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Many great Westerns are known for incorporating similar elements, giving the genre a stylistic personality that separates it from others. For the most part, it's most common to have a story of lawmen and anti-heroes who become heroes and save the day. This is true for films like A Fistful of Dollars, Tombstone and many other iconic films in the genre.

However, it's just as thrilling to watch a story about the outlaw or the bandit who has no intention of battling with their morality and doing what's right. While some are less overt about it, like No Country For Old Men or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, others like Forty Guns and The Quick and the Dead make it very clear.

Bonnie and Clyde Has the Outlaws in the Title Released: 1967

Although Bonnie and Clyde is much more of a gangster film than a Western, there's still...

Actors such as John Wayne, James Stewart, and Randolph Scott easily rank among the Western genre's greatest stars. However, because these actors starred in movies during Hollywood's Golden Age, a time when movie ticket prices were well under $1, they do not account for the highest-grossing Western actors. Full of countless surprises, the list of cinema's highest-grossing Western actors features many unexpected stars, most of whom appeared in commercially successful Westerns within the past fifteen years.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Western was one of cinema's least popular genres. Fortunately for fans of the genre, the Western made a triumphant comeback in the 2010s thanks to films such as True Grit, Django Unchained, and The Revenant. The Western has also experienced a resurgence on television due to the success of shows like Yellowstone, 1883, and 1923. A renewed interest in the Western genre has led stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio,...

There’s always the risk of misusing 15 tightly mandated minutes on a director’s junket day. One imagines it increases twofold when the subject’s been of interest nearly your entire film-watching life, with whom you’d sooner exchange questions about a 2019 short produced for the Pompidou Centre than, say, what it’s like working with Glen Powell.

It was under these circumstances I had the fortune to interview Richard Linklater, who’s been on a major press jag for Hit Man, his biggest crowdpleaser in several years that arrives on Netflix this Friday, June 7. In a tight frame we managed to cover the strange connections it bears with his other recent premiere, and––an issue about which he clearly feels passionate––why the culture is asking us to remain 13 years old forever.

The Film Stage: I watched Gabe Klinger’s Double Play, and I loved seeing the many, many posters in your editing room.

David Leitch's The Fall Guy is a highly anticipated action comedy starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. Loosely based on the 1980s television show of the same name, The Fall Guy is a tribute to stunt performers, the unsung heroes of action movies. Leitch began his career as a stuntman, doubling for major movie stars such as Brad Pitt and Matt Damon. Over the last decade, Leitch has established himself as a prominent action director, making movies such as John Wick, Deadpool 2, and Bullet Train.

Although not as well known to mainstream audiences, stuntmen such as Yakima Canutt, Dar Robinson, and Vic Armstrong played significant roles in the development of action cinema, inventing many stunt practices used in the moviemaking process. While stunt performers are an invaluable component of action films, some actors throughout history have transcended their craft by performing their own stunts. Movie stars such as Jackie Chan,...

A movie marathon with our favorite auteurs? Where do we sign up?

Turner Classic Movies’ latest limited series “Two for One” features curated double features coupled with commentary from select guest programmers like Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, and more. The upcoming TCM series is hosted by Ben Mankiewicz, who will interview each director about why they chose to highlight their two chosen films.

“Two for One” will feature 12 nights of double features, beginning April 6. With the logline “two films, one filmmaker, countless perspectives,” the series is set to span all of cinematic history. Directors will offer commentary on the double feature’s cultural significance, its influence on other films, behind-the-scenes stories, and their own personal reflections.

Martin Scorsese kicks off the show with a conversation comparing “Blood on the Moon” and “One Touch of Venus.” The following week, actress/director Olivia Wilde picks “Auntie Mame” and 1976 documentary “Grey Gardens.

Turner Classic Movies have announced a new limited series, Two for One, that will feature 12 nights of double features curated by some of the most celebrated filmmakers in Hollywood beginning April 6. TCM Primetime Host Ben Mankiewicz will be joined by each director, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Todd Haynes, Spike Lee, Nicole Holofcener, and Rian Johnson, to introduce the two films they chose. They will offer commentary on the double feature’s cultural significance, its influence on other films, behind-the-scenes stories, and their own personal reflections.

