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In hindsight, the American cinema of the 1970s has two major legacies attached to it. On the one hand, there's the American New Wave aka the New Hollywood movement, in which "Five Easy Pieces," "Klute," "The French Connection," and other films like them eschewed the mainstream studio filmmaking formula in favor of telling stories that were creatively daring and heartfelt. On the other, there's the dawn of the blockbuster, a trend that continues to this day and whose beginning is most often attributed to Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" from 1975. But while "Jaws" gets the lion's share of the credit for birthing the blockbuster, a good dollop of credit must also go to the other populist trend in American cinema during the decade: the disaster movie.

The disaster film had been around before the '70s in one form or another, but it's the version that was popularized during that decade...

Quick Links'Over the Top' Shamelessly Recycles the 'Rocky' FormulaSylvester Stallone Received a Record-Breaking Salary to Star in 'Over the Top''Over the Top' Triggered a Slump in Stallone's Career

Before Sylvester Stallone became an action star, he was a serious actor. His Oscar-nominated performance in the first Rocky film led many critics to compare Stallone to a young Marlon Brando. Subsequent performances in the films Paradise Alley and Rocky II further showcased his disarmingly offbeat personality and magnetic screen presence.

Stallone reached the peak of his popularity in 1985 with the releases of Rambo: First Blood II and Rocky IV, both of which grossed more than $100 million at the domestic box office. However, amid these blockbuster successes, he made one of the biggest commercial miscalculations of his career with the 1987 sports drama film Over the Top, in which he plays a long-haul truck driver who attempts to become a champion arm wrestler...

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This January, Prime Video is bringing you a lot of entertainment from the Will Ferrell comedy film You’re Cordially Invited to the beloved romantic action comedy film The Fall Guy. However, for the purposes of this article, we are only including the films that are coming to Prime Video this month and have a 90% or higher Rotten Tomatoes score. So, check out the 10 best films that are coming to Prime Video in January 2025 with a 90% or higher Rotten Tomatoes score.

Boogie Nights (January 1) Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94% Credit – New Line Cinema

Boogie Nights is a drama film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The 1997 film is set in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, and it follows Eddie Adams, a high school dropout working as a dishwasher as he becomes one of the biggest adult film stars,...

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If you are a horror fan then there is a big chance that you might have heard about the horror streaming service Shudder, and if you have its subscription you might be wondering what’s in store for you in December 2024. Don’t worry there is a host of new and old horror movies coming to the service in the upcoming month and we have listed the 10 best movies coming to Shudder in December 2024.

Coming Home in the Dark (December 1) Credit – MPI Media Group

Coming Home in the Dark is a psychological horror thriller film directed by James Ashcroft who also co-wrote the screenplay with Eli Kent. Based on the 1995 short story of the same name by Owen Marshall, the 2021 film follows a high-school teacher and his family on a road trip but they are soon captured by...

On Dec. 16, 1974, 20th-Fox and Warner Bros. unveiled in theaters what would become a landmark disaster movie: The 170-minute, John Guillermin-directed Towering Inferno. The movie grossed $116 million domestically at the time. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review of the feature is below:

Movie technology is the star of this awesome Irwin Allen production, a formula disaster picture made into an event by the sheer size of its inflating production values. More ordeal than entertainment, it overwhelms the spectator like a bully playing on the fears of a society trapped in its own burning affluence.

Since the screenplay by Stirling Silliphant has nothing new to say (the “insanity” of building skyscrapers is dealt with in Earthquake), and the general doomsday appeal of the disaster genre has already been established, The Towering Inferno‘s appeal lies entirely in immediate visceral reactions.

So, like Cecil B. DeMille before him, Irwin Allen gives the...

1989’s The Trial of the Incredible Hulk was a made-for-television movie that served as a backdoor pilot for a Daredevil television series. The film also introduced viewers to Matt Murdock / Daredevil and Wilson Fisk / Kingpin. However, before they could go on to headline their own series, plans were scrapped for an unexpected reason.

Rex Smith as Daredevil in The Trial of the Incredible Hulk

According to actor Rex Smith, who played Daredevil in the movie, there was every intention for the backdoor pilot to expand into a television series. However, these plans never materialized because of another network’s rival series and the spotlight cast upon it. Here is how a planned 90s Daredevil series was canceled because of a DC show.

A 1990s Daredevil Series Was Reportedly Canned Because of DC’s The Flash Show

In 1989’s The Trial of the Incredible Hulk, actor Rex Smith played Matt Murdock...

My father, Howard Rodman Sr., worked in one-hour episodic network drama in the 1960s, notably on Route 66 and Naked City. There were no writers rooms then in one-hour drama. Only two people, called “story editors,” and a pool of freelancers. That was it. The two of them — my father and Stirling Silliphant — wrote or rewrote every single episode.

