Obsession is a 1976 psychological thriller/mystery directed by Brian De Palma, starring Cliff Robertson, Geneviève Bujold, and John Lithgow. The screenplay was by Paul Schrader, from a story by De Palma and Schrader. Bernard Herrmann provided the film's soundtrack. The story is about a New Orleans businessman who is haunted by guilt following the death of his wife and daughter during a kidnapping-rescue attempt. Years after the tragedy, he meets and falls in love with a young woman who is the exact look-alike of his long dead wife.
Both De Palma and Schrader have pointed to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) as the major inspiration for Obsession's narrative and thematic concerns. Schrader's script was extensively rewritten and pared down by De Palma prior to shooting, causing the screenwriter to proclaim complete disinterest in the film's subsequent production and release. Completed in 1975, Columbia Pictures picked up the distribution rights but demanded that minor changes be made to reduce potentially controversial aspects of the plot. When finally released in the late summer of 1976, it became De Palma's first substantial box office success and received a mixed response from critics.
De Palma and Schrader devised a story with a narrative clearly inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, a film that both of them admired.
Schrader's original screenplay, titled Deja Vu, was reportedly much longer than the final film, with a coda that extended another ten years beyond where the film now ends. De Palma ultimately found Schrader's screenplay unfilmable due to its length, and rewrote and condensed the finale himself after Schrader refused to make the requested changes.
According to De Palma, "Paul Schrader's ending actually went on for another act of obsession. I felt it was much too complicated, and wouldn't sustain, so I abbreviated it."
The film's composer, Bernard Herrmann, agreed that the original ending should be jettisoned, telling De Palma, after reading Schrader's version, "Get rid of it--that'll never work". Schrader remained resentful of De Palma's rewrite for years, and claimed to have lost all interest in the project once the change was made. De Palma said, "It made Schrader very unhappy: he thought I'd truncated his masterpiece. He's never been the same since."
After the film was completed, Columbia executives expressed unease over the incest theme, especially as it was portrayed in such a heavily romanticized manner. Consequently, a few minor changes were made to a pivotal sequence between Robertson and Bujold, in which dissolves and visual "ripples" were inserted in order to suggest that the consummation of their marriage was in fact simply a dream. The film's editor, Paul Hirsch, agreed with the decision to obscure the incest theme, noting, "I thought it was a mistake to drag incest into what was basically a romantic mystery, so I suggested to Brian, 'What if it never happened? What if instead of having them get married, Michael only dreams of getting married? We have this shot of Cliff Robertson asleep. We could use that and then cut to the wedding sequence.' And that's what we did. It became a projection of his desires rather than actual fact.
The Fury is a 1978 supernatural thriller film directed by Brian de Palma. The film was written by John Farris based on his novel of the same name. It starred Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Carrie Snodgress, Amy Irving, Charles Durning and Andrew Stevens. The music was composed by John Williams, and was highly praised by critic Pauline Kael, who called it "as elegant and delicately varied a score as any horror film has ever had"
The plot combines elements of horror and the spy thriller. A teenage girl, Gillian Bellaver (Amy Irving) discovers that she possesses psychic powers, including telekinesis and extra-sensory perception, but that other people suffer bleeding if they touch her. She volunteers to attend the Paragon Clinic, whose director, Dr McKeever (Charles Durning), works for a shady intelligence operative named Childress (John Cassavetes). Childress has betrayed his friend Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas) and is using Sandza's psychic son Robin (Andrew Stevens) in research into the weapons potential of psychics. Meanwhile Peter, who survived Childress' set-up, is searching for his son; with Gillian's help and that of his girlfriend Hester (Carrie Snodgress) he tracks Robin down, but Childress' ruthless experiments have driven the young man insane, and he and Peter both die within minutes of their reunion. As he dies, Robin has some form of psychic contact with Gillian. When Childress tries to persuade Gillian to accept his "help", she finally accepts her talent and kills him by exploding him from the inside out.
