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Now that Steamboat Willie is in the public domain, and countless studios are rushing to make a horror movie based on Mickey Mouse, many wonder what iconic cartoon characters may be the next. Over the years, filmmakers have commonly twisted classic fairy tales, cartoons, and nostalgic mascots into horrific caricatures for the big screen. Although, between public domain laws, satirical commentary, and less-than-subtle stand-ins, it's entirely possible...

He-bull womanizer Robert Mitchum spars with wife Eleanor Parker for the future of their son George Hamilton in Vincente Minnelli’s attractive, sprawling tale of cruel family unrest. The real winners in the picture are the fresh-faced George Peppard and Luana Patten, whose small-town romance is more interesting than the main bout.

Home from the Hill

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1960 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 150 min. / Street Date August 14, 2018 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Robert Mitchum, Eleanor Parker, George Peppard, George Hamilton, Everett Sloane, Luana Patten, Constance Ford, Ray Teal, Bill Hickman, Denver Pyle, Stuart Randall, Dub Taylor, Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams.

Cinematography: Milton Krasner

Film Editor: Harold F. Kress

Original Music: Bronislau Kaper

Written by Harriet Frank Jr., Irving Ravetch from the novel by William Humphrey

Produced by Edmund Grainger, Sol C. Siegel

Directed by Vincente Minnelli

Two and a half hours for a dramatic film was considered long in 1960, but...

By Lee Pfeiffer

A controversy over the style of drapes for a mansion's library would not seem to be the fodder for a sizzling screen drama but it is the catalyst for the events that unwind in The Cobweb, a 1955 soap opera that involves the talents of some very impressive actors and filmmakers. The film was directed by Vincente Minnelli and produced by John Houseman, based on the bestselling novel by William Gibson. The cast features an impressive array of seasoned veterans as well as up-and-comers. Among them: Richard Widmark, Lauren, Bacall, Charles Boyer, Gloria Grahame, Lillian Gish, Oscar Levant, Susan Strasberg and John Kerr. The action all takes place in a psychiatric institute called "The Castle". It's actually a mansion house and the patients are seemingly there voluntarily. They are an assortment of mixed nuts ranging from elderly eccentrics to young people with severe problems interacting with others. The...

Actor who starred as the troubled pupil in Tea and Sympathy on stage and screen

The actor John Kerr, who has died aged 81, won a Tony award in his first starring role on the Broadway stage, as Tom in Tea and Sympathy in 1953, and subsequently appeared in the 1956 film version directed by Vincente Minnelli. Robert Anderson's play, in which a schoolboy "confesses" to his housemaster's wife that he might be homosexual – only to be seduced out of the notion by the sympathetic listener – was considered so controversial that it was restricted to a "members only" theatrical run in London, and Minnelli's film received an X certificate, despite modification, notably in the suggestion that the housemaster was gay.

Kerr starred as the boy, although by then he was in his 20s. Born in New York, son of the actors Geoffrey Kerr and June Walker, he had already graduated from Harvard,...

The Two Kerrs: John and Deborah in Tea and Sympathy play and movie [Please see previous article: "John Kerr Has Died: (Possibly) Gay Adolescent in play and movie versions of Tea and Sympathy."] Playwright Robert Anderson's psychological drama Tea and Sympathy is notable for a number of reasons: it marked Hollywood/British cinema star Deborah Kerr's Broadway debut (coincidentally, on her 32nd birthday, Sept. 30); one of the play's key characters (the one played by English Rose Kerr) turns out to be a sympathetic adulteress; and Anderson's play tackles homosexuality, a topic that, despite Elia Kazan's movie version of A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan also directed the play), remained taboo throughout the 1950s. Also worth mentioning is that Tea and Sympathy shows that the last sixty years haven't necessarily led to a major lessening in cultural or social prejudices, as the narrative would still be considered quite daring in the early 21st century -- even if for not the same reasons. (Above movie still: The two Kerrs, John and Deborah,...

Above: Gregory La Cava (seated, right) directs Joel McCrea, Claudette Colbert and a blonde Joan Bennett.