You can only imagine — meaning you can’t imagine — the pressure they were under. In those days, a season of television was 32-39 weeks. For comparison: picture having to write and film four seasons of Succession in a span of ten months. (And then, after the shortest of breaks, doing it all again.)

They wrote pages in Los Angeles that were put on airplanes in hopes that they could be shot the next morning in New York. They used every prescription drug available to keep up the pace.

During the course of...

George Maharis, the star of “Route 66” who went on to appear on “Fantasy Island” and other shows, died Wednesday in Beverly Hills.

His friend and caretaker Marc Bahan announced his death on Facebook, writing that he was “above all a great guy who would do anything for anyone. My dear friend, you will be terribly missed.”

Maharis co-starred with Martin Milner in the early 1960s series “Route 66,” and received an Emmy nomination for his role as Buz, a handsome beatnik-adjacent working class man. Shot on location across the U.S., the adventure series portrayed two young men who travel around in a Corvette, looking for work and adventure as they struggle to find themselves. Part way through the third season, Maharis left the show after being hospitalized for hepatitis. He asserted later in an interview that his departure wasn’t because he wanted a higher salary or wanted to get into movies,...

George Maharis, who starred as the brooding Buz Murdock on Route 66 before he quit the acclaimed 1960s CBS drama after contracting hepatitis, has died. He was 94.

Maharis died Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills, his longtime friend and caregiver Marc Bahan told The Hollywood Reporter.

Route 66, created by Stirling Silliphant and Herbert B. Leonard, featured the Hell’s Kitchen native Murdock and Martin Milner‘s Yale dropout Tod Stiles touring the highways of America in Tod’s Chevrolet Corvette, encountering adventure along the way.

The show “was really kind of a searching or what you may have seen hundreds of years ago where the people came over the mountains to go from one place to the other to find a better life, a place where they belonged, and they didn’t rely on anybody else to do it for them,” Maharis told The Seattle Times in 2008.

All 116 installments of...

Walter Mirisch earned his Oscar for this Sidney Poitier hit directed by Norman Jewison. The tense mystery thriller was also a significant cultural step for Civil Rights, Hollywood-style: Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs claims the right to not turn the other cheek. Stars Rod Steiger, Lee Grant, Warren Oates and Larry Gates are in top form. Kino’s new 4K release maximizes the impact of Haskell Wexler’s steamy cinematography and Quincy Jones’ rich music, and includes bonus Blu-ray encodings of the two sequels made a few years later.

In the Heat of the Night 4K

4K Ultra HD

Kl Studio Classics

1967 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 110 min. / Street Date April 19, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 39.95

Starring: Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates, Lee Grant, Larry Gates, James Patterson, William Schallert, Beah Richards, Peter Whitney, Matt Clark, Scott Wilson, Timothy Scott, Quentin Dean, Anthony James, Alan Oppenheimer.

Cinematography: Haskell Wexler

Art Director: Paul Groesse...

Peter Yates’ excellent war-movie follow-up to Bullitt landed in the wrong year: the beautifully produced and directed action thriller was barely seen in America. Royal Navy mechanic Peter O’Toole swears vengeance on the U-Boat commander who sunk his ship and murdered its entire crew. Locals in a Caribbean backwater help him to strike back: he must first teach himself to fly an airplane. With support from Horst Janson, Sian Phillips and the great Philippe Noiret, it’s a wartime suspense nail-biter with a little manic obsession thrown in as well. Indicator’s extras feature the great editor-director John Glen, who relates the exciting story of the filming on location in Venezuela.

Murphy’s War

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1971 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 107 min. / Limited Edition / Street Date May 30, 2022 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £19.99

Starring: Peter O’Toole, Sian Phillips, Philippe Noiret, Horst Janson, John Hallam, Ingo Mogendorf.

Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe...

Retro-active: The Best From The Cinema Retro Archives

Review – Naked City: The Complete Series

Rlj Entertainment / 6,063 minutes

By Harvey F. Chartrand

Naked City was like no other TV series before or since – Michel Moriarty, star of Law and Order, once told this reviewer.

Inspired by Jules Dassin's 1948 film of the same name, Naked City centers on the detectives of the NYPD’s 65th Precinct, but the criminals and New York City itself often played as prominent a role in the dramas as the series regulars. Like the film it was based on, Naked City (1958- 1963) was shot almost entirely on location. The first season ran as a half-hour show under the title The Naked City, starring James Franciscus and John McIntire playing, respectively, Detective Jimmy Halloran and Lieutenant Dan Muldoon—the same roles essayed by Don Taylor and Barry Fitzgerald in the film.

The Naked City also starred Harry Bellaver as Det.

Jason Kothari, Hong Kong-born entrepreneur and film producer who was an executive producer on Vin Diesel-starring “Bloodshot,” has acquired all rights to The Silent Flute, the spiritual martial arts project co-written by martial arts icon Bruce Lee in 1970. The project is to be set up as a limited series with John Fusco (“Marco Polo”) as screenwriter and executive producer.