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Haumea is a dwarf planet, one-third the mass of Pluto, in the Kuiper belt. It was discovered in 2004 by a team headed by Mike Brown of Caltech at the Palomar Observatory in the United States, and in 2005 by a team headed by J. L. Ortiz at the Sierra Nevada Observatory in Spain, though the latter claim has been contested. On September 17, 2008, it was accepted as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and named after Haumea, the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth. Haumea's extreme elongation makes it unique among known trans-Neptunian objects. Although its shape has not been directly observed, calculations from its light curve suggest it is an ellipsoid, with its greatest axis twice as long as its shortest. Nonetheless, its gravity is believed sufficient for it to have relaxed into hydrostatic equilibrium, thereby meeting the definition of a dwarf planet. This elongation, along with its unusually rapid rotation, high density, and high albedo (due to a surface of crystalline water ice), are thought to be the results of a giant collision, which left Haumea the largest member of a collisional family that includes several large TNOs and its two known moons.
Love Among the Ruins is a 1975 television film (1975) directed by George Cukor and starring Katharine Hepburn and Sir Laurence Olivier.
Set in Edwardian England, Love Among the Ruins tells the story of Jessica Medlicott (Hepburn), an aging grande dame of the London theater. When Medlicott is accused by a young man of seducing and then abandoning him, she retains the services of the greatest barrister in Britain (Olivier), who turns out to be a former suitor still in love with her.
The show took home several Emmy Awards, including Hepburn and Olivier for Outstanding Performance, and Cukor for Outstanding Directing.
Ghost Story is a 1981 American horror film based on the book of the same name by Peter Straub. It is directed by John Irvin and it stars Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., John Houseman and Craig Wasson (in a dual role). It was the last film to feature Astaire, Fairbanks, and Douglas, and the first film to feature Michael O'Neill.
The plot is taken from the novel of the same name by Straub.
A group of elderly gentlemen in their New England hometown have formed a group called "The Chowder Society". Together, they spend their evenings telling ghost stories to one another. However, they begin to experience an actual ghost who wants revenge. The members of the group start dying in mysterious ways, as does the son of one member, who falls to his death after seeing his new bride's face as she really is. His brother attempts to prevent any more deaths. As the story progresses, the audience learns more about the mysterious woman and her relationship with The Chowder Society members.
Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., John Houseman, Melvyn Douglas in the same picture! And then there is Alice Krige, the iron hand in a velvet glove. Four of Hollywood's greats sharing time and space with a more recent and incredibly worthy addition to its hallowed halls. It is a shame, though, that in translating Peter Straub's horror novel to the screen, more couldn't have been done to artfully render the proceedings into a true screamfest, instead of the regular millieu that frequently fails to pass muster in films of this sort.
Fred Astaire fares the best of the quartet, with the always marvelous Melvyn Douglas bringing up a very close second. Astaire's Ricky is sublime and Douglas's Dr. Jaffrey is consummate in its execution. Craig Wasson did nothing to make this reviewer want to see him survive, and it is the one piece of miscasting that flaws the film. Patricia Neal as Astaire's wife, Stella, is always enjoyable to see in anything she does, but in this instance, she was rather forgettable in a role that seemed somehow beneath her vast talents. Sadly, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. makes a very early exit, and in the fashion of Agatha Christie's, Ten Little Indians, we are left to wonder just who or what will be next.
The cinematography by the great British cameraman, Jack Cardiff, is superb and evokes a sense of subtle frightfulness and suspense, and his melding of shades of colour; dark for evil secrets and the bright light of white snow to counter an offensive are masterfully conveyed. The musical score by prolific Philippe Sarde is amply representational and evocative and was slightly reminiscent in ways of the work of Bernard Herrman's Farenheit 451.
Veronica A. Cartwright (born 20 April 1949) is an Emmy Award-nominated English/American actress.
Cartwright was born in Bristol, England. Her career as a child actress began in 1958, with a role in In Love and War. Among her early appearances was a semi-regular part in the television series Leave it to Beaver (1959) (as "Violet Rutherford") and an episode of The Twilight Zone "I Sing the Body Electric" (1962). She guest starred twice in 1963 in NBC's medical drama about psychiatry, The Eleventh Hour, in the episodes "The Silence of Good Men" and "My Name is Judith, I'm Lost, You See". Cartwright appeared in the films, The Children's Hour (1961) and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) which were both highly successful. She was cast as daughter Jemima Boone in the first two seasons of NBC's Daniel Boone from 1964 until 1966, with co-stars Fess Parker, Patricia Blair, Darby Hinton, and Ed Ames.
