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One of the quirks of Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna's annual jamboree celebrating restored or rediscovered movies, is that expensive products of the Hollywood studio system can be just as obscure and hard-to-see as low-budget oddities, foreign arthouse affairs and forgotten silents from a hundred years ago. Dave Kehr's retrospective of neglected items from Universal's vaults demonstrates this clearly.James Whale always liked to say By Candlelight was his favorite of his own films, bypassing the more celebrated Frankenstein films. It's a romantic comedy of confused identities and it's no surprise that P.G. Wodehouse had a hand in the stage source.But in this movie, when a butler impersonates his master in order to seduce a wealthy lady who turns out to be a maid impersonating her mistress, all the irony of Wodehouse's inversion of traditional ideas about class has gone. All right, so George Orwell argued persuasively that Wodehouse...

The retrospective Frank Capra, The American Dreamer is showing April 10 - May 31, 2017 in the United Kingdom.Frank CapraFrank Capra has fallen badly out of fashion in recent decades. While still well-known for the extraordinary Depression-era purple patch that produced It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), the critics have rarely been kind. His work is routinely derided as “Capra-corn” for its perceived sentimentality and “fairy tale” idealism while the man himself is written off in favour of contemporaries Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch.Elliot Stein, writing in Sight & Sound in 1972, attacked Capra’s “fantasies of good will, which at no point conflict with middle-class American status quo values”, arguing that his “shrewdly commercial manipulative tracts” consist of little more than “philistine-populist notions and greeting-card sentiments”. Pauline Kael found him “softheaded,” Derek Malcolm a huckster hawking “cosily absurd fables.” To an extent,...

A thyroid operation every ten years, plus regular libations of an eerie green liquid, has allowed Anton Diffring to live over a hundred years without looking a year over forty. Hammer’s medical horror show features Christopher Lee, Hazel Court and sumptuous cinematography, but not a whole lot of surprises.

The Man Who Could Cheat Death

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1959 / Color/ 1:66 widescreen / 83 min. / Street Date March 14, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Anton Diffring, Hazel Court, Christopher Lee, Arnold Marle, Delphi Lawrence.

Cinematography: Jack Asher

Production Design: Bernard Robinson

Art Direction: Roy Ashton

Film Editor: John Dunsford

Original Music: Richard Rodney Bennett

Written by Jimmy Sangster from a play by Barré Lyndon

Produced by Michael Carreras

Directed by Terence Fisher

For its first two years of Technicolor horror Hammer Films could seemingly do no wrong. In just a few months their revivals of classic horror motifs were being bankrolled and...

'A Beautiful Mind' with Russell Crowe. '31 Days of Oscar' on TCM: 'The Wind and the Lion,' 'The Man Who Would Be King' Turner Classic Movies' “31 Days of Oscar” continues on Saturday, Feb. 6, '16, with more recent fare – as in, several films released in the last four decades. Among these are The Wind and the Lion, The Man Who Would Be King, A Beautiful Mind, Swing Shift, and Broadcast News. John Milius' The Wind and the Lion and John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King are both 1975 releases featuring “Westerners” (i.e., white people) stranded in “exotic” and potentially dangerous locales (i.e., places inhabited by dark-skinned non-Christians) in the distant past: the former in early 20th century Morocco; the latter in a remote region in colonial India in the late 19th century. (That particular area, Kafiristan, is located in today's Afghanistan.) The thematic similarities between the two films end there,...

'Sorrell and Son' with H.B. Warner and Alice Joyce. 'Sorrell and Son' 1927 movie: Long thought lost, surprisingly effective father-love melodrama stars a superlative H.B. Warner Partially shot on location in England and produced independently by director Herbert Brenon at Joseph M. Schenck's United Artists, the 1927 Sorrell and Son is a skillful melodrama about paternal devotion in the face of both personal and social adversity. This long-thought-lost version of Warwick Deeping's 1925 bestseller benefits greatly from the veteran Brenon's assured direction, deservedly shortlisted in the first year of the Academy Awards.* Crucial to the film's effectiveness, however, is the portrayal of its central character, a war-scarred Englishman who sacrifices it all for the happiness of his son. Luckily, the London-born H.B. Warner, best remembered for playing Jesus Christ in another 1927 release, Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings, is the embodiment of honesty, selflessness, and devotion. Less is...

Greta Garbo movie 'The Kiss.' Greta Garbo movies on TCM Greta Garbo, a rarity among silent era movie stars, is Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” performer today, Aug. 26, '15. Now, why would Garbo be considered a silent era rarity? Well, certainly not because she easily made the transition to sound, remaining a major star for another decade. Think Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, William Powell, Fay Wray, Marie Dressler, Wallace Beery, John Barrymore, Warner Baxter, Janet Gaynor, Constance Bennett, etc. And so much for all the stories about actors with foreign accents being unable to maintain their Hollywood stardom following the advent of sound motion pictures. A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer star, Garbo was no major exception to the supposed rule. Mexican Ramon Novarro, another MGM star, also made an easy transition to sound, and so did fellow Mexicans Lupe Velez and Dolores del Rio, in addition to the very British...