The story of “Silent Flute” is set in a dystopian future after mankind has suffered from pandemics, fires and civil wars, and where all weapons and combat arts are banned. It follows a raw fighter who overcomes grave obstacles and loss to reach enlightenment and become the best fighter in the world.

“The Silent Flute” film script was a five-year collaboration between Lee and his friends and martial arts students, Oscar-winning writer Stirling Silliphant and Oscar-winning actor James Coburn. It encapsulated Lee’s vision for the true essence of martial...

On Nov. 8, Norman Lloyd will celebrate his 106th birthday, which is just one more accomplishment for a man whose nearly-100-year career is filled with amazing milestones. Lloyd worked as an actor, director and/or producer in theater, the early days of radio, film and TV. He wasn’t a household name, but he has always been well known and respected within the industry — not only for his work, but for the people he worked with. That list includes Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Elia Kazan, Jean Renoir, Robin Williams, Martin Scorsese, Denzel Washington, Mark Harmon, Cameron Diaz, Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer.

As his contemporary Karl Malden summed up in 2007, “He is the history of our industry.”

Lloyd was born Norman Perlmutter Nov. 8, 1914, in Jersey City, N.J. He took singing and dancing lessons and was a paid professional by the age of 9. He performed with...

Mill Creek and Kit Parker have raided the Columbia vault once again in search of Noir Gold from the ‘fifties. Their selection this time around has a couple of prime gems, several straight crime thrillers and domestic jeopardy tales, and also a couple of interesting Brit imports. They aren’t really ‘Noir’ either, but they’re still unexpected and different. The top title is Don Siegel’s incomparable The Lineup, but also on board is a snappy anti-commie epic by André De Toth. Get set for a lineup of impressive leading ladies: Diana Dors, Arlene Dahl, Anita Ekberg — and the great Colleen Dewhurst as a card-carrying Red!

Noir Archive 9-Film Collection Volume 3

The Shadow on the Window, The Long Haul, Pickup Alley, The Tijuana Story, She Played with Fire, The Case Against Brooklyn, The Lineup, The Crimson Kimono, Man on a String

Blu-ray

Mill Creek / Kit Parker

1957 -1960 / B&w...

“A Slap Heard Around The World”

By Raymond Benson

The year 1967 was a milestone for actor Sidney Poitier. First, To Sir, with Love garnered sizable box-office for this British picture, and then Hollywood produced In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, two back-to-back revolutionary movies that solidified Poitier’s position not only as Tinsel Town’s only black leading man at the time, but also as an icon of the civil rights movement and the representative—certainly not by choice—of his race in films to the rest of America. Throughout his career, Poitier maintained an intelligence and dignity that was tangible, and this is what made him such a charismatic star.

Both In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner were Oscar nominees for Best Picture. A winner of five awards, Heat took home the gold. Rod Steiger,...

It’s time to celebrate the Irwin Allen disaster epics for what they are — huge, indigestible spectacles that first seem funny and then congeal into a cinematic badness that words cannot describe. This sprawling ordeal tortures good actors and shatters every limit of audience patience. I alone have survived to tell thee. Is a fair review even possible?

The Swarm

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1978 / Color / 2:40 widescreen / 156 116 min. /Extended Edition / Street Date September 25, 2018 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, Lee Grant, José Ferrer, Patty Duke, Slim Pickens, Bradford Dillman, Fred MacMurray, Henry Fonda, Cameron Mitchell, Christian Juttner, Alejandro Rey.

Cinematography: Fred J. Koenekamp

Film Editor: Harold F. Kress

Visual Effects: L.B. Abbott

Original Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Written by Stirling Silliphant, from the novel by Arthur Herzog

Produced and Directed by Irwin Allen

“I never dreamed that it would...

Inquiring minds want to know — why you’re thinking about a Brick Wall. John Wyndham’s diabolically clever alien invasion fantasy is taken straight from nature: children fathered by who-knows-what are found to possess a hive mentality and brain-powers that we puny Earthlings cannot oppose. Is it simply Us against Them, or was this perhaps a paranoid image of anti-social, dangerous 1950s teens? The CineSavant review is a full essay this time.

Village of the Damned

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1960 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 77 min. / Street Date July 31, 2018 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Martin Stephens, Michael Gwynn,

Laurence Naismith.

Cinematography: Geoffrey Faithfull

Film Editor: Gordon Hales

Special Effects: Tom Howard

Original Music: Ron Goodwin

Written by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, Ronald Kinnoch from the novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham

Produced by Ronald Kinnoch

Directed by Wolf Rilla

These are the eyes that Hypnotize!

The...

Joseph Wambaugh’s breakthrough novel went through a blender to fit George C. Scott into the narrative, but it’s still a great cop show with terrific work from Stacy Keach and Scott Wilson, not to mention Jane Alexander and Rosalind Cash. The pro-cop agenda has a definite tone of personal experience, and the grim finish is anything but feel-good puffery.

