News

Venice Classics will screen restorations of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita and Pedro Almodóvar’s Matador as part of an 18-film line-up at the 82nd Venice Film Festival (August 27-Septemer 6).

Lolita is a US-uk co-production, adapted by Kubrick from Nabokov’s novel, with James Mason and Sue Lyon in the leading roles. It first played at Venice in 1962.

Matador is one of Almodóvar’s early works. The 1986 erotic thriller sees Antonio Banderas play a student matador who wrongfully confesses to murder.

Among the four Italian films are Giuseppe De Santis’ once underestimated 1952 filmRome 11:00andLuciano Salce’s 1967 filmI Married You For Fun.

Restored movies by Pedro Almodóvar, Stanley Kubrick, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Manoel de Oliveira, Krzysztof Kieślowski and Tsai Ming-Liang are set to screen as part of the Venice Film Festival’s 18-title Venice Classics lineup.

Almodóvar’s 1986 erotic thriller “Matador,” featuring Antonio Banderas as a young bullfighter and exploring themes of sex and violence in the bullfighting world – a film that Quentin Tarantino has cited an inspiration – is part of a clutch of European titles in the selection. It also includes de Oliveira’s first film “Aniki-Bóbó”; Marcel Carné’s classic noir “Quai des brumes,” starring Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan, which was a prizewinner at Venice in 1938; and Kieslowski’s “Blind Chance, which heralded his famed “Decalogue.”

U.S. highlights comprise Kubrick’s 1962 Vladimir Nabokov adaptation “Lolita,” starring James Mason and Sue Lyon; Delmer Daves’ 1957 western “3:10 to Yuma,” redone by James Mangold in 2007 in a version starring Russell Crowe...

The Venice Film Festival has unveiled the 18 recently restored movies that will be showcased in its Venice Classics sidebar at upcoming 82nd edition.

The line-up features Delmer Daves’ 1957 western 3:10 to Yuma, based on a 1953 short story by Elmore Leonard, which was revisited by James Mangold in 2007 in a version starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.

Other U.S. highlights include The Delicate Delinquent, starring Jerry Lewis, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, House of Strangers, starring Edward G. Robinson in the role of a rags-to-riches Italian American banker accused of criminal activity.

The sidebar will also showcase Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 Vladimir Nabokov adaptation Lolita, starring James Mason and Sue Lyon.

European classics in the selection include Manoel de Oliveira’s first film Aniki-Bóbó, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance, which heralded Decalogue; Pedro Almodóvar’s Matador, and Marcel Carné’s pioneering film noir Le Quai des brumes, starring Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan,...

Courtesy of Eureka Entertainment

by James Cameron-wilson

In January of this year something extraordinary happened. For the first time, United Artists’ Black Tuesday was shown on British television, having been originally banned for its violence. The film noir classic of 1954 stars Edward G. Robinson, one of the four giants of Hollywood’s gangster genre, alongside James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and George Raft. At the time that Edward G. starred in Black Tuesday, he was in something of a career slump, but, in spite of his modest physical stature, he still manages to bring to bear his characteristically brutal persona. Perhaps even more surprising is how good the film is, a sort of forgotten masterpiece from the Argentinean helmer Hugo Fregonese who, in his time, had directed such stars as Gary Cooper, James Mason, Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor, Lee Marvin and Stewart Granger, but who is largely forgotten today,...

Eureka's Masters Of Cinema Series brings a little seen classic piece of film noir to Blu-ray. The restoration of Black Tuesday, Hugo Fregonese's violent prison break movie, is well done. Almost architecturally, the black and white film makes use of heightened light and shade, relying on a crisp, geometric delineation of shadow. Counterpoint in the sound design, the interplay of dialogue and gunshot, is a prominent element. The film is all about hard contrasts. Without noise or fuzz, the restoration reproduces them starkly.

The Blu-ray has an audio commentary, three features and an original trailer. The commentary and the features put the film, and prominent members of cast and crew, in historical, social and political context. The commentators are personable and what they have to say is interesting. There is some repetition between them, such as discussion of the film stock used in the film, but it doesn't feels like your're.

Death Row. The camera tracks across five barred cells, lingering close up on each of the inmates. The first, Selwyn (Don Blackman), a heavy set black man, sings the blues, the wooden stool on his lap a drum. The mob boss Vincent Canelli (Edward G. Robinson), armed robber Peter Manning (Peter Graves) and another all pace, like caged beasts. The final man, clutching the bars for dear life, screams, "Shut up, will you?"