New artistic director Chris Fujiwara's Gregory La Cava retrospective at Edinburgh International Film Festival (six films, followed by six films at Edinburgh Filmhouse after the Festival) has brought to light several obscure titles from the great Hollywood director. For instance, I heard several of the lucky few crammed into the sweaty confines of Filmhouse 3 declare the silent comedy Feel My Pulse (1928) to be their favorite experience of the fest. But Private Worlds (1935), the penultimate film shown, is pretty fascinating too.

For one thing, it demonstrates La Cava's ability to work outside the screwball comedy genre for which he was most celebrated (although the film is far from humorless). The cast, which includes Claudette Colbert, Charles Boyer, Joel McCrea and Joan Bennett, could certainly have filled out a romantic comedy to perfection (Colbert and...

Above: The Penn Station set for The Clock.

"Loving evaluation of texture, the screen being filled as a window is dressed in a swank department store." —Orson Welles

If we accept Raymond Durgnat's theory that in cinema, landscape is the equation of the state of the soul and architecture constitutes an X-ray photograph of the heroes'1, then Minnelli's films, especially musicals and melodramas, can be described as full-color X-ray photography of the inner universe of his characters, with a particular interest in artists, daydreamers, painters and dancers.

Minnelli's films generally happen in strange places. In his musicals the absence of modern urban life (unlike Stanley Donen, for instance) is noticeable. The real is recreated by studio-manufactured settings, where also the unreal, the fantasy, takes place. Minnelli's films are the encounter of two worlds, two parallel lines, which in reality never happen to cross each other. Although it is true that...

Vincente Minnelli's sugary 1950s confections are of another age, but as the re-released Meet Me In St Louis shows, they still sing

Released on Thanksgiving weekend in November 1944, only six months after the seismic morale-boost that was D-Day, Meet Me In St Louis offered a suddenly more optimistic wartime America the chance to wallow in the sugary comforts of hearth and home, to take refuge in innocence and nostalgia. With its sumptuous Technicolor tones, its American songbook classics, and its evocation of an idyllic, untroubled fin-de-siècle St Louis that surely never existed until Vincente Minnelli dreamed it up, Meet Me In St Louis is as midwestern Republican in its outlook as Minnelli himself (though, as a closeted gay midwestern Republican, he might well have seen the Gop as perfect camouflage). Yet, as with John Ford, you can forgive a lot politically when you get so well served aesthetically.

Minnelli...

Tuesday, DVD roundup day, is a fine day for taking a look at the new Summer 2011 issue of Cineaste, particularly since, among the online samplings this time around, DVD reviews outnumber all other types of articles combined.

To begin, Darragh O'Donoghue on Harun Farocki's Still Life (1997): "Five aphoristic essays on 17th-century Dutch still-life painting, of about three minutes each, bracket four documentary sequences of photographers creating modern still lifes for magazine advertisements. These two levels, though defined by opposites — stasis/motion, tell/show — are linked by visual motifs and rhymes, just as the modern products echo the subjects of the paintings. The documentary sequences have no commentary, mostly last ten to fifteen minutes, and take their cue from Farocki's earlier An Image (Ein bild, 1983). In that short, he recorded the shooting of a German Playboy centerfold spread, from the building of sets and the arrangement of props (including...

Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks‘ The Big Sleep Lauren Bacall, hardly a top box-office attraction in the 1940s or 1950s, but a major "Old Hollywood" star today, will have her Turner Classic Movies "Summer Under the Stars" day on Wed., Aug. 25. [Lauren Bacall schedule.] Bacall is so prestigious nowadays that she even won an Honorary Oscar last year, a distinction hardly ever accorded to a woman. In fact, the vast majority of female movie stars of her era — and I’m referring to stars who were bigger and/or more prestigious than Bacall in her Hollywood heyday — have moved to the Great Beyond without the "career Oscar." A handful may still be waiting for it on this planet, but chances are they won’t get it. I’ve watched most of the Lauren Bacall vehicles to be presented on TCM tomorrow; the one exception is The Cobweb (1955). Of the ones [...]...