The New Centurions

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1972 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 103 min. / Street Date March 20, 2018 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store / 29.95

Starring: George C. Scott, Stacy Keach, Jane Alexander, Scott Wilson, Rosalind Cash, Erik Estrada, Clifton James, James Sikking, Isabel Sanford, Carol Speed, William Atherton, Ed Lauter, Dolph Sweet, Stefan Gierasch, Roger E. Mosley, Pepe Serna, Kitten Natividad.

Cinematography: Ralph Woolsey

Film Editor: Robert C. Jones

Production Design: Boris Leven

Original Music: Quincy Jones

Written by Stirling Silliphant, Robert Towne (uncredited) from the book by Joseph Wambaugh

Produced by Robert Chartoff,...

Fifty years ago, the 40th Academy Awards proved to be a watershed moment. The five Best Picture nominees — and eventual winner — all echoed the changing, turbulent times, not just in cinema but society, underscored by a tragedy that occurred the week before: Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

King’s April 4, 1968, assassination delayed the Oscars by two days, to April 10, and Gregory Peck, then-academy president, opened the show with remarks about the late civil rights activist and his impact.

“Society has always been reflected in its art and one measure of Dr. King’s influence on the society we live in is that of the five films nominated for Best Picture of the year, two dealt with subject of understanding between the races,” Peck said.

Those two films also both starred the No. 1 box office champ of the year, the first black Best Actor Oscar winner, Sidney Poitier (1963’s “Lilies of the Field...

Racial issues in the south. Small town police department. Best Picture nominee at the Oscars. Lead performance frontrunner to win. These are certainly descriptions of 2018 Oscar contender “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri” starring Frances McDormand but they also describe the film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture 50 years ago: “In the Heat of the Night” (watch the video above).

With “Get Out” and “Three Billboards” as big awards hits for 2017 and “Moonlight” as Best Picture the previous year, it looks as though films dealing with racism and civil rights have risen to a new level of recognition from the Academy. One of the first to be embraced by Oscar voters was the 1967 film “In the Heat of the Night,” a crime drama about an African-American detective (Sidney Poitier) and bigoted police chief (Rod Steiger) in rural Mississippi.

SEEOscar Best Picture Gallery: History of Every Academy Award-Winning Movie

Films...

By John M. Whalen

In the opening scene of Republic Pictures “The Man Who Died Twice,” (1950) a car drives along a mountain road and two cops in a patrol car remark that it’s nightclub owner T. J. Brennon (Don Megowan) passing by. Next thing you know the car goes off a cliff and explodes in flames. Then a woman (Vera Ralston) gets out of a cab in front of her apartment building and looks up at the balcony where two men are fighting. She shrieks in horror as one of the men comes plummeting down and lands on the sidewalk at her feet. Splat! She watches as the other man climbs up a fire escape ladder to the roof. But not before a third man appears on the balcony and the guy on the fire escape shoots him. Vera Ralston faints from all the excitement and falls on the...

By John M. Whalen

In 1988 Oscar-winning screenwriter Stirling Silliphant (“In the Heat of the Night”, “The Poseidon Adventure”) got fed up with what he called “the eel pit of Hollywood,” and moved to Thailand to start a new life. According to the La Times, he’d grown tired of the power plays, the egos, the hypocrisy and the dictum that homage must be paid to the box office. He left and never came back.

Hollywood has always had its dark side-- just read “Hollywood Babylon.” Silliphant’s “eel pit” was never a more apt description than when, a few years later in 2015, the film industry was rocked by WikiLeaks release of some really nasty Sony emails that gave a glimpse into what powerful producers and studio execs really thought of some of their stars. Scott Rudin called Angelina Jolie a “minimally talented spoiled brat.” Clint Culpepper called Kevin Hart “a whore,...

was a young Canadian filmmaker who had made the transition from TV when producer Walter Mirisch sent him a script. Written by Stirling Silliphant, it was a low-budget drama set in the South — an adaptation of a 1965 novel by John Ball ­— about a black police detective who gets caught up in a murder investigation. Jewison liked it immediately, but he put Silliphant through six months of rewrites to create what would became 1967's In the Heat of the Night. The film won five Oscars, including best picture, adapted screenplay and lead actor for Rod...

Manos: The Hands of Fate is a film I’ve been reading about for quite some time. Infamous for its ineptitude, it’s one of those “so bad it’s good” kind of movies that has achieved cult status due to its terrible acting, nonsensical plot, and technical errors. Shot in the 60s, it was written and directed by Harold P. Warren, an insurance salesman who, according to legend, made a bet with visiting location scout Stirling Silliphant that he could film a horror movie with an extremely limited budget. And that he did. What he didn’t do, however, was direct a particularly compelling or even scary motion picture. The stories about Manos are infamous, and could be considered more interesting than the film itself. It...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Tom Neyman, best known for his role as The Master in the 1966 cult classic Manos: The Hands Of Fate, died on Saturday. His daughter, Jackey Neyman, who also appeared in the film as young Debbie, shared the news on Facebook, stating that Neyman “has now transcended to become Manos. #HeIsAlwaysWithUs.” He was 80.

