Dir. William Wyler. Starring Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, Fay Bainter Jezebel is a Civil War movie without a single glance at the Civil War, as its story ends sometime in 1853, but the movie still leans heavily on the Lost Cause mythology which permeates so much Hollywood filmmaking. (The article I’ve linked to does a… Read More Jezebel (1938)
Dir. William Wyler. Starring Charlton Heston, Stephen Boyd, Haya Harareet This is weird for me to say about him, but Charlton Heston was the right man for the job. Judah Ben-Hur spends the vast majority of this movie, which is probably about as famous for being long as it is for anything else, planning to… Read More Ben-Hur (1959)
Dir. William Wyler. Starring Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, Mary Astor In The Razor’s Edge, a novel which postdates Dodsworth the film by a little less than a decade and Sinclair Lewis’ novel Dodsworth by fifteen years, Somerset Maugham creates a rather memorable character named Elliott Templeton, an American who long ago forsook his uncultured native land for the… Read More Dodsworth (1936)
The following is part of an overview of the top 100 American narrative fiction feature films, from my perspective. For an introduction to the project, click here. For a list of more than 800 films which I considered for the top 450 and my eligibility qualifications, click here. And for a way to vote on what you think the top… Read More Better than AFI’s Top 100 (2017): 100-96
Dir. Laurent Bouzereau. I’ve spent some time thinking about what made Five Came Back so effective as a lens to view World War II, and at first I thought it was the subject matter. Entering this documentary and having little more prior knowledge than some vague understanding of John Ford and Frank Capra’s World War II service, I assumed that… Read More Five Came Back (2017)
Dir. William Wyler. Starring Fredric March, Teresa Wright, Dana Andrews In 1979, Jimmy Carter gave a speech that, in my mind, ranks with George Washington’s Farewell Address or Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural as one of the most important in the history of the American executive. The “Crisis of Confidence” speech speaks to a statistic that… Read More The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Seeing Things Secondhand 