Hard cut.

The hard cut is a masterstroke by director Hugo Fregonese. From the claustrophobic to the wide open shot, the gates of death row; from slim, ornamented a cappella to the crash of a dissonant orchestral chord, he makes you sit up in your seat and take notice. Then the credits roll.

It's Tuesday. Two of the convicts, Manning and Canelli, are about to be executed. Manning is offered a ten day stay of execution if he gives up.

La marca del hombre lobo.Jacinto Molina grew up in Francoist Spain, the son of an extremely successful furrier. As a young boy, he was surrounded by death in the aftermath of the civil war, losing friends and family members, and passing corpses in the streets and fields around Madrid. Two of Molina’s uncles, both collectors who ran in artistic circles, introduced him to a bohemian lifestyle and range of interests. He met famous painters (Jose Gutierréz Solana), writers (Camilo José Cela), and matadors (Manolete); he was entranced by comic books, the movies, and the occult. When, at his elite boarding school, he was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he knew to respond with the respectable aspiration of “architect.” Instead, he would become Paul Naschy.Naschy is now synonymous with a mid-century surge in Gothic Eurohorror that replicated in continental Europe the success of Hammer Films in the UK.

Is that the smell of cigarette smoke filling the room? Did a thick layer of fog just descend on the city skyline? Has your inner voice started monologuing more than usual and with an air of suspicion? That’s right folks, Noir City Film Festival at Detroit’s Redford Theatre is set to return this month for it’s seventh annual showcase of murder, intrigue, trenched coats, and brimmed hats. As with every year, the festivities will be hosted by Eddie Muller of Turner Classic Movies‘ “Noir Alley” and will feature an international theme this year with foreign selections, as well as Hollywood films directed by non-American filmmakers like Otto Preminger and Hugo Fregonese.

2024’s Noir City: Detroit begins on Friday, September 20 with a double feature of “Victims of Sin” (1951) and “Night Editor” (1946). Directed by Emilio Fernández, one of the most prolific filmmakers from Mexican cinema’s Golden Age during the ’40s and ’50s,...

“I can’t believe we’re here,” a friend said to me about halfway through this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato, which takes over the center of Bologna for nine glorious days every summer, before correcting himself: “It actually makes a lot of sense that we’re here, but I still can’t believe it.”

My friend was in awe not that we––a pair of New York cinephiles, both fairly well-traveled––managed to make it to beautiful Bologna, but that we had entered some kind of an Olympic village for cinephiles, each day filled with some of the most memorable moviegoing events of our lives and each night filled with hours of discussion about the day’s pleasures. At the festival, everyone’s first question is “how many years have you been coming?” and newcomers are warmly welcomed into the fray. The favored departure is not a “ciao” or...

Cinephiles will have plenty to celebrate this April with the next slate of additions to the Criterion Channel. The boutique distributor, which recently announced its June 2024 Blu-ray releases, has unveiled its new streaming lineup highlighted by an eclectic mix of classic films and modern arthouse hits.

Students of Hollywood history will be treated to the “Peak Noir: 1950” collection, which features 17 noir films from the landmark film year from directors including Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Huston.

New Hollywood maverick William Friedkin will also be celebrated when five of his most beloved movies, including “Sorcerer” and “The Exorcist,” come to the channel in April.

Criterion will offer the streaming premiere of Wim Wenders’ 3D art documentary “Anselm,” which will be accompanied by the “Wim Wenders’ Adventures in Moviegoing” collection, which sees the director curating a selection of films from around the world that have influenced his careers.

Contemporary cinema is also well represented,...

April’s an uncommonly strong auteurist month for the Criterion Channel, who will highlight a number of directors––many of whom aren’t often grouped together. Just after we screened House of Tolerance at the Roxy Cinema, Criterion are showing it and Nocturama for a two-film Bertrand Bonello retrospective, starting just four days before The Beast opens. Larger and rarer (but just as French) is the complete Jean Eustache series Janus toured last year. Meanwhile, five William Friedkin films and work from Makoto Shinkai, Lizzie Borden, and Rosine Mbakam are given a highlight.