Born in 1935, Neyman—a professional artist—was active in community theater throughout the ‘60s. His only film credit is Harold P. Warren’s Manos: The Hands Of Fate, made famous by Mystery Science Theater 3000 and deemed “The Worst Movie Ever Made” by Entertainment Weekly. Made as a result of a bet with In The Heat Of The Night screenwriter Stirling Silliphant for a budget of $19,000, Manos featured local theater actors and models and was shot on 16mm, with all dialogue and sound effects dubbed in during post-production. Manos premiered on November 15 ...

The great Fred Zinnemann's last feature is a very personal story, a fairly uncomplicated drama with a mountain climbing backdrop. Sean Connery plays older than his age as a Scotsman on an Alpine vacation, toying with social disaster. With excellent, non- grandstanding performances from Betsy Brantley and Lambert Wilson. Five Days One Summer DVD-r The Warner Archive Collection 1982 / Color / 1:85 enhanced widescreen / 108 96 min. / Street Date July 12, 2016 / available through the WBshop / 21.99 Starring Sean Connery, Betsy Brantley, Lambert Wilson, Jennifer Hilary, Isabel Dean, Gérard Buhr, Anna Massey, Sheila Reid, Emilie Lihou. Cinematography Giuseppe Rotunno Film Editor Stuart Baird Original Music Elmer Bernstein Written by Michael Austin from the story 'Maiden Maiden' by Kay Boyle Produced and Directed by Fred Zinnemann

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Fred Zinnemann is a filmmaker that I've come to admire, as much for his personal integrity as for the movies he made. He could be inconsistent and...

Presenting murderous moppets on screen is always a dicey proposition. For every The Bad Seed or The Omen, there is always The Good Son or Mikey skulking about. It’s all about the fear – making a five or ten year old believably frightening is hard to do. As audience members, we put our faith in filmmakers to produce tension, conflict, and danger in a palpable (but not necessarily plausible) way, and when it’s tested we end up wading through Children of the Corn. But when our faith is rewarded, we find ourselves in the Village of the Damned (1960), a seminal killer kid chiller.

Based on the novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, Village was produced by MGM’s British division and distributed there in July, with a December rollout in the States. The film was a great success, both with critics and audiences alike, luring them in with...

Special Mention: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

Directed by Dario Argento

Screenplay by Dario Argento

1970, Italy

Genre: Giallo

One of the most self-assured directorial debuts of the 70’s was Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Not only was it a breakthrough film for the master of Giallo, but it was also a box office hit and had critics buzzing, regardless if they liked it or not. Although Argento would go on to perfect his craft in later films, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage went a long way in popularizing the Giallo genre and laid the groundwork for later classics like Deep Red. A difficult film to discuss without spoiling many of its most impressive and famous scenes, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a fairly straightforward murder mystery, albeit with many twists, turns and one of the best surprise endings of all time. But...

Reteaming for the first time in over a decade, Steven Spielberg‘s Bridge of Spies follows Tom Hanks the true story of James B. Donovan as an unblemished Brooklyn lawyer who becomes involved in defending a suspected Kgb agent (Mark Rylance). The snappy, propulsive part-courtroom drama, part-international thriller held its world premiere at the New York Film Festival, but shortly before the director and his cast gathered to discuss the making of the project.

We’ve highlighted the most worthwhile discussion points, including an original iteration half-a-century ago that never went into production, the relevance of the film today, collaborating with Joel and Ethan Coen, who co-wrote the script, Spielberg’s updated thoughts on the state of Hollywood, and much more. Check it out below.

Steven Spielberg on Finding the Story and Gregory Peck’s Original Iteration

Upon coming to the material, Spielberg said, “I knew nothing about this story two years ago.

Clint Eastwood revisited Harry Callahan three more times, usually whenever his career was in the dumps. If Dirty Harry was a cultural phenomenon and Magnum Force a respectable follow-up, the rest are uninspired cash-ins. The main law Harry enforces in these sequels is the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Given Dirty Harry‘s San Francisco setting, something like The Enforcer (1976) was inevitable. After all, San Fran hosted Haight-Ashbury, hippie capital of the world; was a favored site for Black Panther and Sds protests; headquarters of the nascent gay rights movement; victim of Weathermen bombings and the racially-charged Zebra murders. Writers Gail Morgan Hickman and S.W. Schurr based their script, originally titled “Moving Target,” on the Symbionese Liberation Army which kidnapped Patty Hearst. Dean Riesner (who cowrote the original Harry) and Stirling Silliphant (In the Heat of the Night) polished the film.