Cartwright's career slowed down during the late 1960s. She continued to work sporadically and achieved two of her biggest successes with Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and Alien (1979). She was originally cast as Alien's heroine Ellen Ripley, but director Ridley Scott switched her role with Sigourney Weaver's just prior to shooting the movie.
Other film roles include: Spencer's Mountain with Henry Fonda and Kym Karath (1963), Inserts (1976), Goin' South (1978), The Right Stuff (1983), Flight of the Navigator (1986), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Shoot the Moon (1996), Money Talks (1997), Scary Movie 2 (2001), Kinsey (2004), and Straight-Jacket (2004).
A frequent performer in television, she has played guest roles in such series as The Mod Squad, Miami Vice, Baywatch, L.A. Law, ER, The X-Files, Chicago Hope, Will & Grace, Touched by an Angel, Judging Amy and Six Feet Under. Cartwright has received three Emmy Award nominations, one for her work in ER in 1997, and two for her work on The X-Files in 1998 and 1999.
She co-starred in the fourth remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Invasion (2007). She appears on the cover art for the Scissor Sisters' 2006 single I Don't Feel Like Dancin' as well as on their second album Ta-Dah.
Veronica Cartwright's sister, actress Angela Cartwright, appeared in The Sound of Music (1965) and in the CBS television series Lost in Space.
Trilogy of Terror (also known in the United States as Tales of Terror and Terror of the Doll ) is a three part television horror thriller film, first aired on ABC on March 4, 1975. The film, directed by Dan Curtis and starring Karen Black in the four lead roles of each chapter, including roles as twin sisters, was originally a failed pilot for a horror anthology television series.
All three segments are based on unrelated short stories written by Richard Matheson, with film titles being the names for the film's protagonists, played by Black. Black initially turned the role down but eventually accepted when her then-husband, Robert Burton, was selected for the role of "Chad". A television film sequel, Trilogy of Terror II, written and also directed by Dan Curtis was released in 1996.
Amelia, the third segment, was filmed with Karen Black as the only actor. It was also the only film of three to be adapted from the short story to the screen by its author Richard Matheson, who based Amelia on his short story, Prey, published six-years earlier in Playboy Magazine.
District 9 is an upcoming science fiction movie to be directed by Neill Blomkamp. The film is set for an August 14, 2009 release date. It takes place in Johannesburg, South Africa. A screening was shown at ShoWest, but other than that the movie has been kept private.
Not much is known about the movie's plot. It is, however, known to be based on Alive in Joburg, a short film (produced by Neill Blomkamp, Sharlto Copley, Simon Hansen and Shanon Worley; Sharlto Copley also portrayed one of the interviewed policemen) about aliens landing in Africa and becoming slaves/migrant workers. In the movie they are called the "Non-Humans" and are forced to work by the fictional company, Multi National United (MNU for short).
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a 1966 American drama film directed by Mike Nichols. The screenplay by Ernest Lehman is an adaptation of the play of the same title by Edward Albee. It stars Elizabeth Taylor as Martha and Richard Burton as George, with George Segal as Nick and Sandy Dennis as Honey.
At the time of the release of the film, Warner Brothers Records released a deluxe, gatefold two-LP record set which included the entire film's dialogue. The album was made before some of the film's profanity was toned down, so Martha's original "Screw you!" line that welcomes Nick and Honey is heard on the LP but not in the final version of the film. This is one of the only cases in which Warner Brothers released an album of this kind. This album is out of print, extremely rare and hard to find. It has not been released on CD. A single-LP release featured dialogue excerpts and Alex North's score; this album was issued on CD by DRG in 2006.
The choice of Taylor -- at the time regarded as one of the most beautiful women in the world -- to play the frumpy, fifty-ish Martha surprised many, but the actress gained thirty pounds for the role and her performance (along with those of Burton, Segal and Dennis) was ultimately praised. According to Edward Albee, he had been told that Bette Davis and James Mason were going to play "Martha" and "George" — in the script, Martha references Davis and quotes her famous "What a dump!" line from the film Beyond the Forest (1949) — and was surprised by the Burton/Taylor casting, but stated that Taylor was quite good, and Burton was incredible.
The film was the only one to be nominated in every eligible category at the Academy Awards. Each of the four main actors was nominated for an Oscar but only Taylor and Sandy Dennis (Honey) won, for Best Actress and Supporting Actress, respectively. The film also won the Black and White Cinematography award for Haskell Wexler's stark, black-and-white camera work (it was the last film to win before the category was eliminated) and for Best Art Direction (Richard Sylbert, George James Hopkins). It was the first film to have its entire credited cast be nominated for acting Oscars. The film received the BAFTA Award for Best Film from any Source.
