Graham Greene’s tense crime tale is as important as his classic The Third Man but nowhere near as well known. Down Brighton way the race-track boys have sharp ways of solving disputes and terrorizing the common folk — think ‘straight razor.’ Richard Attenborough’s breakthrough film is also a showcase for Hermoine Baddelely and a marvelous newcomer that every horror fan loves even if they don’t know her name, Carol Marsh. Kino’s disc has a Tim Lucas commentary; this review balances thoughts about mercy and damnation, with an extra insight about a piece of ‘stick candy’ unfamiliar to us Yanks.
Brighton Rock
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1948 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 92 min. / Street Date May 5, 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Richard Attenborough, Carol Marsh, Hermione Baddeley, William Hartnell, Harcourt Williams, Wylie Watson, Nigel Stock, Virginia Winter, Reginald Purdell, George Carney, Charles Goldner, Alan Wheatley.
Cinematography: Harry Waxman
Camera operator:...
Brighton Rock
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1948 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 92 min. / Street Date May 5, 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Richard Attenborough, Carol Marsh, Hermione Baddeley, William Hartnell, Harcourt Williams, Wylie Watson, Nigel Stock, Virginia Winter, Reginald Purdell, George Carney, Charles Goldner, Alan Wheatley.
Cinematography: Harry Waxman
Camera operator:...
- 5/9/2020
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Lust-filled treachery in the steaming tropics! He dared to love a cannibal empress! Taglines like that suggest that it wasn’t easy to sell Carol Reed’s phenomenally good adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s classic, a tale of human self-degradation and malevolence in the tropics. Long difficult to see, it’s finally here to dazzle a generation that might appreciate its superb performances. Forget Lord Jim and Colonel Kurtz. Trevor Howard’s back-stabbing Peter Willems shows us the price of total betrayal: permanent banishment from humanity.
Outcast of the Islands
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1951 / B&w / 1:37 flat / 100 93 min. / Street Date April 29, 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Trevor Howard, Ralph Richardson, Robert Morley, Wendy Hiller, Aissa, George Coulouris, Tamine, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Peter Illing, Betty Ann Davies, Frederick Valk, A.V. Bramble, Marne Maitland, James Kenney, Annabel Morley.
Cinematography: Edward Scaife, John Wilcox
Production Design: Vincent Korda
Second Unit Director: Guy Hamilton...
Outcast of the Islands
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1951 / B&w / 1:37 flat / 100 93 min. / Street Date April 29, 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Trevor Howard, Ralph Richardson, Robert Morley, Wendy Hiller, Aissa, George Coulouris, Tamine, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Peter Illing, Betty Ann Davies, Frederick Valk, A.V. Bramble, Marne Maitland, James Kenney, Annabel Morley.
Cinematography: Edward Scaife, John Wilcox
Production Design: Vincent Korda
Second Unit Director: Guy Hamilton...
- 4/18/2020
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Ken Hughes’ beat-influenced portrait of 1960s London life was forgotten for years, but has just been restored. Full of weaselly charm, low-rent hipness and rare depictions of Jewish family life, it is well worth rediscovering
There’s lots to like about The Small World of Sammy Lee: Anthony Newley’s weaselly charm in the title role; the seedy 1960s Soho streets; the Night-and-the-City flourishes; the rare glimpse of the bickering family life of British Jews; the haunting soundtrack. Having lurked for several decades in the shadows of British cinema, the 1963 film is finally emerging into the sunlight of 4K restoration, festival screenings and Blu-ray release.
It’s a genuine curiosity: the last knockings of black-and-white, beat-influenced hipster cinema before a tide of gaudily-coloured, new wave-inspired, pop art films. Ken Hughes, its director, reached back to the prewar working-class bohemianism so perfectly captured by Graham Greene and Gerald Kersh.
Continue reading.
There’s lots to like about The Small World of Sammy Lee: Anthony Newley’s weaselly charm in the title role; the seedy 1960s Soho streets; the Night-and-the-City flourishes; the rare glimpse of the bickering family life of British Jews; the haunting soundtrack. Having lurked for several decades in the shadows of British cinema, the 1963 film is finally emerging into the sunlight of 4K restoration, festival screenings and Blu-ray release.
It’s a genuine curiosity: the last knockings of black-and-white, beat-influenced hipster cinema before a tide of gaudily-coloured, new wave-inspired, pop art films. Ken Hughes, its director, reached back to the prewar working-class bohemianism so perfectly captured by Graham Greene and Gerald Kersh.
Continue reading.
