In Billy Wilder’s hilariously acid The Fortune Cookie (1966), sports cameraman Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon) gets clobbered by football star Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson (Ron Rich) when Jackson is tackled along the sidelines. Conniving lawyer Willie Gingrich (Walter Matthau) convinces Harry, his hapless brother-in-law, to fake a more serious injury so they can make a [...]
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John Fidler
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John Fidler is an editor and writer for the Reading Eagle, a daily newspaper in Reading, Pennsylvania, USA. He has also written for Cineaste and The Washington Post. A feature and accompanying commentary on the 50th anniversary DVD release of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957) for his newspaper were winners in the recent 30th annual William A. Schnader Print Media Awards, which are sponsored by the Pennsylvania Bar Association and the U.S. law firm of Schnader Harrison Segal and Lewis LLP.
Articles by John Fidler:
Towards the end of Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos, 2009) – his sad, playful, colour-saturated tribute to his own and so many others’ films – Harry Caine/Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar) caresses the screen upon which images from a surreptitiously shot surveillance video play. The images are of Harry and Lena (Penélope Cruz) exchanging [...]
With its rapid cuts, roaming camera, passel of characters (some of them so pitiful they seem always in need of a hug or maybe a swat on the behind), sense that chaos is only a phone call or knock of the door away, and wry subject – the making of an “important” French film – Olivier Assayas’ [...]
WALDO PEPPER [Robert Redford]: Do you like movies? MARY BETH [Susan Sarandon]: Mmm-hmmm. – The Great Waldo Pepper (George Roy Hill, 1975) … perhaps one must become the films one loves. – Murray Pomerance (1) A moment in Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock’s dark and grisly comedy about the dangers of being too close to your [...]
A recent roundup of prostitutes in a small town yielded a collection of mug shots of the women of the night. Looking at these empty, grey faces staring blindly into the same kind of camera that departments of transportation use for drivers licenses, one couldn’t help asking, “Who would spend money – or time – [...]
The only male soldier in Aleksandr Askoldov’s Commissar who shows up ready for a fight as the Russian Civil War lurches on is a child. The opening scenes of this monumental film are chock-a-block with bedraggled soldiers of a defeated White army, hauling themselves and their rickety cannons from another time through a grey and [...]
“I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas…” Too sentimental! – Boris (Woody Allen), as he throws out one of his poems (which is from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) in Allen’s Love and Death (1975) But, of course, only those who have [...]
A new article to coincide with screenings at the Australian Centre For the Moving Image in Melbourne.
Fury (1936 US 92 mins) Prod Co: MGM Prod: Joseph L. Mankiewicz Dir: Fritz Lang Scr: Bartlett Cormack, Fritz Lang, from the story “Mob Rule” by Norman Krasna Phot: Joseph Ruttenberg Ed: Frank Sullivan Art Dir: Cedric Gibbons Mus: Franz Waxman Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Spencer Tracy, Walter Abel, Bruce Cabot, Edward Ellis, Walter Brennan, Frank [...]
A vehicle crawls along a road that cuts across a brown and dusty landscape, where an African-American youngster tends an ailing horse. Three shiftless white men gather on a porch, talking of wasting time, waiting for nothing. A fourth watches over the horse, then the boy, but like his cohorts on the porch seems to [...]
State Legislature (2006 USA 217 mins) Prod Co: Zipporah Films, Inc. Prod, Dir, Ed, Sound: Frederick Wiseman Phot: John Davey Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table …. – T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” They [...]
The critic must have two things: personality and an ax to grind. – Eric Bentley, critic and playwright (1) In his review of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2007) in The Nation – an American magazine of political commentary that has been stirring up its readers since 1865 – Kent Jones blasts off. Jones never [...]
WILLIE [John Lurie] (eating a TV dinner): Eva, stop bugging me, will you? You know, this is the way we eat in America. I got my meat, I got my potatoes, I got my vegetables, I got my dessert, and I don’t even have to wash the dishes. – Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984) [...]
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show [...]
