Author Brad Weismann

In August of 1963, two months before his death, Jean Cocteau recorded on film a “speech to the year 2000” in which he mused on his creative process. He drew a line between his mundane and artistic personas. He ...

Stalag 17 is not the original prisoner-of-war film, nor the first escape film. Its most notable predecessors include such films as Mervyn LeRoy’s I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Jean Renoir’s The G...

In his heyday – from 1926 to 1938 – Philo Vance, the sleuth hero of S.S. Van Dine’s dozen crime novels, was more popular in America than Sherlock Holmes. Quickly adapted to film, his gentleman-detective was pla...

If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman.  – Elaine May While it’s true that you learn more from mistakes than successes, nobody says it isn’t going to be a painful process. In...

Robert Aldrich’s career is a manifest of contradictions. One of the first living directors to be lauded as an auteur, he conscientiously worked his way up from the bottom of the studio system, despite being bor...

Darryl F. Zanuck hated it. After the masterful American producer screened the relentlessly downbeat, anti-capitalist spaghetti Western Il grande silenzio (The Great Silence, Sergio Corbucci, 1968), he refused t...

“As I saw it, the essential task in this was not to do the directing, but to attend to the child.” – François Truffaut, introduction to The Wild Child screenplay Made halfway through the director’s career, L’e...

Autocrat as Messiah: The Fall of Berlin  Padenie Berlina (The Fall of Berlin, Mikheil Chiaurelli, 1950) is the epitome of the politically correct film. No national cinema before or since geared itself to expre...

A Subversive Affirmation: Letter Never Sent  Neotpravlennoe pismo (Letter Never Sent, Mikhail Kalatozov, 1960) is a curious document that bears a lot of freight. It is simultaneously a rousing adventure story,...

I could go on and on about Tarkovsky. Thousands have.  Some directors seem made for critical fodder. Hitchcock, Welles, Ford, Kurosawa, and others in the cinematic pantheon have inspired an academic avalanch...

Why Worry? marks a major transition point in the life of its star, Harold Lloyd. In the wake of the success of his 1922 breakthrough feature Grandma’s Boy and its hit 1923 follow-up Safety Last, Lloyd had figur...

“Come weez me to zee Casbah!” This famous Hollywood misquote, and the amorous adventures of the animated skunk Pépé le Pew, might seem to constitute the only lasting bit of cultural fallout from Julien Duviv...