One of my very favorite films, Comrades: Almost a Love Story plays in a series I’ve been trying to program for years: “Hong Kong in New York,” boasting the magnificent Full Moon in New York, Farewell China, and An Autumn’s Tale. Wim Wenders gets his “Adventures in Moviegoing”; After Hours, Personal Shopper, and Werckmeister Harmonies fill...

Rodrigo Moreno's The Delinquents is screening exclusively on Mubi in many countries.The Delinquents.Words have no owner. They simply are. They live in the speakers of a language, but no one has possession of a verb or a noun. If anyone can come close to such ownership, it is an artist, who puts the word in a complex combination that is theirs alone. A filmmaker's material is not words—though some might say a shot is its equivalent—but rather the world. Through framing, cutting, and duration, the director makes a movie their own, yet what is shot does not obey the will of the filmmaker. The material of the world is the filmmaker's lyrics, and the world does not belong to them.The arrangement and rearrangement of material—whether of words or of the world when it is filmed—into new works of art can be linked...

Rodrigo Moreno’s heist thriller The Delinquents has many tricks up its sleeve, from outsized musical motifs to droll office comedy. Yet one of the most potent tools at Moreno’s disposal is one that was unplanned. Like the events chronicled in the film, the production spread out across over five years, a duration that created a space for the Argentine writer-director to contemplate deep existential questions as if in parallel with his characters. It’s but one pane in a full house of mirrors that creates some fascinating cinematic refractions.

Though the robbery of a Buenos Aires bank marks the inciting incident of The Delinquents, this sui generis crime caper quickly moves beyond tactical considerations and enters a philosophical realm for Morán (Daniel Elías) and Román (Esteban Bigliardi). The former of the two bank employees smuggles out enough money for both men to retire, wagering that a few years...

It’s the rare three-hour film that has as light a touch as The Delinquents while keeping a deft hold on the audience. That’s partly down to its surefire bank heist plot, borrowed somewhat from Hugo Fregonese’s 1949 Argentine noir Hardly a Criminal: a longtime clerk steals enough money to retire on, stashes it, then goes to jail, planning to recover the loot upon release. Morán (Daniel Elias) is the nebbishy thief in Rodrigo Moreno’s new film, which premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes to general delight. But his accomplice on the outside, Román (Esteban Bigliardi), gets distracted by another […]

The post “I Had Three Art Directors and Two Cinematographers”: Rodrigo Moreno on The Delinquents at Cannes 2023 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

It’s the rare three-hour film that has as light a touch as The Delinquents while keeping a deft hold on the audience. That’s partly down to its surefire bank heist plot, borrowed somewhat from Hugo Fregonese’s 1949 Argentine noir Hardly a Criminal: a longtime clerk steals enough money to retire on, stashes it, then goes to jail, planning to recover the loot upon release. Morán (Daniel Elias) is the nebbishy thief in Rodrigo Moreno’s new film, which premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes to general delight. But his accomplice on the outside, Román (Esteban Bigliardi), gets distracted by another […]

The post “I Had Three Art Directors and Two Cinematographers”: Rodrigo Moreno on The Delinquents at Cannes 2023 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

You can’t argue with disc collectors eager to rediscover movies they loved at age 10, in terrific kiddie matinees. Cowboy star Rory Calhoun makes a perfectly fine Italian vagabond ladies’ man for this very un-serious ‘oriental’ adventure, and Yôko Tani is the requisite princess who needs kissing lessons. Tim Lucas’s welcome, info-packed commentary satisfies our curiosity about the long-unavailable title — it’s different than the A.I.P. release we (barely) remember.

Marco Polo

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1962 / Color/ 2:35 widescreen / 104, 95 min. / Street Date , 2023 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Rory Calhoun, Yôko Tani, Camillo Pilotto, Pierre Cressoy, Michael Chow, Thien-Huong, Franco Ressel.

Cinematography: Riccardo Pallottini

Production Designer: Zoran Zorcic

Art Directors: Aurelio Crugnola, Franco Fumagalli, Miodrag Miric, Jovan Radic

Film Editor: Ornella Micheli

Costume design: Mario Giorsi

Original Music: Angelo Francesco Lavagnino / Les Baxter

Written by Oreste Biancoli, Ennio De Concini, Eliana De Sabata, Antoinette Pellevant, Piero Pierotti, Duccio Tessari

Produced by Luigi Carpentieri,...

