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            In 1939 theatre and radio star Orson Welles was offered a generous contract by RKO pictures to bring his talents to Hollywood. This contract called for him to write, direct, produce, cast, and star in two films, and promised him complete creative control over the films’ final cut. Giving such a munificent contract to an untested director was a great risk; especially as the film he made was a hit piece on William Randolph Hearst, America’s biggest media mogul. Hearst met the completed film with fury, and he did everything in his power to prevent the film from becoming commercially successful by pulling all advertising for it and all other RKO pictures. Still, try as he might, Hearst could not bury such an achievement; Citizen Kane captured audiences, and is now widely considered the greatest film of all time.             Citizen Kane, like Birth of a Nation be...

            During the Second World War, studios across the world took up arms and fought the war through propaganda films. In America, Frank Capra left screwball comedies to make the Why We Fight documentaries, alongside directors turned propagandists John Ford and John Huston. Some films used propaganda through narrative, such as Casablanca or Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. In Germany Joseph Goebbels commissioned a series of war films showing Wehrmacht victories, and in Japan a young Akira Kurosawa began his career in cinema by directing war films commissioned by the emperor’s government. In 1944, in both Britain and in Russia, two of cinema’s greatest legends made films that didn’t show the war that they were in the midst of, but rather adapted well known histories into epics to show their struggle in a larger narrative. These allied filmmakers made films about two of their greatest monarchs – Henry V and Ivan the Terrible – to rile the...

“Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms. Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.”             So sings the comforting baritone of the Reverend Henry Powell from his horse late one night, while out scouting for children he wants to rob and murder. As he rides, a distant silhouette, we understand the children’s horror that, run as they might, he is not going to give up.             The Night of the Hunter is dependent on juxtapositions, powerful images, and this dreamlike horror fantasy environment. Robert Mitchum plays the amiably sinister Henry Powell, a preacher with the words Love and Hate tattooed across his knuckles. We are introduced to him on a clear day, as he drives away from his latest crime. He is praying aloud, asking “well now, what’s it to be Lord? Another widow?” As he tries to remember how many widows the Lord has given him he assumes...

      I used to be   a big Quentin Tarantino fan . A lot of my friends still are, and I will readily admit that he is a man of great talent. He writes interesting characters, unique nonlinear story lines, and chucks his movies full of delightful foreign and classic film homage. I never really thought about all the violence in his films, as they were so over the top that I failed to relate to it. I got a bit upset when some of the characters I liked died in  Jackie Brown , but for the most part I could watch Uma Thurman scalp people with her samurai sword without issue. We, the viewers, aren’t supposed to empathise with any of his characters except the main protagonists. My thoughts on violence have since evolved, and now I cannot watch the infamous "Bear Jew" scene without actually sympathising with the poor Nazi on that one. And I hate Nazis.         It was the Michael Haneke film   Funny Games  that forced me to rethink the wa...

       I have spent the past few days overhauling the design of this old blog, adding new pictures and fixing the structure to some of the older articles, and I have now written more entries in the past month than any other time since 2012. I have even changed the web address (filmsonfilms.blogspot.com) to make it easier to remember and to highlight that this was, and is always, a film blog, even when other topics sneak in. I think this is as good as a time as any to take a little stock.       I started this film blog my junior year in college, when I was studying abroad at the University of York. I was twenty-one and in a foreign country with too much time on my hands, and began watching, on average, more than a film a day. I had taken two film courses the previous semester and figured I knew a thing or two, so I wrote a bunch of articles until I moved on to something else, and ever since have popped in the odd update here and there.     ...

         It is quite common for directors to work with a consistent set of actors over the course of their careers. Looking over a director’s filmography one will often find evidence of these collaborations, and, indeed, using the same acting talent over and over again is one of the signs of an auteur. The actors and actresses often build a relationship with a director; they draw inspiration from one another, and push the other’s limits. There are a few directors who narrow this number, and end up working with one specific actor or actress over and over again, until they begin to be permanently identified with one another in the public consciousness. Think Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski or, if you prefer, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. These relationships have highs and lows, just as any other relationship, but the more films you watch by these collaborators the richer the experience becomes.             Ta...

          In my last article I wrote about one of my favorite directors, Akira Kurosawa, and Ran, his adaptation of King Lear . Kurosawa was well read in western literature, and also made adaptations of Macbeth ( Throne of Blood ), Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich ( Ikiru ), and works by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maxim Gorky. Kurosawa was a master of identifying characteristics that made stories universal, thus making western classics accessible to Japanese audiences. What is even more impressive is, however, how many of his 1950s-era Japanese films became classics in world cinema, and have remained in the western collective conscience ever since.             To my eye, Kurosawa made two different types of film. There are the “jidaigeki” samurai epics, set in feudal Japan, all evoking a distant past – films such as Rashomon, Ran, Kagemusha, and Yojimbo. These are how most audiences think of Kurosa...