Joan Crawford Movie Star Joan Crawford movies on TCM: Underrated actress, top star in several of her greatest roles If there was ever a professional who was utterly, completely, wholeheartedly dedicated to her work, Joan Crawford was it. Ambitious, driven, talented, smart, obsessive, calculating, she had whatever it took – and more – to reach the top and stay there. Nearly four decades after her death, Crawford, the star to end all stars, remains one of the iconic performers of the 20th century. Deservedly so, once you choose to bypass the Mommie Dearest inanity and focus on her film work. From the get-go, she was a capable actress; look for the hard-to-find silents The Understanding Heart (1927) and The Taxi Dancer (1927), and check her out in the more easily accessible The Unknown (1927) and Our Dancing Daughters (1928). By the early '30s, Joan Crawford had become a first-rate film actress, far more naturalistic than...

'Father of the Bride': Steve Martin and Kimberly Williams. Top Five Father's Day Movies? From giant Gregory Peck to tyrant John Gielgud What would be the Top Five Father's Day movies ever made? Well, there have been countless films about fathers and/or featuring fathers of various sizes, shapes, and inclinations. In terms of quality, these range from the amusing – e.g., the 1950 version of Cheaper by the Dozen; the Oscar-nominated The Grandfather – to the nauseating – e.g., the 1950 version of Father of the Bride; its atrocious sequel, Father's Little Dividend. Although I'm unable to come up with the absolute Top Five Father's Day Movies – or rather, just plain Father Movies – ever made, below are the first five (actually six, including a remake) "quality" patriarch-centered films that come to mind. Now, the fathers portrayed in these films aren't all heroic, loving, and/or saintly paternal figures. Several are...

Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films for a Nasty-Ass World! runs from today through Thursday at the Roxie in San Francisco and Dennis Harvey has a fun preview in the Bay Guardian. A snippet: "March 4 offers a shocking double dose of pure white femininity finding themselves in, ahem, 'Yellow Peril' — miscegenation being something Hollywood could only begin to embrace a few decades later. Frank Capra's atypically erotic The Bitter Tea of General Yen, with Barbara Stanwyck alllllmost surrendering the white flag to a 'charismatic Chinese warlord' (Swede Nils Asther, eyes narrowed), has become a minor classic since flopping in 1933. No such luck for The Cheat (1931), a remake of Cecil B DeMille's 1915 shocker that was part of Paramount's brief, failed attempt to make stage sensation Tallulah Bankhead a movie star. Her gambling-addicted socialite gets branded (literally) in lieu of repayment not by the original's Far East businessman (dashing Sessue Hayakawa...

Lon Chaney on TCM: He Who Gets Slapped, The Unknown, Mr. Wu Get ready for more extreme perversity in West of Zanzibar (1928), as Chaney abuses both Warner Baxter and Mary Nolan, while the great-looking Mr. Wu (1927) offers Chaney as a Chinese creep about to destroy the life of lovely Renée Adorée — one of the best and prettiest actresses of the 1920s. Adorée — who was just as effective in her few early talkies — died of tuberculosis in 1933. Also worth mentioning, the great John Arnold was Mr. Wu's cinematographer. I'm no fan of Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), or The Phantom of the Opera (1925), but Chaney's work in them — especially in Hunchback — is quite remarkable. I mean, his performances aren't necessarily great, but they're certainly unforgettable. Chaney's leading ladies — all of whom are in love with younger, better-looking men — are Loretta Young (Laugh, Clown, Laugh), Patsy Ruth Miller...

Sorrell And Son (1927) Direction: Herbert Brenon Cast: H. B. Warner, Nils Asther, Anna Q. Nilsson, Alice Joyce, Carmel Myers, Mary Nolan, Mickey McBan, Louis Wolheim, Norman Trevor, Lionel Belmore Screenplay: Elizabeth Meehan; from Warwick Deeping's novel Oscar Movies Recommended H. B. Warner, Alice Joyce, Sorrell and Son A skilled melodrama about paternal devotion in the face of both personal and social adversity, Sorrell and Son benefits greatly from Herbert Brenon's assured direction, which deservedly received a nomination in the first year of the Academy Awards. Crucial to the film's effectiveness, however, is the central performance of the war-scarred father who sacrifices it all for the happiness of his son. Luckily, stage and screen veteran H. B. Warner, perhaps best remembered for his portrayal of Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings, is the embodiment of honesty, selflessness, and devotion. Unlike many silent-era performers — even...

Brigitte Helm in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (top); Jack Holt, Fay Wray in Frank Capra's Dirigible (middle); Walter Huston, Barry Fitzgerald, Roland Young, Louis Hayward, Judith Anderson in René Clair's And Then There Were None (bottom) London's BFI Southbank will be screening several Frank Capra efforts today and on Saturday, in addition to films based on Agatha Christie's works and the restored Metropolis. Most notable among those screenings is probably a 1986 British television production named Shades of Darkness: Agatha Christie’s The Last Séance. Directed by June Wyndham-Davies, the 50-minute show stars Jeanne Moreau in a "suitably spooky, at times surreal" supernatural tale about spiritualism. Frank Capra will be represented with Dirigible (1931), an early adventure tale set in the South Pole that features Fay Wray sandwiched between popular late-'20s players Jack Holt and Ralph Graves; The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), an overbaked interethnic romance-drama-tragedy starring...