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New on Video: John Carpenter’s ‘Assault on Precinct 13’

Assault on Precinct 13 Written and directed by John Carpenter USA, 1976 With his filmmaking career beginning in the midst of the new Hollywood and its touchstones in American film history, it’s perhaps easy to see why the work of John Carpenter has been somewhat overshadowed by more celebrated filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Steven …

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‘The Big Sleep’ is saved from the depths of incomprehension by Bogart and Bacall

Fictional private detective icon Philip Marlowe, a creation from the mind of famed author Raymond Chandler, was one such character who always succeeded in putting millions of puzzle pieces together. 1944 saw the release of a great film adaptation of a Marlowe story, Murder, My Sweet, with Dick Powell playing the aforementioned private dick. 1946 was the year a Philip Marlowe adventure with a lot more star power behind it was bought to the silver screen, The Big Sleep, directed by legend Howard Hawks and starring none other than Humphrey Bogart.

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Iconic Westerns: A Visual Guide to the Pick of the Bunch

Westerns may appear as diverse and unruly as the characters they contain, but beneath the ten gallon hats and spurs lie a handful of basic mythologies. This guide selects one movie which epitomizes each legend plus another four outstanding examples, each one given a capsule review and illustrated with a classic movie poster. Click on …

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‘High Noon’, ‘Rio Bravo’, and the Blacklist

High Noon and Rio Bravo share a fascinating and perhaps singular position in the annals of American cinema as companion pieces of social commentary that also managed to succeed as two of the greatest and most influential Westerns, and indeed films, of their time. Created seven years apart, with Rio Bravo intended as a direct …

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‘Rio Bravo’ shies away from bravado, concentrating on the essentials

Rio Bravo Directed by Howard Hawks Written by Jules Furthman, Leigh Brackett and U.S.A., 1959 Being a writer, producer, director or actor during the era when westerns were all the craze, a period which lasted an impressive amount of time, could not always have been very easy. With so many of such films flooding the …

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Making Of The West: Mythmakers and truth-tellers

The “adult” Western – as it would come to be called –  was a long time coming.  A Hollywood staple since the days of The Great Train Robbery (1903), the Western offered spectacle and action set against the uniquely American milieu of the Old West – a historical period which, at the dawn of the motion picture …

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Nine Overlooked Classic Westerns

The Western was a movie staple for decades. It seemed the genre that would never die, feeding the fantasies of one generation after another of young boys who galloped around their backyards, playgrounds, and brick streets on broomsticks, banging away with their Mattel cap pistols. Something about a man on a horse set against the …

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Five Underseen Classic Hollywood Comedies

Inspired by the recent Sound on Sight radio show on Preston Sturges, I have decided to supplement the work of one of the great comic directors by providing a list of under seen and generally under appreciated comedies from Preston Sturges’ era. Whereas most connoisseurs will be familiar with his work, as well as films …

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Bringing Up Baby

Taken out of context, it seems like Bringing Up Baby should have been a blockbuster in its day. It had all of the necessary elements: big name stars playing unique characters, a wacky plot, hilarious dialogue and a large handful of plot twists – but when the movie premiered in 1938, it bombed. Director Howard …

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