No year in review would be complete without a thank-you to our writers. Time and again, they reminded us that cinema is not only alive and well, but it is also always transforming; the filmmakers and festivals covered here push the boundaries of what we took for granted about the medium.Here’s a quick overview of what we published in 2022—and, for many more excellent pieces, we encourage you to browse our archive using the “explore” tab on the homepage.ESSAYSContemporary Cinema:When Propaganda Fails: Adam McKay's Don't Look Up by Ryan MeehanThe Horse in Motion: Jordan Peele's Nope by Blair McClendonThe Many Faces of Michelle Yeoh by Sean GilmanHall of Mirrors: James Gray's Armageddon Time and Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans by Kelli WestonNameless Energies: Don DeLillo at the Movies by Leonardo GoiThe Voice of a Generation: The Trope of the "Complex Female Character" by Rafaela BassiliHong...

This Civil War thriller has so much truth to say about War, Patriotism and combatant-vs.-civilian terror that we can hardly believe it was released in 1954. It’s based on a true event from 1864, a daring undercover mission that hit the Union far away from the conventional fighting. Van Heflin is the vengeance-seeking advance agent, Anne Bancroft a war widow, Richard Boone a maimed Union veteran and Lee Marvin a loose cannon with a hair trigger. The anti-war message is stronger than anything from the Vietnam years! The 20th-Fox release is not on quality home video, and is in great need of restoration.

The Raid

Not on Home Video

CineSavant Revival Screening Review

1954 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 83 min.

Starring: Van Heflin, Anne Bancroft, Richard Boone, Lee Marvin, Tommy Rettig, Peter Graves, Douglas Spencer, Paul Cavanagh, Will Wright, James Best, John Dierkes, Helen Ford, Lee Aaker, Claude Akins, John Beradino, Robert Easton,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWomen Talking.The 49th edition of the Telluride Film Festival, which doesn't reveal its lineup until the four-day festival starts, took place last weekend. Its program included world premieres of Sarah Polley’s Women Talking and Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, as well as Adam Curtis’s new 420-minute-long Russia [1985-1999] Traumazone, plus a tribute to Cate Blanchett. A.O. Scott, reporting from the festival for the New York Times, remarks that "Every so often, Telluride’s best is as good as movies can be," and singles out Women Talking specifically: "...what Women Talking shares with Moonlight is an absolute concentration on the specifics of story and setting that nonetheless illuminate a vast, underexplored region of contemporary life. A reality that has always been there is seen as if for the first time."Charlbi Dean Kriek—South African model,...

Black Tuesday (1954).Hugo Fregonese’s best films are fueled by desperation, a clean and potent but highly flammable form of energy. Just as fight-or-flight adrenaline sharpens our senses and reflexes, his filmmaking reaches heights of rigor and intensity when his characters are in the tightest spots—locked up, on the run, or under siege. Often facing death, they are also sentenced for life to be themselves: fate in his films is not a capricious external force but an expression of character. As a pensive Jack the Ripper says in Man in the Attic (1953), “There are no criminals. There are only people doing what they must do because they are who they are.”But who was Hugo Fregonese? Watching his films, it is hard not to speculate on the link between their compulsive themes of escape and restless wandering and his own refusal or inability to settle down. Born in Argentina...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWill-o'-the-Wisp.The New York Film Festival has revealed the lineup for their Currents section, dedicated to films "testing and stretching the possibilities of the medium." The program includes new films from João Pedro Rodrígues, Ashley McKenzie, Bertrand Bonello, Helena Wittmann, and more. This year's crop of Revivals was also unveiled, featuring the highly anticipated restoration of Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore.61 films will be preserved through funding from The National Film Preservation Foundation. Grant recipients include the 1921 mystery-western Trailin’—starring Tom Mix, considered the first on-screen cowboy—and The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980), one of two feature films Kathleen Collins completed before her premature death.Cinema company Cineworld, owner of the Picturehouse chain in the UK and Regal Cinemas in the US, could be facing imminent bankruptcy, per recent reports.