A Man and His Music + Ella + Jobim was a 1967 television special starring Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Antonio Carlos Jobim, accompanied by the orchestras of Nelson Riddle and Gordon Jenkins. The medley that Jobim & Sinatra sing together was arranged by Claus Ogerman.
Earlier in the year Sinatra had recorded the album Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim with Jobim, and this show offered a rare opportunity to see them both in live performance.
Sinatra had featured Ella on his Timex television shows in the late 1950s, and this show marked their first televisual appearance together since then, and their last until a series of live concerts at Caesars Palace in 1974.
Before Bond, before Bourne, there was Bonisseur de la Bath explains the Wall Street Journal. Created in 1949 by French thriller writer Jean Bruce (four years before Ian Fleming published his first Bond adventure, "Casino Royale"), Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, otherwise known as OSS 117, was the original prototype for the globe-trotting, devil-may-care secret agent.
Bruce's creation -- a smooth-talking, Americanized Frenchman employed by the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner to the CIA) -- brought him fame and wealth in over 80 novels and half-a-dozen films before the author's untimely death in a car accident in 1963. Since then, Bruce's widow and children have churned out further OSS 117 adventures without ever hitting the heights of the originals.
But two new French films have successfully resurrected OSS 117 and introduced him to a new generation of fans. The first film, "OSS 117: Cairo, nest of spies," was released in France in 2006; it sold over two million tickets and was subsequently distributed throughout the world. A sequel, "OSS 117: Lost in Rio," came out in France last week and immediately shot to the top of the box-office charts.
Whereas the original books and films (most of which were made during the 1960s starring a variety of B-list actors like Frederick Stafford, John Gavin and Errol Flynn's son Sean Flynn as OSS) were fairly serious, though slightly tongue-in-cheek adventures, the new films are deliberately played for laughs. "We appropriated Bruce's character by taking all his faults and magnifying them," says Michel Hazanavicius, who directed both films. "We also decided to make the character purely French as opposed to an Americanized Frenchman."
Both films star 36-year-old French actor Jean Dujardin, whose good looks and comic timing have drawn widespread acclaim. "He has this handsome premier side but also an elastic face a bit like Jim Carrey, which makes him ideal for comedy," says Jean-François Halin, who wrote the first film and co-wrote the second with Mr. Hazanavicius. "I was watching the second film the other day where Jean has this scene with an American CIA agent and if you look closely you'll see him pull about 15 different facial expressions in 15 seconds."
Mr. Dujardin's portrayal of OSS 117 has also drawn numerous comparisons with a young Sean Connery.
"It's true that for Jean Dujardin's look in the first film we were inspired by Sean Connery in early Bond films like 'Dr. No,'" says Mr. Hazanavicius. "But in the second I wanted Jean to strike a more urbane pose so I got him to look at films like 'Harper' starring Paul Newman. There are two suits he wears in the new film, a dark blue and a brown, which are replicas of the ones Newman wore."
Twelve years separate the two films: the first is set in Cairo in 1955 with France still a colonial power to be reckoned with, while the second takes place in Rio in 1967 with the world on the brink of massive social upheaval. "We wanted to take OSS out of his comfort zone in the second film," explains Mr. Hazanavicius. "In the first film his brand of misogyny and racism is rarely called into question, but in the second he can no longer get away with such outrageous behavior."
"We wanted to show how many French people deliberately turned a blind eye to what was going on during the Second World War in France and for years after," says Mr. Halin. "We wanted to puncture the myth propagated by de Gaulle that France was a country entirely made up of resistors of the German occupation. It was interesting to talk about this climate that still reigned in France at the end of the 1960s 40 years later."
Both Mr. Hazanavicius and Mr. Halin cut their comedy teeth working for Canal Plus, the French pay-per-view channel, through the 1990s on a series of satirical shows. The channel has become renowned for its irreverent tone and anti-establishment voice. It also helped to revolutionize comedy sketch shows in France by applying high production values and paying its writers competitive salaries.