Harry battles the People’s Revolutionary Strike Froce, led by...

Today on Trailers from Hell, Josh Olson takes a look at Don Siegel's savage 1958 thriller "The Lineup," the big screen adaptation of the 1950s TV series starring Warner Anderson. Warner Anderson, star of the long-running early fifties TV show "The Lineup," repeated his role in 1958's big screen version but the real stars of director Don Siegel's brutal thriller were Eli Wallach and Robert Keith as a pair of sociopathic crooks and, of course, Siegel himself who masterminded several lethal set pieces including the hair-raising climax (involving a chase on an unfinished freeway). Seasoned TV writer Stirling Silliphant ("Route 66," "Naked City") was responsible for the screenplay and cinematographer Hal Mohr ("The Wild One," "Destry Rides Again") lensed the appropriately gritty black and white San Francisco landscapes.

Warner Anderson, star of the long-running early fifties TV show The Lineup, repeated his role in 1958's big screen version but the real stars of director Don Siegel's brutal thriller were Eli Wallach and Robert Keith as a pair of sociopathic crooks and, of course, Siegel himself who masterminded several lethal set pieces including the hair-raising climax (involving a chase on an unfinished freeway). Seasoned TV writer Stirling Silliphant (Route 66, Naked City) was responsible for the screenplay and cinematographer Hal Mohr (The Wild One, Destry Rides Again) lensed the appropriately gritty black and white San Francisco landscapes.

The post The Lineup appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

Throughout the month of October, Editor-in-Chief and resident Horror expert Ricky D, will be posting a list of his favorite Horror films of all time. The list will be posted in six parts. Click here to see every entry.

****

Enjoy!

150: Session 9

Directed by Brad Anderson

Written by Stephen Gevedon and Brad Anderson

2001, USA

If there was ever a perfect setting for a horror movie, it would be the abandoned Danvers State Mental Hospital. Built in 1878 on an isolated site in rural Massachusetts, it was a multi-acre, self-contained psychiatric hospital rumoured to have been the birthplace of the pre-frontal lobotomy. The hospital was the setting for the 2001 horror film Session 9, where an asbestos clean-up crew discover a series of nine tapes, which have recorded a patient with multiple personalities, all of which are innocent, except for number nine. With a shoestring budget and no real special effects, Session 9...

They called it the "Slap Heard 'Round the World." It happened partway through "In the Heat of the Night" -- a movie released at the height of racial tensions during the Civil Rights Era exactly 45 years ago (on August 2, 1967) -- in a scene where a bigoted Southern cotton plantation owner slaps Sidney Poitier (and Poitier slaps back just as hard). Years of deferential behavior, both from Poitier in saintly role-model performances, and from every black actor ever to perform in a Hollywood movie, halted with a mighty thwack. It's one of the most memorable moments in film history and helped earn "In the Heat of the Night" the Best Picture Oscar that year. Even today, the scene remains brutally effective, a reminder of how much has changed in 45 years, and how much has not. The film -- in which a racist Southern sheriff (Rod Steiger) and a haughty black police...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Oct. 16, 2012

Price: DVD $24.95, Blu-ray $29.95

Studio: Olive Films

Anne Bancroft and Steven Hill star in The Slender Thread.

The 1965 film drama The Slender Thread marks the filmmaking debut of director Sydney Pollack (The Firm).

The movie deals with a young woman named Inga Dyson (Anne Bancroft, The Graduate), who takes an overdose of prescription pills and calls a crisis clinic for help. College volunteer Alan Newell (Sidney Poitier, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?) fields the call and tries to keep the suicidal woman on the line while asking the police to trace down the caller.

Boasting a supporting cast that includes Telly Savalas (TV’s Kojak), Ed Asner (JFK) and Dabney Coleman (TV’s Boardwealk Empire), The Slender Thread was written by Stirling Silliphant (The Towering Inferno) and based upon an actual incident reported in Time Magazine. Additionally, the film features a rousing score by Quincy Jones...

Apparently sometime between his untimely death in 1973 and becoming the biggest Asian movie star in the world, martial arts legend Bruce Lee was working on a script called “The Silent Flute” with actor James Coburn and Hollywood screenwriter Stirling Silliphant. The film is supposedly set 800 years in the future, in a post-apocalyptic dystopian society. Although it’s apparently sci-fi-ish, given that Lee came up with the idea and was writing it, I’m guessing it’s also heavy on the martial arts. Originally titled “The Silent Flute”, the film is now on the slate of China’s National Film Capital, the country’s State-run/State-financed/State-controlled investment into films that will incorporate Chinese actors/storylines with Hollywood moviemaking know-how. “The Silent Flute” will feature two male leads, one from China and one from Hollywood (re: an Asian and a Caucasian actor), with an eye towards International markets. (Update: I’ve...