- 11/8/2016
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
★★★★★ Adapted from Gerald Kersh's 1938 novel, which at the time warned readers that it featured a story "not for the strait-laced or squeamish, but for those willing to taste it, a treat of rare substance", Night and the City (1950) postmarked the end of the gloom-ridden cinema of the forties as something of an exemplary of the film noir genre. Directed by Jules Dassin before his unfathomable exile from Hollywood, the film is an astonishing, baroque study of corruption and paranoia in a frantic metropolitan setting rife with betrayal.
- 9/29/2015
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
Tuesdays are when new books are typically released, and horror fans usually don’t have too much trouble finding something to read. There is Amazon of course and publishers like Samhain and Cemetery Dance…
We also boast authors ranging from "The King" himself to Dan Simmons, Robert McCammon, the late Thomas Tryon, Tim Curran, Aussies Stephen Irwin, Brett McBean, and Aaron Dries as well as Brits such as David Moody, anthologist Stephen Jones, and Mark Morris, to name just a very few.
But what if you long for the paperback originals which seemed to flood bookstores back in the 80s or want to read even earlier horror that is long out of print? What to do? Well, you turn to Valancourt Books to assuage those yearnings. And we recently spoke with Ryan Cagle, one half of the publishing team that brings those long unavailable titles to life for readers to enjoy again,...
We also boast authors ranging from "The King" himself to Dan Simmons, Robert McCammon, the late Thomas Tryon, Tim Curran, Aussies Stephen Irwin, Brett McBean, and Aaron Dries as well as Brits such as David Moody, anthologist Stephen Jones, and Mark Morris, to name just a very few.
But what if you long for the paperback originals which seemed to flood bookstores back in the 80s or want to read even earlier horror that is long out of print? What to do? Well, you turn to Valancourt Books to assuage those yearnings. And we recently spoke with Ryan Cagle, one half of the publishing team that brings those long unavailable titles to life for readers to enjoy again,...
- 4/22/2014
- by thebellefromhell
- DreadCentral.com
The Italian master's challenging and difficult L'Avventura was booed at its premiere in Cannes. But nowadays the director gets something far more hurtful: indifference
This is the centenary year of Michelangelo Antonioni. He was born on 29 September 1912 and died in 2007 at the age of 94, having worked until almost the very end. As well as everything else, he gave us one of the founding myths of postwar cinema: The Booing of L'Avventura. For film historians, it's as pretty much important as the audience riots at the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
At the Cannes film festival on 15 May 1960, Antonioni presented his L'Avventura, a challenging and difficult film and a decisive break from his earlier work, replete with languorous spaces and silences. This was movie-modernism's difficult birth. The film was jeered so ferociously, so deafeningly, that poor Antonioni and his beautiful star Monica Vitti burst into tears where they sat. There...
This is the centenary year of Michelangelo Antonioni. He was born on 29 September 1912 and died in 2007 at the age of 94, having worked until almost the very end. As well as everything else, he gave us one of the founding myths of postwar cinema: The Booing of L'Avventura. For film historians, it's as pretty much important as the audience riots at the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
At the Cannes film festival on 15 May 1960, Antonioni presented his L'Avventura, a challenging and difficult film and a decisive break from his earlier work, replete with languorous spaces and silences. This was movie-modernism's difficult birth. The film was jeered so ferociously, so deafeningly, that poor Antonioni and his beautiful star Monica Vitti burst into tears where they sat. There...
- 9/27/2012
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
The 35th anniversary of Martin Scorsese's unforgettable New York drama starring Robert De Niro. It's a film that stays in the bloodstream, says Peter Bradshaw
Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) was last revived five years ago, for its 30th anniversary, but any occasion to return it to the big screen is fine. There is, perhaps, little or nothing left to say, other than this is one of the fiercest depictions of insomnia in the cinema: Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle is a Vietnam vet apparently unable to sleep, who drives his yellow cab endlessly through the infernal darkness of New York by night, haunted and obsessed by the squalor, possessed of an ambiguous need to cleanse, to redeem or to destroy. Bernard Herrmann's score is unforgettable and so is Paul Schrader's screenplay. I like to think that Travis's famous line about a real rain coming to...
Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) was last revived five years ago, for its 30th anniversary, but any occasion to return it to the big screen is fine. There is, perhaps, little or nothing left to say, other than this is one of the fiercest depictions of insomnia in the cinema: Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle is a Vietnam vet apparently unable to sleep, who drives his yellow cab endlessly through the infernal darkness of New York by night, haunted and obsessed by the squalor, possessed of an ambiguous need to cleanse, to redeem or to destroy. Bernard Herrmann's score is unforgettable and so is Paul Schrader's screenplay. I like to think that Travis's famous line about a real rain coming to...