“This was such an eclectic group of filmmakers to sit down with, which was invigorating, from Martin Scorsese talking about a Robert Mitchum western, to Spike Lee discussing Elia Kazan, to Olivia Wilde’s breakdown of Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame,” said Ben Mankiewicz. “In these double features, these 12 directors lead us on an insider’s journey through cinematic history.”

See...

Among the myriad reasons we could call the Criterion Channel the single greatest streaming service is its leveling of cinematic snobbery. Where a new World Cinema Project restoration plays, so too does Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight. I think about this looking at November’s lineup and being happiest about two new additions: a nine-film Robert Bresson retro including L’argent and The Devil, Probably; and a one-film Hype Williams retro including Belly and only Belly, but bringing as a bonus the direct-to-video Belly 2: Millionaire Boyz Club. Until recently such curation seemed impossible.

November will also feature a 20-film noir series boasting the obvious and the not. Maybe the single tightest collection is “Women of the West,” with Johnny Guitar and The Beguiled and Rancho Notorious and The Furies only half of it. Lynch/Oz, Irradiated, and My Two Voices make streaming premieres; Drylongso gets a Criterion Edition; and joining...

It is my experience that one gets a far richer, stranger cinema education in pursuing the careers of actors, that group defined first by (assuming luck shines upon them) two or three era-defining films and then so much that dictates their industry—pet projects, contractual obligations, called-in favors alimony payments, auteur one-offs, and on and on. Few embody that deluge of circumstance better than Michelle Yeoh and Isabelle Huppert, both of whom are receiving spotlights in March. The former’s is a who’s-who of Hong Kong talent, new favorites (The Heroic Trio), items we can at least say are of interest (Trio‘s not-great sequel Executioners), etc.

Huppert’s series runs longer, and notwithstanding certain standards that have long sat on the channel it adds some heavy hitters: Hong’s In Another Country, Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, Breillat’s Abuse of Weakness, Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come. And, of course,...

Above: Bone (1972) / The Furies (1950)In 1967, Barbara Stanwyck was looking back on a five-decade career, a feat few of her early Hollywood peers could match. Having spent much of the past decade working exclusively in television—she was an actress, she reasoned, so if movie scripts weren’t coming in, she would act on TV—she had found more failures than success. But by the late 60s, Stanwyck was finally where she wanted to be: the star of The Big Valley, an ABC Western that ran four seasons from 1965 - 1969. Stanwyck played matriarch Victoria Barkley on the series, which focused on the lives and loves of the millionaire Barkley ranching family.Like many series of the time, The Big Valley had a constant stream of guest stars, but one young actor stood out to Stanwyck when he guested on the show as an ex-slave serving as convict labor on the Barkley ranch.

John Ericson, a star of Hollywood’s Golden Age who appeared in multiple MGM films and in the 1960s TV show “Honey West,” died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, of pneumonia on Sunday. He was 93.

Born Joseph Meibes in Dusseldorf, Germany, Ericson emigrated with his family to the United States to escape the Nazis as they rose to power. Ericson trained in acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and soon appeared in the original production of “Stalag 17” in 1951.

Shortly after that, Ericson signed a contract with MGM and made his cinematic debut alongside Pier Angeli in “Teresa,” playing a World War II veteran struggling to cope with post-war life after marrying a woman he met in Italy. He continued to take on supporting roles in MGM films through the ’50s, starring alongside stars like Elizabeth Taylor in “Rhapsody,” Spencer Tracy in “Bad Day at Black Rock,...

Her versatility made her a star of Hollywood’s golden age, but Stanwyck’s best characters were always fighters who, like herself, had tasted life’s bitterness

Even Barbara Stanwyck struggled to pin down her appeal. “What the hell,” she blustered at critic Rex Reed, when he asked her to take a stab. “Whatever I had, it worked, didn’t it?” She was right, of course, and you can forgive her inarticulacy. Stanwyck – who is the subject of a BFI season, Starring Barbara Stanwyck – was not just unusually streetsmart and independent for a Hollywood star of the golden age, but superbly versatile, too.

