It’s been one year since the coronavirus pandemic began: a year of lockdowns, social distancing, mounting anxiety and masks. I’ve watched a lot of films since last March (I don’t think I’m alone in that), but looking back I realize many of them weren’t new to me. As reality edged uncomfortably close to fiction, I […]
Lonely Town: ‘The Crowd’ (1928)
Here’s the second instalment in my ‘New York State of Mind’ series. The Crowd is about a man who moves to a big city and waits for his life to get started, without realising that his life has become waiting. So desperate is he to stand out from the crowd, he never considers there might […]
La Belle Josephine: ‘Siren of the Tropics’ (1927), ‘Zouzou’ (1934) and ‘Princess Tam Tam’ (1935)
What I remember best about The Triplets of Belleville, Sylvain Chomet’s eccentric, inscrutable animated comedy is its opening: a flashback showing the titular triplets performing on stage in the 1930s. There’s Charles Trenet and Django Reinhardt jamming in the orchestra pit, Fred Astaire inexplicably being devoured by his own shoes and, for reasons best known […]
Life with Fathers: Nine Fathers for Father’s Day
Happy Father’s Day! As we celebrate fathers of all shapes and sizes, here are a handful of cinematic ones who run the gamut of paternal devotion. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) When Scout Finch (Mary Badham) comes home weeping after a disastrous first day at school, her father comforts her with the following advice: “You […]
Not-so-silent cinema: The Art of Silent Film Music
This article was originally published on Starring NYC (now sadly defunct) and has been dusted off and spruced up for its Retro Movie Buff debut. Ben Model believes silent cinema is the worst name for a film genre. Not only is it patently misleading, it’s also a little dull. “It sounds like you’re going to […]
Hollywood East
This article was originally published on Starring NYC (now sadly defunct) and has been dusted off and spruced up for its Retro Movie Buff debut. The thumbnail history of American cinema goes something like this: In the beginning, there was Edison. In the 1890s, Thomas Alva Edison—or rather his employee, W.K.L. Dickson—developed the Kinetograph, […]
Bread and Circuses: ‘Ben-Hur’ (1925)
No, not that Ben-Hur– the other one. Three decades before MGM’s mighty, Technicolor sword-and-sandal epic starring Charlton Heston, there was MGM’s mighty, black-and-white sword-and-sandal epic starring Ramon Novarro. Both are adaptations of the same novel, Lew Wallace’s 1880 best-seller Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and, naturally, feature the most magnificent chariot races ever committed […]