"One of the things I learned working for Canal Plus was to make the kinds of things I would like to see and not to differentiate between my own tastes and those of the public," says Mr. Hazanavicius. "It may sound egotistical but everything I've ever done professionally has been done to amuse myself."
The only difference now is that Messrs. Hazanavicius and Halin are working on a grander scale. Both OSS films were bankrolled by French studio giant Gaumont, which, far from rushing "Lost in Rio" into production after the success of the first film, gave their screenwriters ample time to develop a second film that is not a carbon copy of the first and works well on its own terms.
With the success of the second film now seemingly assured, Mr. Halin is keen for there to be one last installment in the adventures of OSS. "I think we're two-thirds way through this character's psychological arc and now we need to finish it," says Mr. Halin. "Cairo was the period of innocence, Rio that of doubt, it might be interesting in the third film to see an aging Hubert trading on former glories."
Beatrice "Bea" Arthur (May 13, 1922 – April 25, 2009) was an American comedienne, actress, and singer. In a career spanning seven decades, Arthur achieved success as the title character, Maude Findlay, on the 1970s sitcom Maude, and as Dorothy Zbornak on the 1980s sitcom The Golden Girls; she won Emmys for both roles.
Invitation to the Dance (1956) is an anthology film consisting of three distinct stories, all starring and directed by Gene Kelly.
The film is unique in that it has no spoken dialogue, with the characters performing their roles entirely through dance and mime. Kelly appears in all three stories, which feature leading dancers of the era including Tommy Rall, Igor Youskevitch, Tamara Toumanova and Carol Haney.
The movie was filmed in 1952, but its release was delayed until 1956 because of doubts at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer about its commercial viability. The movie was a failure at the box office, but is regarded today as a landmark all-dance film.
The first segment, "Circus", set to original music composed for the film by Jacques Ibert, is a tragic love triangle set in a mythical land sometime in the past. Kelly plays a clown, who is in love with another circus performer, played by Claire Sombert. She, however, is in love with an aerialist, played by Youskevitch. To impress Ms. Sombert, the clown performs a dangerous high-wire act, and falls.
The third and best segment, "Sinbad the Sailor", is a fantasy consisting of live action and Hanna-Barbera-directed cartoons set in the casbah of a Middle Eastern country. Kelly plays a sailor who is sold a magic lantern. This puts him in conflict with cartoon villains wielding swords, and falling in love with a cartoon harem girl. This segment includes complex dance sequences showing a live Kelly dancing with cartoon characters; predating many ideas which reappeared in Mary Poppins. (Walt Disney was a friend of Gene Kelly's, and Disney animators provided technical consulting for the MGM animators on blending live action with animation for this film.) Good use is also made of the original themes of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade by the durable MGM music department team of adapter Roger Edens, conductor Johnny Green and orchestrator Conrad Salinger.
The film won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Jack Cardiff OBE, B.S.C. (18 September 1914 – 22 April 2009) was a British cinematographer, director and photographer.
His career spanned the development of cinema, from silent film, through early experiments in Technicolor (and, less successfully, Smell-o-vision), to filmmaking in the 21st century. He was best known for his influential cinematography for directors such as Powell, Huston and Hitchcock.
In 2000 he was awarded an OBE and in 2001 he was awarded an Honorary Oscar for his contribution to the cinema.
Cardiff was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, and his parents were music hall entertainers. He worked as an actor from an early age, both in the music hall and in a number of silent films: My Son, My Son (1918), Billy's Rose (1922), The Loves of Mary, Queen of Scots (1923) and Tiptoes (1927). At 15 he began working as a camera assistant, clapper boy and production runner for British International Pictures, including Hitchcock's The Skin Game (1931).
In 1935 Cardiff graduated to camera operator and occasional cinematographer, working mostly for London Films. He was the first to shoot a film in Britain in Technicolor: Wings of the Morning (1937). When the war began he worked as a cinematographer on public information films.
The turning point in his career was as a 2nd unit cameraman on Powell & Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943); they were impressed enough to hire Cardiff as cinematographer on their post-war Technicolor A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Their collaboration continued with Black Narcissus (1947), which won Cardiff an Oscar and a Golden Globe, and The Red Shoes (1948). These films put Cardiff's talents in high demand, and a string of big-budget films followed.
After concentrating on direction in the 1960s, he returned to cinematography in the 1970s and 1980s, though on undistinguished films.
