Pit Stop: Billy Wilder’s Mauvaise graine (1934) Adrian Danks April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film The low budget, independently-produced Mauvaise graine (1934) is an outlier in Billy Wilder’s career. Although it characteristically illustrates the value and practice of collaboration – it was co-directed by t...
Hard Labour: Cecil Holmes’s Captain Thunderbolt (1953) Adrian Danks April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film This is an extended and amended version of an article that first appeared in Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand, edited by Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand (Intellect: Bristol and Chicago, 20...
The Masquerade is Over: Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) Adrian Danks April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) was one of the projects closest to Billy Wilder’s heart – an organ that some commentators question even existed. It is also a notoriously vexed and incomplete work, co...
G’day Comrade: Cecil Holmes’s Three in One (1956) Adrian Danks April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film This is an extended and amended version of an article that first appeared in Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand, edited by Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand (Intellect: Bristol and Chicago, 20...
“Welcome to Bottleneck”: Peak Hollywood in Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939) Adrian Danks March 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Despite a directorial career in film and television that spread from the mid-1910s to the early 1970s, taking in a series of sustained collaborations with prominent stars (such as Bob Hope and Glenn Ford) and s...
Hear That Lonesome Whippoorwill: Terence Davies’ The Neon Bible (1995) Adrian Danks October 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film I was interested in the nature of the book, which is actually about failure. And very few things in America seem to me to be about failure, because it’s a society geared to success, and failure is not only kind...
Riding, Jumping, Standing Still: Junior Bonner (Sam Peckinpah, 1972) Adrian Danks October 2018 CTEQ Annotations on Film Although Sam Peckinpah’s films are routinely described in terms of their often-fetishistic fascination with violence, influential deployment of such devices as slow motion, split screen and contrapuntal editing...
The Turning of the Earth: Elia Kazan’s Wild River Adrian Danks March 2018 CTEQ Annotations on Film Although Elia Kazan is most well known for films such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1955) that feature heightened, often hyper-masculine and definitively express...
Before On the Beach: Melbourne on Film in the 1950s Adrian Danks December 2017 Screening Melbourne “City images are historical creations, and are often more resistant to change than the modernisers anticipate, although the resistance may be stronger at some times than others.”- Graeme Davison Stanley Kr...
1985: Come and See (Elem Klimov) Adrian Danks December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema Come and See (1985 Soviet Union 142 mins) Source: AFTRS Prod, Dir: Elem Klimov Scr: Klimov and Ales Adamovich Phot: Alexei Rodionov Mus: O. Yanchenko, Mozart Cast: Alexei Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Ly...
The Light on the Chemical Plant: Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949) Adrian Danks September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The careers of Raoul Walsh and James Cagney were never quite the same after White Heat (1949). As various commentators have suggested, this propulsive, machine-tooled, sardonically funny and often-brutal crime ...
All Boxed Up: Barton Fink (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991) Adrian Danks March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Barton Fink (1991), the Coen brothers’ fourth feature, represents a departure from their earlier excavations of classical American genre cinema, Blood Simple. (1984) and Miller’s Crossing (1990), as well as the...