Opening title from the TV version of Duel, broadcast as part of ABC’s TV Movie of the Weekend series Guest writer Caleb Allison compares the original TV and theatrical versions of Steven Spielberg’s masterful debut feature film. The April 1971 edition of Playboy featured a story by screenwriter, novelist, and regular Playboy fiction author Richard… Read more »
Guest post by Caleb Allison. The rules and regulations of the Depression-era dance marathon in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? seem simple enough. Rocky (Gig Young), the film’s imperiously duplicitous emcee, runs through them with all the vigor and verve of a carnival barker to open the film. Contestants get a 10-minute break every… Read more »
Guest post by Caleb Allison. Spoilers throughout! Douglas Sirk has become synonymous with lushly subversive melodrama wrapped in Technicolor brilliance, but before his nearly unbelievable string of melodramatic masterpieces in the 1950s, including Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), and Imitation of Life (1959), he conjured up a… Read more »
Guest post by Caleb Allison. Paramount’s erotic and atmospheric ghost story The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944) sets up a salacious mystery before one sees even a single frame of the film. Who, exactly, is being uninvited and from what? Turning the film’s simple yet provocative title into an interrogative proposition leads us down a tortuous… Read more »
Guest post by Caleb Allison. Even as Louis Malle’s taut crime thriller, Elevator to the Gallows (1958), descends to dark, fatalistic depths it simmers with a kinetic futurism that portends the mischievous talents of the French New Wave. Blending equal parts Hitchcockian thriller and methodical Bressonian precision, the 24-year-old Malle concocts a noirish thriller that… Read more »
Space: the final frontier, as the line goes, stands as a testament to the last unexplored territory for humanity, but it just as often serves as the final resting place of its pioneers. Those same starry plains full of hope and promise can quickly become a prison with no escape. You might even say space,… Read more »