No ghost picture scared people more than The Haunting, with its doomed house where doors seem to buckle and bulge unnaturally from the inside. The opening of Sound of Music, as a helicopter sweeps down on Julie Andrews, in the Swiss Alps is a visual and musical triumph. Both landmark scenes were the work of […]
The Brothers Mankiewicz review: a groundbreaking dual biography
Sydney Ladensohn Stern, The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope. Heartbreak and Hollywood Classics (USA: University Press of Mississippi, 2019) The writing talent alone of the Mankiewicz Brothers – Herman and Joseph – is overwhelming. Younger brother Joseph won academy awards for writing and directing, particularly for the verbal fireworks of All About Eve, and Herman laid the basis […]
No more Grapes of Wrath – really?
Jill Lepore’s magisterial These Truths is a fantastic book. It is highly ambitious and delivers a strong narrative history of the United States. Professor Lepore has taken the United States Constitution as a starting point for a highly impressive single volume survey of the history of the USA. Impressive as it is, it is not […]
Ayn Rand and the Motion Picture Alliance
While the studios were beginning to bring out anti-communist films, the right began to look for other targets. Not content with driving communists out of Hollywood, the right turned its attention to films with liberal messages. Ayn Rand wrote a Screen Guide for Americans in 1947 for the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of […]
The Fountainhead (1949)
One of the oddest anti-communist films to come out of Hollywood in the period between the first and second HUAC investigations was the The Fountainhead (1949). Based on Ayn Rand’s bestselling book, and directed by MPAPAI founding executive committee member King Vidor, the film was a defence of the creative individual against the deadening collective. […]
Westerns against HUAC: Johnny Guitar (1954)
Johnny Guitar (1954) was directed against HUAC in a different way to High Noon. In the film, Johnny Guitar, played by Sterling Hayden, returned to this estranged lover Vienna, played by Joan Crawford, who owned a disreputable bar. A stage robbery occurred in town, and a banker was killed. The dead man’s sister Emma Small, […]
Storm Center (1956) – a strike against anticommunism
One American film which stood out clearly against McCarthyism was Storm Center (1956) which focused on a small town in America where a librarian Alicia Hull, played by Bette Davis, was dismissed for having a book called ‘The Communist Dream’ on the library’s shelves. The local council wanted the book removed and for future decisions […]
Ninotchka (1939)
Against the background of the Stalinist show trials and the Nazi-Soviet pact, there were strong anti-communist and anti-Russian sympathies in the United States. A small cycle of films with anti-communist themes began with the most famous and popular of these films being Ninotchka, which was made in 1939. Communist emissary Ninotchka was given some vicious […]
DeMille vs. Mankiewicz, October 22, 1950 – Frederick on Film
Am interesting discussion of the Screen Directors Meeting on 22 October 1950 in Frederick on Film. https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com.au/2017/04/demille-vs-mankiewicz-october-22-1950.html
Hollywood Divided on Film Buffs Forecast
I was a guest on Film Buffs Forecast’s Episode 2 for an 80-minute in-depth interview (which will be broadcast over the next 4 episodes). I talk about the events behind and leading up to the momentous October 1950 of the Screen Directors’ Guild at a time when the Red Scare was warming up . The […]