Harold P. Warren’s Manos: the Hands of Fate is one those adorably odd micro-budgeted films that have garnered a strong cult following because of an astonishing, unclassifiable “otherness.” Complete with actors who appear to be hypnotized, bizarre dubbed dialogue and myriad moments of 'whaaaa?', Manos is less a film than it is an experience. A fairly trippy experience.

It was made far and away from the typical Hollywood system, defying category, logic and basic narrative structure. Shot in El Paso, Texas, in 1966, the film was the result of a bet Warren made with screenwriter Stirling Silliphant (The Poseidon Adventure). The two struck up a conversation at a coffee shop while the writer was in town shooting a film. Warren told Silliphant that making a movie would be easy and bet him that he could shoot one entirely on his own. Using local theater actors and a script that...

I’ve always been a war film buff, maybe because I grew up with them at a time when they were a regular part of the cinema landscape. That’s why I read, with particular interest, my Sound on Sight colleague Edgar Chaput’s recent pieces on The Flowers of War (“The Flowers of War Is an Uneven but Interesting Chinese Ww II Film” – posted 2/20/12) and The Front Line (The Front Line Rises to the Occasion to Overcome Its Familiarity” – 2/16/12) with such interest. An even more fun read was the back-and-forth between Edgar and Sos’s Michael Ryan over the latter (“The Sound on Sight Debate on Korea’s The Front Line” – 2/12/12), with Michael unimpressed because the movie had “…nothing new to add to the war genre,” and Edgar coming back with “…‘new’ is not always what a film must strive for. So long as it does well what it set out to do…...

DVD Release Date: May 22, 2012

Price: DVD $129.99

Studio: Shout! Factory

George Maharis( l.) and Martin Milner get their kicks on Route 66.

Shout! Factory gets its kicks with the release of the 1960 road tip drama television show Route 66: The Complete Series which marks the first time all four seasons of the show have been issued as one set.

Created by Academy Award-winning writer Stirling Silliphant and producer Herbert Leonard, Route 66 follow the lives of two young men: Yale graduate Tod Stiles (Martin Milner, TV’s Adam-12), an intellectual who has led a privileged and sheltered life, and Buz Murdock (George Maharis, TV’s The Most Deadly Game), a tough young man raised in “Hell’s Kitchen” who’s been struggling his entire life just to survive. When his wealthy father dies, Tod finds himself unexpectedly penniless with just one possession, a Chevrolet Corvette. On a quest to find...

Hollywood script doctor favoured by Sydney Pollack

Like certain potentates who travel with a personal physician, the director Sydney Pollack almost always had his own script doctor close at hand to revitalise a sick screenplay. David Rayfiel, who has died of congestive heart failure aged 87, was called in on the majority of Pollack's features, usually for a few weeks, in order to fix specific problems, rewrite here and there, and add and subtract lines. Though well remunerated for his work, Rayfiel was usually given no screen credit.

However, the spotlight was sometimes turned on him, such as when Robert Redford called Rayfiel "the unsung hero of almost every picture Sydney Pollack and I have made together". When Out of Africa (1985) won the Oscar for best picture, Pollack thanked Rayfiel for "keeping us honest" and Kurt Luedtke, upon accepting the Academy award for his screenplay of the same film, also acknowledged Rayfiel.

Csu Archives / Everett Collection Ayn Rand testifying before House Un-American Activities Committee as a friendly witness, on Oct. 20, 1947.

In her old age, after she had stopped writing essay-length exegeses of the moral and political prescriptions contained in her fiction, after her large cult following had left her and dispersed, after the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s, after lung cancer, Ayn Rand spent evenings playing Scrabble with a few regular visitors to her Murray Hill apartment and casting and recasting...

Part I: Super Chiefs — Calley, Evans, Zanuck and the Passing of the Studio Torches

From the 1960s into the 1980s, one by one, the legendary studios of old – MGM, United Artists, Warner Bros., Paramount, Columbia, 20th Century Fox — were gobbled up by conglomerates, some of which had had almost no previous interests in the entertainment business, such as Paramount’s acquirer, Gulf + Western (a motley collection of properties ranging from Caribbean sugar companies to auto parts), and Kinney National Service (a hodgepodge of funeral homes and parking lots which bought up Warner Bros.). This corporatization of the major studios – the once mighty fiefdoms of the old moguls subjugated by invaders with little or no practical or emotional affinity for movies – is often viewed disparagingly as a sea change signaling the end of the grand Old Hollywood; the Hollywood of Gable and Garland, of Casablanca (1942) and Gone with the Wind (1939).

Factually,...

In real life the world's bees may be facing decimation from colony collapse, but that apparently hasn't stopped filmmakers from deciding to launch a remake of the 1978 Irwin Allen disaster film The Swarm, in which killer South American bees join forces to launch a massive attack on humans.

