The Criterion Collection
Dec 16, 1991 — Lady for a Day represented a watershed in the career of Frank Capra. The young director had been laboring at Columbia Pictures’ Poverty Row Studio, churning out 18 films in less than six years. He had moved from low-budget programmers...
Dec 9, 1991 — This rarely seen, overlooked gem, featuring what may be one of Marlon Brando’s most fascinating characterizations, was Gillo Pontecorvo’s worthy follow-up to his political masterpiece The Battle of Algiers. The brilliant radical Italian director achieved something unique in cinema, by...
Essays
Dec 9, 1991 — We used as much of the actual detail of physical things and of technique as we could possibly cram in, and as many players reflecting the endless variety of character and emotion of the real men as dramatization would allow.
Essays
Dec 8, 1991 — One of cinema’s most revered thrillers, La Saliare de la Peur or The Wages of Fear is the acknowledged masterpiece of the brilliant French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-77). It is also the film that made popular music hall singer Yves...
Essays
Dec 2, 1991 — Director Akira Kurosawa had wanted to make Throne of Blood for some time. “After finishing Rashomon [in 1950] I wanted to do something with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but just about that time Orson Welles’s version was announced, so I postponed mine.”...
Essays
Oct 21, 1991 — Written under the German occupation of France, and produced with the sanction of occupation censors, Marcel Carné’s masterpiece began shooting on August 17, 1943, at the Victorine Studios in Nice.
Aug 12, 1991 — It is 1945. For the first time in four years, the Southern Pacific stops in Black Rock. A one-armed man named John J. MacReedy (Spencer Tracy) steps off the train. This brooding stranger makes the few residents who inhabit the...
Jun 3, 1991 — Jean Marais on the set of Beauty and the Beast An excerpt from Cocteau: A Biography (1970) by Francis Steegmuller Beauty and the Beast, the first film of Cocteau’s own since The Blood of a Poet, and his finest poem since...