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October 26, 2020  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In film history, Uncategorized

Legacies of Buster Keaton: Jackie Chan and Malcolm (1986)

Kevin Brianton, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia In almost every Buster Keaton film, there is a scene where the audience gasps at the actor’s astonishing athleticism. It can be when Keaton wrestles with huge pieces of wood on his steam engine, The General or when a building collapses on him.In an […]

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September 21, 2020  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In Book Review, film history

J. R. Jordan, Robert Wise: The Motion Pictures, Revised Edition. (Florida: Bear Manor, 2020)

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 […]

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March 5, 2020  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In Book Review, film history, Uncategorized

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 […]

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January 2, 2020  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In Book Review, film history

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 without […]

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January 26, 2019  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In film history, Uncategorized

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 […]

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January 2, 2019  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In film history

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.  […]

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October 4, 2017  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In film history

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, […]

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1956 Storm Centre
September 26, 2017  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In film history

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 […]

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ninotchka-pressbook3
September 13, 2017  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In film history

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 […]

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Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Directed by Billy Wilder
Shown from left: Cecil B. DeMille, Gloria Swanson, Billy Wilder
September 2, 2017  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In film history

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

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