- 5/12/2011
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
The 35th anniversary of Martin Scorsese's unforgettable New York drama starring Robert De Niro. It's a film that stays in the bloodstream, says Peter Bradshaw
Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) was last revived five years ago, for its 30th anniversary, but any occasion to return it to the big screen is fine. There is, perhaps, little or nothing left to say, other than this is one of the fiercest depictions of insomnia in the cinema: Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle is a Vietnam vet apparently unable to sleep, who drives his yellow cab endlessly through the infernal darkness of New York by night, haunted and obsessed by the squalor, possessed of an ambiguous need to cleanse, to redeem or to destroy. Bernard Herrmann's score is unforgettable and so is Paul Schrader's screenplay. I like to think that Travis's famous line about a real rain coming to...
Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) was last revived five years ago, for its 30th anniversary, but any occasion to return it to the big screen is fine. There is, perhaps, little or nothing left to say, other than this is one of the fiercest depictions of insomnia in the cinema: Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle is a Vietnam vet apparently unable to sleep, who drives his yellow cab endlessly through the infernal darkness of New York by night, haunted and obsessed by the squalor, possessed of an ambiguous need to cleanse, to redeem or to destroy. Bernard Herrmann's score is unforgettable and so is Paul Schrader's screenplay. I like to think that Travis's famous line about a real rain coming to...
- 5/12/2011
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Night and the City, adapted from Gerald Kersh's novel, is the supreme example of London noir
It's the title that gets you first – so elemental and sinewy. In four short words it yokes together two key 20th-century fetishes: the black swamp of the night (with the moral terrors it summons up) and the concretised urban jungle that has taken on a brutal life of its own. As a pairing, it is definitively modern and anti-pastoral. And with the careful positioning of a definite article, it becomes a phrase of pure, hard poetry of authentically modernist intent. Would The Night and the City have worked so well? Or The Night and City? Or even City and the Night? No chance.
The writer who came up with it, Gerald Kersh, attached it to his third novel. Published in 1938, Night and the City is a high-minded pulp thriller containing a fantastically vivid...
It's the title that gets you first – so elemental and sinewy. In four short words it yokes together two key 20th-century fetishes: the black swamp of the night (with the moral terrors it summons up) and the concretised urban jungle that has taken on a brutal life of its own. As a pairing, it is definitively modern and anti-pastoral. And with the careful positioning of a definite article, it becomes a phrase of pure, hard poetry of authentically modernist intent. Would The Night and the City have worked so well? Or The Night and City? Or even City and the Night? No chance.
The writer who came up with it, Gerald Kersh, attached it to his third novel. Published in 1938, Night and the City is a high-minded pulp thriller containing a fantastically vivid...
- 12/11/2010
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
In less than a week is Labor Day, traditionally the end of summer for many Americans, though the official end is not until Sept. 22nd, the date of the autumnal equinox. Time for fun in the sun is drawing to a close. I’d like to recommend some horror stories and nightmarish novels to give you some chills for the few hot days left in 2010.
Let’s start with some downloadable stories in audio form, and begin with some of the classics. These are all free (they’re in the public domain), and will remind you of some of the greatest monster movies ever made.
The first is “The Picture in the House”, a story by the influential horror author H. P. Lovecraft. With themes of cannibalism and insanity, it reminds me of Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs, of the mad clan in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and...
Let’s start with some downloadable stories in audio form, and begin with some of the classics. These are all free (they’re in the public domain), and will remind you of some of the greatest monster movies ever made.
The first is “The Picture in the House”, a story by the influential horror author H. P. Lovecraft. With themes of cannibalism and insanity, it reminds me of Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs, of the mad clan in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and...
- 9/1/2010
- by Max
- FamousMonsters of Filmland
Joe R. Lansdale has been called a Mojo storyteller, a cult figure, a gifted storyteller, a folklorist, and an American original. I prefer to think of him as a purveyor of the Southern Gothic genre with stops to deliver some of the best crime stories through his recurring characters Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. (If you haven’t read a Hap and Leonard story, you need to get with the program and pick up a copy of Savage Season, their first adventure.)
Joe has also delighted horror fans with film versions of his short stories Bubba Ho-Tep and Incident On and Off a Mountain Road.
Dread Central recently spoke with the laconic Texan about how he feels being a cult icon as well as what’s up next.
DC: Thank you so much for taking time to speak with Dread Central, Joe. With your prolific writing schedule, I’m surprised you had the time.
Joe has also delighted horror fans with film versions of his short stories Bubba Ho-Tep and Incident On and Off a Mountain Road.
Dread Central recently spoke with the laconic Texan about how he feels being a cult icon as well as what’s up next.
DC: Thank you so much for taking time to speak with Dread Central, Joe. With your prolific writing schedule, I’m surprised you had the time.
- 2/4/2010
- by thebellefromhell
- DreadCentral.com
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