Author David Melville

“We must try to be more conspicuous!” - Monica Vitti,  Modesty Blaise A typical scene in Modesty Blaise (Joseph Losey, 1966) takes place in a hip Amsterdam nightspot. A darkly epicene illusionist (Aldo Silvan...

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing. — W. B. Yeats The Slovak director Juraj Jakubisko has been described by some critics as ‘the Fellini of the East.’ The comparison ...

Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood. – Oscar Wilde The term “sophisticated comedy” has become a lazy critical shorthand for any film in which the characters sip champagne from crystal goblets an...

Dear friend, I congratulate you. Disaster endears beyond Fortune. – Emily Dickinson Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Vittorio De Sica, 1970) is a tranquil film about disaste...

Ever and anon the snow fell, penetrating so profoundly into the depths of her enraptured being that she had no room in her for any other sensation than that of dying of cold, and being buried beneath the adorab...

They flourished their masks, the independent pair, as they might have flourished Spanish fans; they smiled and sighed on removing them; but the gesture, the smiles, the sighs, strangely enough, might have been ...

“Often,” says Tieck in William Lovell, “the world, its people, and its contingencies flicker before my eyes like flimsy shadows; often I appear to myself to be a shadow playing a part, coming and going and doi...

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. But it will be my decision.” -Robert Stack, Bullfighter and the Lady In the opening five minutes of Bullfighter and Lady (1951), viewers may well start wondering if they ha...

“When you dream about my likeness, you create it. The more ardently you dream, the sooner you will see me. And I will resemble your dream.” - The Beast to Beauty, Panna a netvor (Beauty and the Beast) Of al...

“You feel as if your dreams were alive and you could touch them – and real life just passes you by!” - Marcello Mastroianni to Maria Schell, Le notti bianche (White Nights) Night falls on a provincial Italian...

Roberto Gavaldón 7 June 1909, Chihuahua, Mexico 4 September 1986, Mexico City The so-called Golden Age of Mexican Cinema in the 1940s and ’50s remains a mythical terra incognita for most film lovers. We may...

“A life that should have been but never was! A fate that moved on twisting and tortuous paths!” - Dolores del Río, La Otra (The Other One) The ‘twin sisters’ melodrama was one of the more intriguing and idios...