Remember those DVD collections organized by star, that combined favorite actors’ big movies with good titles you might not have seen? Shout Select has gone that route in honor of the great Anne Bancroft, collecting eight titles in one box. They span the years 1952 to 1989 … and are sourced from multiple studios and disc boutiques. Eight, count ’em 8 — no dog-eared transfers, and one is even a fully-appointed Criterion disc. We’re told that Mel Brooks applied some of the clout that made this happen.

The Anne Bancroft Collection

Blu-ray

Shout Select

1952 – 1987 / B&w + Color / Street Date December 10, 2019 / 79.97

Starring: Anne Bancroft, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Widmark; Patty Duke; Peter Finch; Dustin Hoffman, Katherine Ross; Dom De Luise; Mel Brooks; Jane Fonda, Meg Tilly; Anthony Hopkins.

Directed by Roy Baker; Arthur Penn; Jack Clayton; Mike Nichols; Anne Bancroft; Alan Johnson; Norman Jewison; David Hugh Jones.

This Shout Select compilation disc was reportedly curated by Anne Bancroft’s husband,...

Dazzling urbanites of the New York persuasion will no doubt wend their way to MoMA's season of Argentinian noirs in February, seeking the familiar, morally-compromised pleasures of noir in an exotic new form. They will enjoy Carlos Hugo Christensen's Cornell Woolrich adaptations, subject of a previous Forgotten, the great, underrated French filmmaker Pierre Chenal's version of Native Son, and early work by Hugo Fregonese, later a decent Hollywood journeyman who made one classic for Val Lewton (eerie siege western Apache Drums).But they'll also get the chance to see a stylish remake of Fritz Lang's M, which is as free with its source material as Joseph Losey's recently reappraised 1951 version, and which might almost have cut its ties to its German role model to make its own way as an original work. It's faintly disappointing whenever its plot reconnects with Thea Von Harbou's masterly 1931 scenario,...

How would you program this year's newest, most interesting films into double features with movies of the past you saw in 2015?Looking back over the year at what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2015—in theatres or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2015 to create a unique double feature.All the contributors were given the option to write some text explaining their 2015 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch...

Akahige, Amarcord, Aleksandr Nevskij among Venice Classics titles; Bertrand Tavernier selects four films.

Akahige, Amarcord, Aleksandr Nevskij and A Matter of Life and Death are among 21 titles announced today to screen in Venice’s (September 2-12) Classics section, which will reveal further titles later this month.

Director Bertrand Tavernier, who is to receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement award, has selected and will present four films for the Classics strand: Pattes Blances (White Paws) by Jean Grémillion, La Lupa (The Vixen) by Alberto Lattuada, Sonnenstrahl (Ray of Sunshine) by Pál Fejös and A Matter of Life and Death by Michael Powell and Eric Pressburger.

The 21 restorations:

Akahige (Red Beard) by Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1965, 185’, B&W), restoration by Tōhō Co., Ltd.

Aleksandr Nevskij (Alexander Nevsky) by Sergej Michajlovič Ėjzenštejn (Ussr, 1938, 108’, B&W), restoration by Mosfilm

Amarcord by Federico Fellini (Italy, 1973, 123’, Color) restoration by Cineteca di Bologna with the support of yoox.com and the...

Horse Money

Caro Danny,

Festival time once more, for me the most valuable time. Time to soak in contrasting cinematic visions from across the globe, of course, and time to run into old and new friends. My first couple of days at a place like Toronto, I’m rather ashamed to say, mainly consist of playing catch-up. Not just catching up with titles which have already received coverage in other festivals, but also with fellow writers and cinema-lovers whom I practically only get to see once a year. As lonely as the basic act of movie-watching can be, to me the atmosphere here has always been an intoxicatingly communal one. The joy of leaping from screening to screening is matched only by the pleasure of discussing those discoveries with others—a dialogue that flows fluidly from contemporary releases to classic obscurities and gives a festival as vast as Tiff the intimate sense of shared exploration.

Gong Li in (but not as) Marco Polo? Director Tarsem Singh (Immortals / Mirror Mirror) and producer Gianni Nunnari (300 / 300: Battle of Artemisia) are reportedly working on a film project about the life of the Italian explorer, previously incarnated on screen by the likes of Gary Cooper (in Archie Mayo’s The Adventures of Marco Polo, 1938), Rory Calhoun (Piero Pierotti and Hugo Fregonese’s Marco Polo, 1962), Horst Buchholz (Denys de La Patellière and Raoul Lévy’s Marco the Magnificent, 1965), and Ian Somerhalder (Kevin Connor’s TV movie Marco Polo, 2007). According to Screen Daily, the Chinese Gong Li would play a Mongolian princess. In Memoirs of a Geisha Gong played a Japanese geisha. She hasn’t played any Swedes yet, I don’t think, even though that would be karmic. After all, Swedish-born Warner Oland was a frequent "Chinaman," including Charlie Chan, in numerous Hollywood movies of the ’20s and ’30s. The...