Many of her directors tried to put the magic into words. “Stanwyck doesn’t act a scene. She lives it,” said Frank Capra, who directed her in the early 1930s breathtaking emotional films such as The Miracle Woman and Forbidden. For Billy Wilder, who directed her in ice-cold noir Double Indemnity,...

Cult favorite Samuel Fuller explodes the mid-range Hollywood oater with elements we can all appreciate: a ritualistic fetishizing of the gunslinger ethos, and a reliance on kinky role reversals and provocative tease dialogue. It’s as radical as a western can be without becoming a satire. Playing it all perfectly crooked-straight is the still formidable Barbara Stanwyck. Her black-clad ‘woman with a whip’ keeps a full forty gunmen to enforce her will on a one-lady town.

Forty Guns

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 954

1957 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 80 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 11, 2018 / 39.95

Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan, Dean Jagger, John Ericson, Gene Barry, Eve Brent, Robert Dix, Jidge Carroll, Paul Dubov, Gerald Milton, Ziva Rodann, Hank Worden, Neyle Morrow, Chuck Roberson, Chuck Hayward.

Cinematography: Joseph F. Biroc

Film Editor: Gene Fowler Jr.

Original Music: Harry Sukman

Produced, Written and Directed by Samuel Fuller

Was there ever a...

Don’t be surprised to come away from Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns a bit dizzy. And know that with that advice in tow, it may be the only time you aren’t surprised during this senses-shattering 1957 Western. Boldly shot in both CinemaScope and cool black and white, Forty Guns marks the waning period of the Hollywood Western revival heyday with a swift pistol whipping on the cloven heels of a forty-one horse tear across the dusty plains and the film’s few opening titles. The unsuspecting fellas on the wagon they blast passed, suddenly and mercilessly engulfed in dust clouds fifteen feet high, never know what nearly hit them. And just as suddenly as they descended from around the bend, they’re gone around another. Led by a...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Thinking of gifting a home video fan a fresh new Criterion Collection release in December? Here are your options. The first black woman to direct a Hollywood studio film, Euzhan Palcy made history with the blistering drama A Dry White Season (1989). White schoolteacher Donald Sutherland sees his gardener (Winston Ntshona) suffer "a wave of brutal repression" and finally takes notice of what's been going on in his country for many years. On a less serious note, Sam Fuller's Forty Guns (1957) stars Barbara Stanwyck in "the pulp maestro's most audacious Western," which is really saying something, if you know the work of Sam Fuller. Barry Sullivan also stars. "Based on a novel by Georges Simenon" always sounds...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Robert Dix, the son of a big-screen icon who made his own mark in Hollywood with appearances in dozens of films, including Forbidden Planet, Forty Guns and a succession of B-grade horror movies, has died. He was 83.

Dix died Monday of respiratory failure at a hospital in Tucson, Arizona, his wife, Lynette, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Dix was the youngest son (by 10 minutes) of Richard Dix, who made the transition from the silent era to talkies, received a best actor nomination in the best picture Oscar winner Cimarron (1931) and starred in the series of Whistler film noirs at Columbia ...

Robert Dix, the son of a big-screen icon who made his own mark in Hollywood with appearances in dozens of films, including Forbidden Planet, Forty Guns and a succession of B-grade horror movies, has died. He was 83.

Dix died Monday of respiratory failure at a hospital in Tucson, Arizona, his wife, Lynette, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Dix was the youngest son (by 10 minutes) of Richard Dix, who made the transition from the silent era to talkies, received a best actor nomination in the best picture Oscar winner Cimarron (1931) and starred in the series of Whistler film noirs at Columbia ...

Guest Reviewer Lee Broughton is back, with another Italo Western double bill DVD review. Wild East’s ongoing Spaghetti Western Collection continues to grow and this double bill release is particularly welcome since it features two obscure and wholly idiosyncratic genre entries from 1969. Italian Western directors had found it relatively easy to appropriate key plot points and ideas from Sergio Leone’s Dollars films during the genre’s early years but when Leone’s sprawling, mega-budgeted, meta-Western Once Upon a Time in the West was released in 1968 it was clear that this was one genre entry that local filmmakers would not be able to easily emulate.

