualities or scenes from films across the 70th edition's selection that grabbed me and have lingered past and beyond the next movie seen, whose characters, story and images have already begun to overwrite those that came just before.***The camera’s brief tracking movements in Jacques Tourneur's Appointment in Honduras (1953). This filmmaker, to whom Locarno is devoting an extensive retrospective, is not a formalist like some of his more acclaimed contemporaries like John Ford, Otto Preminger, or Hitchcock, whose overt and idiosyncratic use of the camera makes far more obvious each director’s perspective on their stories. But that doesn't mean Tourneur didn't have formal flourishes, and none are so lyrically charged as the subtle and surprising times in his films when there’s a cut and suddenly the camera is floating...
- 8/12/2017
- MUBI
Even when based on actual events, classical Hollywood movies never strive for painstaking factual accuracy. This is best exemplified by the ever-present legal disclaimer “The characters and incidents portrayed and the names used in this work are fictitious, and any resemblance to the name, character and history of any real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental,” which appears not only in horror, sci-fi or musical extravaganzas, but also in biopics and historical reconstructions. In the latter two cases, the contradiction is only apparent. While using the above disclaimer (or variations thereof) to protect themselves from defamation lawsuits, the studios openly acknowledge what any person of common sense knows already: in the filmmaking business, dramatization and other poetic licenses are essential to tell and sell exciting stories to an audience, since reality is too boring and complex for an evening's entertainment. In other words, a commercial film is not a...
- 7/9/2015
- by Michael Guarneri
- MUBI
Joel McCrea, Charles Coburn, and Jean Arthur in The More the MerrierWriting about acting is hard. Or rather, avoiding bad writing about acting is hard. When starting this article I nearly fell into that dichotomous peril of guessing which little actions were choices made by the actor himself or the director in charge. That’s a dumb, unfruitful game that would warrant nothing more than self-congratulation if some historical figure were to admit how correct I was. Yet, that dumb, unfruitful notion was the first frame of this article, likely spawned from the innumerable like-minded articles about acting. I’m being this transparent because I’ve taken the call-to-arms from Kent Jones in the most recent issue of Film Comment. In his article, Jones lists the pratfalls critics take when talking about acting, more often than not relying on conventional wisdom about the mythos surrounding certain actors and conventional wisdom...
- 4/13/2015
- by Zach Lewis
- MUBI
After she had the heart attack out in Michigan on Thanksgiving 1988, I stood by her bedside in the recovery room and she tried so hard to tell me something, but it just didn't work. I loved her so much. Did she know how much? I never told her. There are always questions you wish you'd asked after it's too late to get an answer. Sometimes years can pass before you realize they're questions.
Everyone said I "took after her," and I did. My features are more rounded than anyone else on either side of my family. Martha R. Stumm was the youngest of six surviving children of a Dutch-Irish-German couple who raised their family on a farm outside Tayorville, Illinois. Years after after her father died and her mother opened a boarding house in Urbana, enough oil was found beneath the land to make it worth drilling.
I visited the...
Everyone said I "took after her," and I did. My features are more rounded than anyone else on either side of my family. Martha R. Stumm was the youngest of six surviving children of a Dutch-Irish-German couple who raised their family on a farm outside Tayorville, Illinois. Years after after her father died and her mother opened a boarding house in Urbana, enough oil was found beneath the land to make it worth drilling.
I visited the...
- 5/14/2013
- by Roger Ebert
- blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
After she had the heart attack out in Michigan on Thanksgiving 1988, I stood by her bedside in the recovery room and she tried so hard to tell me something, but it just didn't work. I loved her so much. Did she know how much? I never told her. There are always questions you wish you'd asked after it's too late to get an answer. Sometimes years can pass before you realize they're questions.
Everyone said I "took after her," and I did. My features are more rounded than anyone else on either side of my family. Martha R. Stumm was the youngest of six surviving children of a Dutch-Irish-German couple who raised their family on a farm outside Tayorville, Illinois. Years after after her father died and her mother opened a boarding house in Urbana, enough oil was found beneath the land to make it worth drilling.
I visited the...
Everyone said I "took after her," and I did. My features are more rounded than anyone else on either side of my family. Martha R. Stumm was the youngest of six surviving children of a Dutch-Irish-German couple who raised their family on a farm outside Tayorville, Illinois. Years after after her father died and her mother opened a boarding house in Urbana, enough oil was found beneath the land to make it worth drilling.
I visited the...
- 3/11/2013
- by Roger Ebert
- blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
Above: L.A. noir—Rudy Bond, a .45, Aldo Ray, and an oil derrick.
Jacques Tourneur, one of old Hollywood's last poets, seems forever known, when know at all, for pairing his nebulous, poetic clashes between rationality and irrationality with the inspired clouds of unease of producer Val Lewton's wartime productions in such films as Cat People (1942), The Leopard Man (1943), and I Walked With a Zombie (also 43), and for one of the most unsusal and foggy noirs—and canonical films—ever produced, Out of the Past (1947). In the 1950s Tourneur's products grew more erratic, though masterpieces were frequent—ranging frmo the beginning of the decade with the genuine warmth of his good-hearted Western, Stars in My Crown (1950), to the end, with a return to scientific-materialist horror in the British production Night of the Demon (1957)—and frequently uncanny and haunting in that way so specific to Tourneur, where memories of his...
Jacques Tourneur, one of old Hollywood's last poets, seems forever known, when know at all, for pairing his nebulous, poetic clashes between rationality and irrationality with the inspired clouds of unease of producer Val Lewton's wartime productions in such films as Cat People (1942), The Leopard Man (1943), and I Walked With a Zombie (also 43), and for one of the most unsusal and foggy noirs—and canonical films—ever produced, Out of the Past (1947). In the 1950s Tourneur's products grew more erratic, though masterpieces were frequent—ranging frmo the beginning of the decade with the genuine warmth of his good-hearted Western, Stars in My Crown (1950), to the end, with a return to scientific-materialist horror in the British production Night of the Demon (1957)—and frequently uncanny and haunting in that way so specific to Tourneur, where memories of his...
- 6/9/2010
- MUBI
Dancer and actor known for his role in the American TV soap opera All My Children
There are legions of actors who are deeply grateful for the existence of long-running television soap operas. James Mitchell, who has died aged 89, was one of them. He enjoyed playing the wily patriarch Palmer Cortlandt in the popular Us daytime soap All My Children from 1979 to 2008. It came at the right time in his career. At 59, his dancing days were over and his film acting had failed to catch fire.
The majority of loyal fans of All My Children were probably not aware that the debonair, grey-haired Mitchell, still svelte and handsome, had been a leading dancer for many years, particularly associated with the celebrated choreographer Agnes de Mille. According to De Mille, Mitchell had "probably the strongest arms in the business, and the adagio style developed by him and his partners has become...
There are legions of actors who are deeply grateful for the existence of long-running television soap operas. James Mitchell, who has died aged 89, was one of them. He enjoyed playing the wily patriarch Palmer Cortlandt in the popular Us daytime soap All My Children from 1979 to 2008. It came at the right time in his career. At 59, his dancing days were over and his film acting had failed to catch fire.
The majority of loyal fans of All My Children were probably not aware that the debonair, grey-haired Mitchell, still svelte and handsome, had been a leading dancer for many years, particularly associated with the celebrated choreographer Agnes de Mille. According to De Mille, Mitchell had "probably the strongest arms in the business, and the adagio style developed by him and his partners has become...
- 4/13/2010
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
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