From the late forties through the sixties, Elia Kazan was the most important and influential director in America, and the only one who managed simultaneously to dominate both theater and film. In that role he manifestly shaped the conception and writing, as well as the presentation, of many of the period's iconic works, reshaping the values of the stage and bringing a new realism and intensity of performance to the screen. His various achievements include the original Broadway productions of The Skin of Our Teeth, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman and such Hollywood films as Gentleman's...
From the late forties through the sixties, Elia Kazan was the most important and influential director in America, and the only one who managed simu...
He transformed a nickelodeon novelty into a new art form and a powerful, glamorous American Industry. He codified the rules and techniques of screen story-telling, pioneered the conventions that brought films to life, from surging spectacle to soul-baring close ups.
He transformed a nickelodeon novelty into a new art form and a powerful, glamorous American Industry. He codified the rules and techniques of screen s...
Describing Sam Fuller as a cult legend and a celluloid genius would be like describing Muhammad Ali as a boxer or Jimi Hendrix as a guitar player. He was a singular American visionary, a giant of independent filmmaking, and a king of bruised-knuckle cinematic poetry. The Big Red One is his masterpiece. Twenty years in the making, both the novel and the film are based on Fuller's own experiences with the Army's First Infantry Division ("the Big Red One") in World War II. The story centers on the friendship of five soldiers and follows them from the arid landscapes of Vichy French Africa to...
Describing Sam Fuller as a cult legend and a celluloid genius would be like describing Muhammad Ali as a boxer or Jimi Hendrix as a guitar player. He ...
In trying to understand the power of celebrity in modern life, Richard Schickel ranges through every realm of our culture film, theatre, television, literature, art, the media, pop music, politics for examples of how celebrity shapes our world and bends our minds. He considers the careers of figures as diverse as John Kennedy and Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe and Dwight Eisenhower, Walter Cronkite and Andy Warhol, among dozens of others. And he reflects on the dangerous, sometimes deadly, political and social consequences of the fascinating, largely unacknowledged relationship between the...
In trying to understand the power of celebrity in modern life, Richard Schickel ranges through every realm of our culture film, theatre, television, l...
One of our most thoughtful film critics here takes on eight of Hollywood s finest directors in conversation, reminiscing about their working lives which spanned the most intriguing decades of American filmmaking. The directors are Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, William A. Wellman, King Vidor, and Raoul Walsh. Speaking with them, Mr. Schickel found in these men a special quality: They felt in their bones the character and quality of a vanished America. There was something valuable to be learned from them, not merely about the cinema but about the...
One of our most thoughtful film critics here takes on eight of Hollywood s finest directors in conversation, reminiscing about their working lives whi...