Linda Darnell, Ann Sothern, Jeanne Crain, A Letter to Three Wives DGA Awards vs. Academy Awards Pt.2: Foreign, Small, Controversial Movies Have Better Luck at the Oscars Since pre-1970 Directors Guild Award finalists often consisted of more than five directors, it was impossible to get an exact match for the DGA's and the Academy's lists of nominees. In the list below, the years before 1970 include DGA finalists (DGA) who didn't receive an Academy Award nod and, if applicable, those Academy Award-nominated directors (AMPAS) not found in the — usually much lengthier — DGA list. The label "DGA/AMPAS" means the directors in question received nominations for both the DGA Award and the Academy Award. The DGA Awards vs. Academy Awards list below goes from 1948 (the DGA Awards' first year) to 1952. Follow-up posts will cover the ensuing decades. The number in parentheses next to "DGA" indicates that year's number of DGA finalists if other than five.

Many—maybe too many, looking at this bunch of bone-tired warriors of Av-virtue—were the travels the Ferroni Brigade embarked on all through 2011: oftentimes for festivals all over Europe, sometimes for visits to this archive or that as part of our programming arbeit (to be read with a Japanese drawl). During those months in the dark, we saw a lot—some of which chimed and rhymed with new works we encountered in this multiplex back home or that gallery abroad, on this collector's Steenbeck or in that producer's private projection room (they still exist).

On one of those trips, we were joined by our main Mubi-man, His Kasness a.k.a. the Kasest with whom we plunged one evening into a brainstorming on what The Festival would look and feel like (truth be told: it was more like a communal delirium—but what do you expect from folks sitting...

There are no credits at the opening of Hugo Fregonese's Black Tuesday (1954), just a few shots, one wide and one a medium close-up, that tell very little but give you a moment to settle in. The opening's main sequence, which feels like it’s out of a lost pre-Code film, starts with a prisoner behind bars banging on an object and singing a song. The camera stays with him a moment before quickly tracking and then panning into the darkness and landing on another prisoner (the always welcome Edward G. Robinson) bathed in shadows and constrained by glowing white bars. The camera stops, the man moves and the camera follows until it's time to find a new prisoner in the same situation.

There’s no overall sense of the space itself in the sequence, just a seemingly endless parade of men illuminated in the darkness, with nothing to do but pace back and forth.

Acknowledging Apache Drums (1951) as the forgotten Val Lewton movie, we must also acknowledge that it's not quite as special as Cat People or Isle of the Dead or any of the others in the chiller cycle, but it does bear comparison with the lesser-known Mademoiselle Fifi and it certainly beats the pants off of Youth Runs Wild.

If the conservative nature of the western format reins in some of Lewton's more sophisticated tendencies, it also allows others to stand out in bold relief, and if director Hugo Fregonese is no Jacques Tourneur, nor even a Mark Robson, he's a perfectly amicable journeyman.

Admitting a certain B-movie banality, what's striking is how Lewton is able to continue his preoccupations into what might seem an alien genre, so that Apache Drums resembles, at numerous times, a supernatural/psychological horror movie, in which the horror is dually located in the American Indian "other,...

The actor Fess Parker, who has died aged 85, was a quintessential westerner, a tall, rugged, Texas-born athlete turned actor, famous for his portrayals of two frontiersmen, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, as well as sheriffs, cowboys and ranchers. He greatly appreciated the commercial success of these two title roles, and himself became a substantial businessman.

The Walt Disney Studio was the first in Hollywood to move wholeheartedly into television, and had the bright idea of combining three episodes of the Davy Crockett series Parker had made for them in 1954 into a feature. The result, Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier (1955), spawned the craze for "racoon-fur" hats and became a box-office hit on the back of its singalong theme - Bill Hayes's recording of The Ballad of Davy Crockett topped the charts for three months,...