With scriptwriters and directors now essentially being forced to come up with their own ideas and generic trends, a new wave of Spaghetti Westerns were produced that effectively took the genre in a multitude of new directions. The two films featured here were part of that wave.

Another release of the Kramer-Foreman-Zinnemann classic gives Savant another chance to make his argument that this supposedly 'liberal' movie is too confused to be anything but political quicksand -- if anything, its statement is bitterly hawkish. High Noon Blu-ray Olive Signature 1952 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 85 min. / Street Date September 20, 2016 / available through the Olive Films website / 39.95 Starring Gary Cooper, Thomas Mitchell, Grace Kelly, Katy Jurado, Lloyd Bridges, Lon Chaney Jr, Harry Morgan, Otto Kruger, Lee Van Cleef. Cinematography Floyd Crosby Production Designer Rudolph Sternad Film Editor Elmo Williams Original Music Dimitri Tiomkin Written by Carl Foreman Produced by Stanley Kramer Directed by Fred Zinnemann

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

This is my fourth time out with a review of High Noon, starting fourteen years ago with a pretty miserable Artisan DVD, then a Lionsgate 'ultimate edition,' followed by Olive Film's first, quite good Blu-ray. Olive now revisits the 1952 classic as...

I’m noticing more and more a theme in postwar (especially American) cinema concerning pacifists turning towards violence. A character will introduce him- or herself as someone unable and morally opposed to weapons in general or harming another human being specifically, only to be put in a situation in which violence is presented as the only way out. We’ve covered (at least) two such films on this very website – Shane and Violent Saturday – and, having just seen it, I can add the considerably odd Frank Sinatra vehicle Suddenly to this list.

It’s not hard to see why American filmmakers and moviegoers would be interested in this subject at this time. Many of them had recently returned from war, where they did awful things for a greater good; those who didn’t go to war themselves certainly knew somebody who had. On a much larger scale, the use of...

Sam Fuller's superior western classic stars Rod Steiger, Brian Keith, Charles Bronson and Sarita Montiel, and takes on a tall stack of potent issues. A Reb sharpshooter denies the South's defeat, and goes west to join the Sioux nation where he can continue his war against the Yankees. This spin on 'The Man Without a Country' is one of Fuller's best thanks to a generous budget, unflinching action violence and committed performances. Run of the Arrow DVD-r The Warner Archive Collection 1957 / Color / 1:78 enhanced widescreen / 86 min. / Street Date July 7, 2015 / available through the WBshop / 19.49 Starring Rod Steiger, Sarita Montiel, Brian Keith, Ralph Meeker, Jay C. Flippen, Charles Bronson, Olive Carey, H.M. Wynant, Neyle Morrow, Frank DeKova, Tim McCoy, Chuck Hayward, Chuck Roberson, Roscoe Ates, Angie Dickinson, Carleton Young. Cinematography Joseph Biroc Film Editor Gene Fowler Jr. Original Music Victor Young Written, Produced and Directed by Samuel Fuller    

Reviewed...

In so many of the discussions (recorded and written) that accompany Masters of Cinema’s new Blu-ray edition of Pickup on South Street, the critic finds some way to make apologies for the fact that not all of the film was shot on the streets. In fact, very little was. Then as now, New York is an unpredictable animal, difficult to harness in a medium that so predicated on reliability that the entire industry surrounding it moved across the country just to ensure the sun would always be out. But studio-set production is not antithetical to Samuel Fuller’s “whole thing.” He’s not the gritty realist perhaps even he’d like to be, even viewing his films in the context of the times. Fuller is more like a political cartoonist without a punchline. He has cleverness to spare, but no jokes. More importantly, his style of expression is dependent...