Cardiff died of natural causes on 22 April 2009, the same day as Ken Annakin, with whom he had worked on The Fifth Musketeer (1979). He was survived by his wife and his four sons.
Kenneth Cooper Annakin, OBE (10 August 1914 – 22 April 2009) was an English film director.
His career in feature films followed early experience making documentaries, he made his fiction film debut in 1947 with the Rank Organisation. The following year he moved to Gainsborough Pictures to direct three films about the Huggetts, a working class family living in suburban England. Annakin became known for a series of Walt Disney adventures including The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), The Sword and the Rose (1953) and Swiss Family Robinson (1960).
He was later associated with another American producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, when he was hired to direct the British segments in The Longest Day (1962). As head of the 20th Century-Fox Studio, Zanuck endorsed Annakin's most ambitious project Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965). Annakin also directed the big-scale war film Battle of the Bulge (also 1965) for the Warner Brothers studio.
However, some of Annakin's better received films are smaller-scale comedies and dramas, including his episodes in Quartet (1948) and Trio (1950), based on Somerset Maugham's stories, Hotel Sahara (1951), Across the Bridge (1957), Crooks Anonymous (1962), The Fast Lady (1963) and The Informers (1963).
Annakin's last completed film was The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking (1988), Ghenghis Khan (1992) was not completed. He died on 22 April 2009, the same day as Jack Cardiff, who had been his cinematographer on the 1979 film The Fifth Musketeer.
Despite claims that George Lucas took the name for Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars from his friend and fellow film director, Lucas denied this via his publicist following Annakin's death in 2009.
Starring Spencer Tracy (Drummond) and Fredric March (Brady), and featuring Gene Kelly (Hornbeck), Dick York (Cates), Harry Morgan (Judge), Donna Anderson (Rachel Brown), Claude Akins (Rev. Brown), Noah Beery, Jr. (Stebbins), Florence Eldridge (Mrs. Brady), and Jimmy Boyd (Howard). The movie was adapted by Nedrick Young (originally as Nathan E. Douglas) and Harold Jacob Smith, and directed by Stanley Kramer.
At the Berlin International Film Festival, March received the Silver Bear Award for Best Actor, and the film was nominated for the Golden Bear award. The movie was also nominated for the following Academy Awards: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Spencer Tracy), Best Cinematography, Black-and-White, Best Film Editing and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. It was also nominated for BAFTA Best Film and Best Foreign Actor.
The film deviates from the play, most notably by reducing the unidimensionality of some of the characters. Furthermore, the friendship of Drummond and Brady is emphasized as they respectfully explain their positions in a cordial private conversation.
The film incorporates more of the actual trial transcript than does the stage play, most notably the incident in which Clarence Darrow is cited for contempt of court. The film includes a sequence where a mob harasses Cates in his jail cell and then threatens Drummond at his hotel. That same night, a conversation with Hornbeck inspires Drummond to call Brady as a witness, to expose the contradictions that result from a literal interpretation of the Bible.
The blurb for the 2002 DVD release of the film included the following factoid: "In 1960, Inherit the Wind became the world's first in-flight movie when Trans World Airlines used it to lure first-class passengers!"
The British film-making partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, also known as The Archers, made a series of influential films in the 1940s and 1950s, and in 1983 were recognized for their contributions to British cinema with the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award, the most prestigious award given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Their collaborations were mainly written by Pressburger, with Powell directing. Unusually, the pair shared a writer-director-producer credit for most of their films.
After Powell had made two further films for Korda, he was reunited with Pressburger in 1940 for Contraband, the first in a run of Powell and Pressburger films set during World War II. The second was 49th Parallel (1941), which won Pressburger an Academy Award for Best Story. Both are Hitchcock-like thrillers made as anti-German propaganda.
The pair adopted a joint writer-producer-director credit for their next film, One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942). In 1943 they formed their own production company, Archers Film Productions and adopted a distinctive archery target logo which began each film. The joint credit "Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger" indicates their total joint responsibility for their own work and that they weren't beholden to any studio or other producers.
In a letter to Deborah Kerr, asking her to appear in Colonel Blimp, Pressburger explicitly set out 'The Archers' Manifesto'. Its five points express the pair's intentions:
We owe allegiance to nobody except the financial interests which provide our money; and, to them, the sole responsibility of ensuring them a profit, not a loss.
