According to IMDB, close to 40 films and TV shows have Elmore Leonard’s name attached, some as creator, some as screenwriter, but about three-quarters because they’re based on one of his novels or short stories. Leonard, who died August 20 of complications following a stroke, didn’t like most of them. Actually, that’s something of an …
On a number of past occasions, I’ve written, in various contexts, about what I consider to be that most elusive of on-screen elements: a sense of place. “Sense of place” is the difference between a location serving as mere background, and being a character in its own right. It’s about getting the viewer’s head there, …
As happened for so many other genres, the 1960s/1970s saw a tremendous creative expansion in crime and cop thrillers. The old Hollywood moguls had died off or retired, most of the major studios were bleeding red ink, attendance had gone off a cliff since the end of WW II, and a new breed of young, …
The title of Lee Server’s acclaimed 2002 biography, Robert Mitchum: Baby I Don’t Care (MacMillan), offers a perfect encapsulization of the eponymous actor: a hard-partying Hollywood Bad Boy who didn’t give a damn what moralizing finger-waggers thought of him, or what his peers in the movie business thought, or the press, or even the public. He …
Peter Yates, who died this past weekend at age 81, was one of several British directors invited to make movies in The States in the 1960s, all of whom had a particular and rare filmmaker’s gift for capturing a sense – the feel — of a setting often better than native-born filmmakers could. Yates’ obits …