Well, I’m glad I’m not the only one who didn’t quite follow this one. In his 1957 review of the film for Cahiers du cinema (reprinted in the booklet accompanying this release), Jean-Luc Godard wrote that Forty Guns “is so rich in invention – despite an incomprehensible plot – and so bursting with daring conceptions that it reminds one of the extravagances of Abel Gance and Stroheim, or purely and simply of Murnau.” For a movie featuring a half-dozen standoffs, at least as many deaths, two musical numbers, and an honest-to-God tornado, nothing much seems to happen in Forty Guns. The tone and tenor of the thing feels as relaxed as Rio Bravo. I’ve seen it twice now, and viewed a few scenes here and there beyond that, and I still can’t quite reconcile the whole. But Godard’s right – it’s a hell of a thing to see.

Note: For the review of Powder Burns‘ Peekarama DVD double-bill feature, Little Sisters, check out this episode of Mondo Squallido….

(1971, dir: Alex deRenzy)

“Outlaw Men – Wild Women”

After a montage of the vastness of the desert (we’re nearly in Herzogian territory here!) we are thrown balls deep in to a small shoot out. Yep, welcome to the Old West! Well, not exactly! Aside from cowboys, horses and fitting music, we also have chaps wearing aviator shades and scrapped cars laying about. The year is actually 1969 and we’re in the small town of Sewer Pipe Creek. The local sheriff (and barkeep) is having a spot of trouble with the pesky McNasty Brothers, a trio of brothers who like to cause chaos in the town for a couple of weeks once a year. Our hero runs the scum out of town and as a result, his saloon girls aren’t...

Known primarily for his war films and crime dramas, American director Samuel Fuller also directed a quartet of westerns, the last of which being 1957's Forty Guns. The film was part of a deal struck with 20th Century Fox after the success of Fuller's breakout film, about the Korean War, The Steel Helmet. Wooed by the studio's dedication to making "better movies" rather than lining their own pockets, Fuller signed a seven-picture deal. Forty Guns is loosely based on Wyatt Earp and the iconic "gunfight at the O.K. Corral", which went down in Tombstone, Arizona in October 1881. Here, the Earp surrogate is Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan), who rides into town with his two younger brothers, Wes (Gene Barry) and Chico (Robert Dix), with a warrant...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

"She commands and men obey." The line, from a ballad sung in Samuel Fuller's feverish western Forty Guns (1957), is addressed to the formidable, black-clad dragoon leader played by Barbara Stanwyck, 50 when the film was released. Yet the lyric also pinpoints the most defining quality of one of cinema's most versatile performers, as adept in oaters as in pre-Code pulp, screwball comedy, film noir, and melodrama. Few actresses from Hollywood's golden age had as much range; fewer still worked as long and as consistently as Stanwyck, who died in 1990 at age 82.

Fuller's movie is just one of 40 (roughly half of Stanwyck's output; she made her last film in 1964 and then kept busy on TV) on view in Film Forum's tribute, occasioned by the publication of Victoria Wilson's behem...

Like most right-minded film fans we're big fans of Sam Fuller (check out our list of essential films from the director). Kicking of his career as a crime reporter and novelist, Fuller soon found his way to Hollywood and after serving in World War Two as an infantryman, became a film director. Generally favoring low-budget and independently-produced pictures, but not averse to working within the studio system (he had a good relationship with Daryl Zanuck), he knocked out a string of genre classics — from "Pickup On South Street" and "Forty Guns" to "Shock Corridor" and his epic autobiographical masterpiece "The Big Red One" — that quietly influenced many of your favourite directors. So to say we were excited to see "A Fuller Life" tucked away in the Venice program would be an understatement. Directed by the great filmmaker's daughter Samantha, a former glass artist, it promised to dig into the man's fascinating life and tremendous work,...

"Dan Callahan's Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman is a serious book about a serious woman, less a biography of an actress than a biography of her career," writes Scott Eyman in the Wall Street Journal. "Mr Callahan follows her choices of roles and tries to capture what she was saying about herself through her acting. It was an astonishing career, whose impressive outlines only became clear in retrospect. Most actors want to be loved — it's the Achilles' heel of the profession — but Stanwyck seems to have been after something else: respect."

Introducing his interview with Dan Callahan at the L, Mark Asch notes that "Dan concludes that Stanwyck was the most open, raw, unshowy and affectless of the Golden Age movie queens, in both her performances and offscreen attitudes; he builds a compelling personal narrative out of her contradictions: her bootstrapping tough-broad self-sufficiency (this slum kid was a...