Every single foot in our films is our own responsibility and nobody else's. We refuse to be guided or coerced by any influence but our own judgement.
When we start work on a new idea we must be a year ahead, not only of our competitors, but also of the times. A real film, from idea to universal release, takes a year. Or more.
No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for other reasons than her nakedness.
At any time, and particularly at the present, the self respect of all collaborators, from star to prop-man, is sustained, or diminished, by the theme and purpose of the film they are working on.
They began to form a group of regular cast and crew members who were to work with them on many films over the next twelve years. Hardly any of these people were ever under contract to The Archers. They were hired film by film. But Powell and Pressburger soon learnt who they could work well with and these people enjoyed working with them. When Raymond Massey was offered the part of the Prosecuting Attorney in A Matter of Life and Death his cabled reply was "For the Archers anytime, this world or the next."
The remainder of the war saw them release a series of remarkably inventive films:
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
The Volunteer (1943) a short propaganda film
A Canterbury Tale (1944)
I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
Black Narcissus (1947)
The Red Shoes (1948). Their most commercially successful film.
The Small Back Room (1949)
The Elusive Pimpernel (1950)
Gone to Earth (1950). A substantially re-edited version was released in the US as The Wild Heart (1952) by co-producer David O. Selznick, after a court battle with Powell and Pressburger. The film was fully restored by the British Film Archive in 1985.
The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)
Generally, Pressburger would create the original story (for all their films from 1940–1946 plus The Red Shoes) and write the first draft of the script. They would then pass the script back and forth a few times – they could never work on it together in the same room. For the actual dialogue, Pressburger would know what he wanted the characters to say but Powell would often supply some of the actual words.
They would both act as producers, perhaps Pressburger slightly more so than Powell, since he could sooth the feathers ruffled by Powell's forthright manner. They became their own producers mainly to stop anyone else poking their noses in, since they had a considerable degree of freedom, especially under Rank, to make just about any film they wanted.
The direction was nearly all done by Powell, but even so The Archers generally worked as a team, with the cast and crew often making suggestions. Pressburger was always on hand, usually on the studio floor, to make sure that these late changes fitted seamlessly into the story.
Once the filming was finished, Powell would usually go off for a walk in the hills of Scotland to clear his head, but Pressburger was often closely involved in the editing, especially of the way the music was used. Pressburger was a musician himself and played the violin in an orchestra in Hungary.
When the film was finally ready and Powell was back from the Highlands, it would usually be Powell that would be the front man in any promotional work, such as interviews for the trade papers or fan magazines.
Because collaborative efforts such as Powell's and Pressburger's were, and continue to be, unusual in the film industry, and because of the influence of the auteur theory, which elevates the director as a film's primary creator, Pressburger has sometimes been dismissed as "Michael Powell's scriptwriter", but Powell himself was the first to say, in many interviews, that he couldn't have done most of what he did without Pressburger.
British film critics gave the films of Powell and Pressburger a mixed reaction at the time, acknowledging their creativity but sometimes questioning their motivations and taste. For better or worse, The Archers were always out of step with mainstream British cinema.
From the 1970s onwards, British critical opinion began to revise this lukewarm assessment, with their first BFI retrospective in 1970 and another in 1978. They are now seen as playing a key part in the history of British film, and have become influential and iconic for many film-makers of later generations, such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George A. Romero, Wes Anderson and many more.
In the early 1950s the Powell and Pressburger began to produce fewer films, with notably less success. This may have been because they switched from making films for the British Rank Organisation to the Hollywood-led Alexander Korda. The Archers' productions officially came to an end in 1957, and the pair separated to pursue their individual careers. The separation was quite amicable and they remained devoted friends for the rest of their lives.
In 1960 Michael Powell directed Peeping Tom, which has been praised for its psychological complexity. On the surface, the film is about the Freudian relationship between the protagonist and his father and the protagonist and his victims. However, several critics argue that the film is as much about the voyeurism of the audience as they watch the protagonist's actions. For example, Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, states that "The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it."
In this reading, Lewis is an allegory of the director of a horror film. In horror movies, the directors kill victims, often innocents, to provoke responses from the audiences and to manipulate their responses. Lewis records the deaths of his victims with his camera and by using the mirror and showing each of his victims their last moments, provokes their own fear even as he kills them.
