Ugetsu

Essays

Dec 28, 1993 In his touchstone of postwar Japanese cinema, Kenji Mizoguchi uses woman’s fate to reveal the human cost of oppression.

Sep 23, 1993 Two men, one woman and a boy. French director Bertrand Blier fashions out of this bizarre love quadrangle a film of seamless beauty, high farce and, finally, haunting majesty. To experience Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is to watch a master...

Sep 2, 1993 Capturing for posterity the portrayal that brought Paul Robeson fame, this film was a turning point—the culmination of his early career and a groundbreaking showcase for the work of a black leading man.

Jul 26, 1993 But for the recalcitrance of RKO, Evergreen could have been the finest of Fred Astaire’s movies. Instead, it was never an Astaire film, but “merely” the best musical ever made in England, and the finest film of the legendary Jessie...

May 10, 1993 Green for Danger is a welcome twist on that most venerable of English concoctions, the drawing-room thriller. In this instance, the drawing room is instead a hospital not far from London, where surgery is conducted under a cascade of German...

Jan 5, 1993 All right, I’ll just say it. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the most sublimely irreverent, most jaw-droppingly hysterical movie of the last twenty years. How many films, after all, have Knights who say “Ni!,” filth-eating peasants, and 160...

Dec 22, 1992 With a script by Graham Greene, Carol Reed’s thriller plays upon the classic themes of trust, innocence, betrayal, and truth through the lens of a precocious eight-year-old.

Sep 24, 1992 It was in 1947 that Vladimir Nabokov began writing what he described as “a short novel about a man who liked little girls.” Completed in 1954, the manuscript was rejected as pornographic by at least four New York publishers. Nabokov...

Sep 1, 1992 The evolution of Jason and the Argonauts began in the late 1950s, after the initial success of 20 Million Miles to Earth. Harryhausen and his producer, Charles Schneer, decided to get away from doing “monster-on-the-loose” stories and try something more...

Aug 17, 1992 Blackmail was Alfred Hitchcock’s tenth picture in England, his second thriller and first British talkie—and it marked an important crossroads in film history. Hitchcock shot the film in 1929 as a silent picture, but when it was ready for silent...

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