The Film Doctor makes a passionate case for Hawaii and The Descendants... but I'm still having trouble. I just don't think it's very good. And also it's hard to be receptive to the arguments when they start by dissing The Artist. 'Can't we all just get along?' That said I do agree that the final shot is pretty wonderful. Just wish the rest of the movie was.

They Live By Night Awww, there was an Amadeus Blog-a-Thon and I didn't even know about it. Blog-a-thons just don't have as much outreach as they used to. Totally would've done that one.

The Awl  (speaking of the 80s...) remembers The Thorn Birds in a funny piece. Omg. I was so into priestly Richard Chamberlain when I was a wee boy. 

Cineuropa Iceland's Volcano didn't go the distant with Oscar this year in the Best Foreign Film Category but it's doing very...

Below you will find a list of movie that Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright has never seen. Not long ago Wright went out and asked his friends and fans to recommend some movies they thought he may have missed over the last thirty years of his life. He got recommendations from Quentin Tarantino, Daniel Waters, Bill Hader, John Landis, Guillermo Del Toro, Joe Dante, Judd Apatow, Joss Whedon, Greg Mottola, Schwartzman, Doug Benson, Rian Johnson, Larry Karaszeski, Josh Olson, Harry Knowles and hundreds of fans on this blog.

From these recommendations, Wright created a master list of recommended films that were frequently mentioned. The director now wants the fans to choose which of the films on the list he should watch on the big screen.

Wright is holding a film event at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles called Films Edgar Has Never Seen.

Edgar Wright's latest epic project [1] has him partnering with Quentin Tarantino, Judd Apatow, Joss Whedon, Bill Hader, Guillermo Del Toro, Joe Dante, Greg Mottola, Harry Knowles, Rian Johnson and, probably, several of you. Like all of us, Wright has a bunch of classic and cult films he's never seen. Unlike all of us, he has the means to see them for the first time on the big screen and will do just that in December [2] at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles during Films Edgar Has Never Seen. The director of Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World asked both his famous friends (some of which are listed above) and fans to send in their personal must see lists and, from those titles, Wright came up with one mega list from which he'll pick a few movies to watch December 9-16. After the jump check...

Eve Brent, best remembered for playing Jane twice opposite Gordon Scott's Tarzan, died August 27 of "natural causes" at Pacifica Hospital of the Valley in Sun Valley, Calif. She was either 81 or 82. Initially billed as either Jean Lewis or Jean Ann Lewis, Eve Brent's show business career in films and on television lasted nearly six decades. The Houston-born actress appeared in about three dozen movies, ranging from a small part in Bruno VeSota's crime drama Female Jungle (1955), featuring Lawrence Tierney and Jayne Mansfield, to playing Cate Blanchett's grandmother in David Fincher's Oscar nominated The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). Almost invariably in small supporting roles or bit parts, Brent could also be seen in the Jean Simmons vehicle The Happy Ending (1969), George Seaton's all-star blockbuster Airport (1970), the Charles Bronson Western The White Buffalo (1976), Frank Darabont's 1999 Best Picture Oscar nominee The Green Mile ("a lovely experience,...

Actress Eve Brent has died at the age of 82.

The Green Mile star, who was born Jean Ewers, passed away on 27 August of natural causes at Pacifica Hospital of the Valley in Sun Valley, California, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Brent broke into the industry in the 1950s, starring in a number of TV shows and commercials, before rising to fame in films including Gun Girls and Journey To Freedom.

She then went on to play iconic character Jane in 1956's Tarzan's Fight For Life and changed her name to Eve Brent after starring in Samuel Fuller's 1977 western Forty Guns.

She won a Best Supporting Actress Saturn Award in 1980 for her role in Fade To Black and starred in 1999's The Green Mile, 2004's Garfield and 2008 movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Brent also had bit-parts in TV shows including Scrubs and Roswell High.