Martin Scorsese, who has long been an admirer of Powell's works, has stated that this film, along with Federico Fellini's 8½, contains all that can be said about directing:
"I have always felt that Peeping Tom and 8½ say everything that can be said about film-making, about the process of dealing with film, the objectivity and subjectivity of it and the confusion between the two. 8½ captures the glamour and enjoyment of film-making, while Peeping Tom shows the aggression of it, how the camera violates... From studying them you can discover everything about people who make films, or at least people who express themselves through films."
Age of Consent (1969) is an Australian film which was the penultimate feature film directed by British director Michael Powell. The romantic comedy-drama stars James Mason, who also co-produced it with Powell, Helen Mirren, in her first major film role, and veteran Irish character actor Jack MacGowran. The screenplay by Peter Yeldham was adapted from the 1935 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Norman Lindsay. Lindsay was also the subject of the 1994 film Sirens by John Duigan.
Bradley Morahan (James Mason) is an Australian artist who feels he has become jaded by success and life in New York City. He decides that he needs to regain the edge he had as a young artist and returns to Australia.
He sets up in a shack on the shore of a small, sparsely-inhabited island on the Great Barrier Reef. There he meets young Cora Ryan (Helen Mirren), who has grown up wild, with her only relative, her difficult, gin-guzzling grandmother 'Ma' (Neva Carr-Glynn). To earn money, Cora sells Bradley fish that she has caught in the sea. She later sells him a chicken which she has stolen from his spinster neighbor Isabel Marley (Andonia Katsaros). When Bradley is suspected of being the thief, he pays Isabel and gets Cora to promise not to steal anymore. To help her save enough money to fulfill her dream of becoming a hairdresser in Brisbane, he pays her to be his model. She reinvigorates him, becoming his artistic muse.
Bradley's work is disrupted when his sponging longtime "friend" Nat Kelly (Jack MacGowran) shows up. Nat is hiding from the police over alimony he owes. When Bradley refuses to give him a loan, Nat invites himself to stay with Bradley. After several days, Bradley's patience becomes exhausted. Luckily, the problem is solved for him. Nat romances Isabel, hoping to get some money from her. Instead, she unexpectedly ravishes him. The next day, he hastily departs the island, but not before stealing Bradley's money and some of his drawings.
Then Ma catches Cora posing nude for Bradley and accuses him of carrying on with her underage granddaughter. Bradley protests that he has done nothing improper; finally, he gives her the little money he has left to get her to go away.
When Cora discovers that Ma has found her hidden cache of money, she chases after her. In the ensuing struggle, Ma falls down a hill, breaks her neck, and dies. The local policeman happens by while the woman is still lying on the beach, but he sees no reason to investigate further, since the old woman was known to be frequently drunk.
Later that night, Cora goes to Bradley's shack, but is disappointed when he seems to view her only as his model. When she runs out, Bradley follows her into the water. There, she finally gets him to see her as a desirable young woman.
Helen Mirren, who was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and had played supporting roles in three films, was 22 at the time the filming of Age of Consent began.
James Mason met his future wife Clarissa Kaye-Mason (who was "Clarissa Kaye" at the time) on this film; she played the part of Bradley's ex-girlfriend in Australia. Their scene together was filmed in bed, and Kaye, who was recovering from pneumonia, had a temperature of 103 degrees F. After the filming, Mason began corresponding with Kaye, and the two were married in 1971, and remained so until Mason's death in 1984.
James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was a British novelist and short story writer and former Japanese internee. He was born in the International Settlement in Shanghai, China. He was a prominent member of the New Wave in science fiction. His best known books are the controversial Crash, and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, both of which have been adapted to film.
The adjective "Ballardian", defined as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments", has been included in the Collins English Dictionary.
A January 2008 interview in The Sunday Times, promoting Ballard's autobiography Miracles of Life (2008), revealed that Ballard was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in June 2006. On 17 October 2008, the UK web site BookBrunch reported that Ballard's agent, Margaret Hanbury, had just arrived at the Frankfurt Book fair with a new manuscript from Ballard with the working title, Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life. The physician in question is oncologist Professor Jonathan Waxman of Imperial College, London, who was treating Ballard for prostate cancer. While it is in part a book about cancer, and Ballard's struggle with it, it reportedly moves on to broader themes. Hanbury is in conversation with publishers.
In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I have never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention.
(Waldo Lydecker - Laura 1944)
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