Category: Articles
Parody and Noir: More curves than a scenic railway
Probably because of its wide appeal as popular culture (both as a literary and cinematic genre) and of the tendency to codify characters and plot points, the noir lent itself easily to parody from early on. My Favorite Brunette (1947), directed by the forgettable Elliott Nugent and starring Bob Hope, is the movie that inaugurates…
Cowboys and Indians: Native Americans and cinema
For most of my youth, films featuring Red Indians (as we called them back then) followed a simple formula. The Indians were all bad, and attacked white settlers, wagon trains, and any soldiers sent out to discipline them. They all wore warpaint, had feathered headgear, and generally used weapons like tomahawks, and bows and arrows.…
The gun against the sword: Why Kurosawa remakes miss the point
The biggest trap directors fall into when remaking Kurosawa films is putting the gun centre stage. I’m going to admit something: I’m biased. I love Akira Kurosawa’s movies – though I tend to prefer the jidai-geki flicks to the ones set in the present day. Yet there’s an inherent issue unrelated to quality that precludes…
Seeing with the ear: Meditations on the use of sound in the films of Dario Argento
It may seem odd to make an argument about the supremacy of sound in the films of Dario Argento, which bear such a recognisable visual flair. While it’s impossible to discount Argento’s expressive imagery, his creative use of sound is an often overlooked element of his style. This isn’t too surprising, since I believe sound…
Moving with the Beats: Words on the big screen
How do you portray on film a movement as influential, radical and ground breaking as that of the Beat Generation? It seems hard to fathom now, but what the Beats did for the literary world was akin to what the Beatles did for music. The Beats were a crazed frenzy of creativity that came kicking…