On the other hand, maybe it's time the bees had a little payback for man's mistreatment of the planet…and maybe the filmmakers — Roy Lee (The Ring) and Steven Schneider (Paranormal Activity) — will have the foresight to factor that into their story. And there is recent precedent for such an occurrence, though from Africanized bees.

The original film starred Michael Caine as an entomologist who learns that killer bees from South America have been coming together to form huge swarms. He sets out to stop the military from attacking and worsening the imbalance in nature, ultimately teaming up with them to prevent...

By Jeff Sneider 

Bruce Lee has been dead for nearly 37 years but one of his movie treatments is still fighting its way to the bigscreen.

"Police Academy" producer Paul Maslansky is developing "The Silent Flute," a martial arts feature based on a treatment by Lee, reports Variety. Lee conceived the original story with James Coburn and Stirling Silliphant in 1969.

Maslansky and the late Sandy Howard produced an earlier version o...

There's always a serious cachet to making a film based on a 'lost' story or treatment from a deceased talent. For example, we've just been talking about Lunatic at Large, which will be based on a long treatment Jim Thompson wrote for Stanley Kubrick. Today an old Bruce Lee story is coming back to light. In the late '60s Lee wrote The Silent Flute, which he conceived with James Coburn (envisioned as Lee's co-star for the film) and Stirling Silliphant, before it went by the wayside prior to Lee's death. Now producer Paul Maslansky wants to mount the story as a new martial arts film. Variety has quotes from Maslansky, who says this "will be an epic martial arts adventure film that promises to honor Bruce Lee's original artistic and philosophical conception. It also promises to reach new levels of action and adventure never before seen in martial arts filmmaking.

DVD Playhouse—July 2009

By

Allen Gardner

Do The Right Thing: 20th Anniversary Edition (Universal) Spike Lee’s groundbreaking fable about race relations in an ethnically mixed Brooklyn neighborhood during a sweltering New York summer remains as potent, timely and prescient as it was in 1989. Lee is among the cast, which also includes John Turturro, Danny Aiello, Samuel L. Jackson, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Rosie Perez (to name a few), that provide the tableaux-like framework for this stunning work. Criminally ignored by Oscar (it wasn't even nominated for Best Picture, but did garner nods for Supporting Actor Danny Aiello and Lee’s screenplay), it endures as a timeless classic. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Commentary by Lee, Ernest Dickerson, Wynn Thomas, Joie Lee; Documentary; Deleted and extended scenes; Featurettes. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround.

Coraline (Universal) A young girl moves into an old Victorian house with her parents...

By Spencer Lloyd Peet

Normal 0 false false false En-us X-none X-none There have been many books written about the charismatic ‘King of Kung Fu’ Bruce Lee since his untimely death in 1973. None, however, have captured his passion for filmmaking quite like Bruce Lee: Legends of the Dragon by Steve Kerridge. This three volume pictorial history of the making of his third Hong Kong action film, Way of the Dragon, follows ‘The little Dragon’ through true timeline from April to August 1972 in Italy and Hong Kong. Each book is lavishly illustrated with several rare and unseen photos that have come from the Bruce Lee Estate archive and the personal collection of Bruce’s friends and colleagues. Many of those who were involved in the film, such as Bruce’s business partner Raymond Chow, actor and American Karate Champion Chuck Norris, leading Lady Nora Miao and production manager Chaplin Chang, share their stories.

You can relive a 1974 classic in 1080p this July. The Towering Inferno will be released on Blu-ray on July 14. We have no pricing details at this time, but you can take a look at the cover art and special features below. The film stars Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, William Holden and Faye Dunaway.

A dedication ceremony at the world's tallest skyscraper turns into a high-rise catastrophe when a defective wire in its systems-control panel causes an electrical flare-up. Within minutes the gala event turns into a hellish inferno, as a raging fire traps society's most prominent citizens on the top floor. Winner of three Academy Awards, this spectacular suspense thriller features dazzling special effects and a star studded cast including Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, William Holden and Faye Dunaway.

Special Features:

- Inside the Tower: We Remember Featurette

- Innovating Tower: The Spfx of an Inferno Featurette

- The Art...

This year's Halloween might be dominated by Heath Ledger Jokers, but a few years from now, expect Robby the Robot to be the costume to beat.

That's right, sports fans, Fordbidden Planet is coming back to theaters with a fresh relaunch. The Hollywood Reporter says that fan-friendly scribe J. Michael Straczynski is writing the script for Warner Bros., with Joel Silver producing through Silver Pictures.

Released in 1956, Forbidden Planet features a space expedition to a far-off colony populated by scientists. When they arrive, they find only the troubled Dr. Morbius and his daughter. Morbius, now smarter due to alien technology, warns that there's an invisible monster terrorizing the planet. Dubbed a "monster from the id," the scientist, his daughter and the expedition's captain band together to fight the creature and survive the encounter. Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis and Leslie Nielsen starred in the picture. The longest lasting effect of the...