She is survived by her son, Jack Lewis.

by Vadim Rizov

The best—or least most characteristically forceful—Samuel Fuller movies veer excitedly from one violent moment and camera movement to the next, like someone justifiably punching you in the face. 1955's House of Bamboo is a calmer production. Fuller novices shouldn't start here: for a introduction to the two-fisted director's earlier work, try on the sleazy Cold War noir Pickup on South Street (made two films before this) or 1957's Forty Guns, a widescreen Western that often accelerates to warp speed. House of Bamboo has patches of standard-issue narrative tissue to get through, and the camera's less mobile and impulsive than usual. Compared with, say, 1952's Park Row, in which Fuller tracks so fast the camera gets wobbly out of sheer urgency (speed trumps thought), Bamboo is more tableaux-bound.

Continued reading Film Of The Week: House of Bamboo...

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Joe Dante speaks well of Samuel Fuller and declares it Verboten! to do otherwise.

Once again Samuel Fuller uses the skimpiest of budgets as a tool to contrast reality with artifice. A long cherished project for the director, this German-set postwar drama was the last Rko picture, and has been out of circulation for years until its recent Warner Archive dvd release.

Check out the trailer commentary and then keep reading for some bonus annotations.

Let’s talk about Samuel Fuller for a moment, shall we? Or, more importantly, let’s let Samuel Fuller talk about Sam Fuller (in the context of his film Pickup on South Street):

How can you not love a cigar-chomping guy like that? And then to look a the movies he made is something unto itself. His films have verve and impact and, despite their b-picture nature, are never just blank programmers; they’re fully always alive.

0:00 - Intro 7:15 - Headlines: 2011 Oscar Nominees, Kevin Smith to Self-Distribute Red State, Henry Cavill is Superman 25:55 - Review: Enter the Void 54:15 - Review: The King's Speech 1:22:10 - Trailer Trash: Jackass 3.5 1:25:25 - Other Stuff We Watched: Don’t You Forget About Me, Forty Guns, The Visitor, Il Mercenario, No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson, Muhammad and Larry, The One Armed Executioner, Nostalgia for the Light, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, Beverly Hills Cop, Beverly Hills Cop II, Buffalo 66, Talhotblond 2:07:40 - Junk Mail: Mixing DVD and Blu-ray, Combining Collections with a Roommate/Spouse, Alphabetizing Rules for DVDs, Name That Movie, German Movies, Morgan Spurlock, Female Directors, Us Comedian Equivalent of Ricky Gervais, Why Film Podcasts are Poorly Informed 2:49:40 - This Week's DVD Releases 2:52:00 - Outro » Download the MP3 (80 Mb) [1] » View the show...

By the time Samuel Fuller had made his first film, he'd been a copy boy, fought in the second world war, written a number of pulp novels and screenplays and worked as a crime reporter. His directorial debut, I Shot Jesse James [1] (1949), was already informed by a lifetime's worth of real world experience. His films are personal -- even autobiographical -- and his storytelling is aggressive. His themes are often presented in an austere nature and his imagery can be heavy handed (White Dog [2]), but his earnestness leaves me smiling rather than cringing. It makes sense that Criterion would re-release two Samuel Fuller classics, The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor, on the same day with matching cover artwork (provided by Ghost World author/illustrator Daniel Clowes). The films share a deep rooted pulp narrative that examines two of cinema's most prototypical social outcasts: hookers and schitzos. The Naked Kiss Directed...

Jean‑Luc Godard's masterpiece remains a startling example of the French new wave and marked the arrival of one of cinema's most influential directors

Two trailers bookend my half-a-century of writing professionally about the cinema and bracket the career of the man who is arguably the most influential moviemaker of my lifetime. Fifty years ago this month I dropped into an Oslo cinema while waiting for a midnight train and saw an unforgettable trailer for a French picture. It cut abruptly between a handsome, broken-nosed actor I'd never come across before, giant posters of Humphrey Bogart, and the familiar features of Jean Seberg, whom I knew to be an idol of French cinéastes as the protegee of Otto Preminger. Shot in high contrast monochrome, rapidly edited, interspersed with puzzling statements in white-on-black and black-on-white lettering, it was like no other trailer I'd seen, and I was captivated. Not until my...