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Legendary Hollywood actress Kim Novak (Vertigo, Picnic, Bell, Book and Candle) will be awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival of La Biennale di Venezia (Aug. 27–Sept. 6).

Venice also unveiled that the documentary Kim Novak’s Vertigo by Alexandre Philippe, “made in exclusive collaboration with the actress,” will be presented in its world premiere during the festival.

The decision about the honor was made by the board of directors of La Biennale, based on the recommendation of the artistic director of the festival, Alberto Barbera, organizers said Monday.

“I am deeply, deeply touched to receive the prestigious Golden Lion Award from such an enormously respected film festival,” said Novak. “To be recognized for my body of work at this time in my life is a dream come true. I will treasure every moment I spend in Venice. It will fill my heart with joy.

Kim Novak is to receive the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.

The festival, which runs August 27-September 6, also will screen the world premiere of documentary Kim Novak’s Vertigo by Alexandre Philippe, made in collaboration with the legendary American actress.

Known for movies including Vertigo, Picnic, and Bell Book and Candle, Novak said today: “I am deeply, deeply touched to receive the prestigious Golden Lion Award from such an enormously respected film festival. To be recognized for my body of work at this time in my life is a dream come true. I will treasure every moment I spend in Venice. It will fill my heart with joy.”

Venice’s Artistic Director Alberto Barbera declared: “Inadvertently becoming a screen legend, Kim Novak was one of the most beloved icons of an entire era of Hollywood films, from her auspicious debut during the mid-1950s until her...

In 1960, Kirk Douglas had helped to break the Hollywood Blacklist with "Spartacus" by publicly crediting then-blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo as the screenwriter. But in 1969, he found himself working with a director who had been anything but helpful to his Hollywood colleagues during the height of McCarthyism. Sadly, this team-up between Douglas and director Elia Kazan also had the unfortunate distinction of being one of the Greek-American filmmaker's most derided films.

"The Arrangement" currently has a 15% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which should tell you pretty much all you need to know about how this ill-fated drama was received upon release. The film is an adaptation of Kazan's own 1967 novel of the same name and follows LA advertising executive Evangelos Topouzoglou/Eddie Anderson (Douglas) as he endures a protracted nervous breakdown (which is what watching this incredible trailer feels like). Critics at the time were merciless with their condemnation of Kazan's film,...

When Robert Aldrich’s 1968 Hollywood insider yarn, “The Legend of Lylah Clare” screens at the Maine International Film Festival in Waterville, Maine, it will represent much more than a simple revival of a New Hollywood-era roman à clef.

The film’s presentation on July 12 will include a discussion between actor Michael Murphy, who co-stars in the film, and former MGM publicity director Mike Kaplan, who has from the film’s earliest screenings defended both the film’s director, who Kaplan feels was “grossly maligned” by the depiction of him in Ryan Murphy’s limited series “Feud,” and the film, which monumentally tanked both critically and commercially when first released.

Kaplan recalls “I loved the script, and I loved the film. MGM had an unexceptional slate at the time. I was a big fan at the get-go.”

But as MGM’s New York City-based publicity chief, Kaplan watched helplessly as others,...

Now up for grabs in Region A, it’s the Robert Aldrich movie that wins over all that see it. The epitome of Men In Peril adventures, the tale of 14 random oil men marooned in the Sahara is brutal yet optimistic about human cooperation — please, the world needs more of that right now. James Stewart is at his best, stretching his hard-bitten loner persona and tapping into his flying experience. Also with an English-language-best performance from Hardy Krüger. The male group dynamics are absorbing and the suspense powerful — especially when seen cold. No spoilers here!

The Flight of the Phoenix

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1116

1965 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 142 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date March 22, 2022 / 39.95

Starring: James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Hardy Krüger, Ernest Borgnine, Ian Bannen, Ronald Fraser, Christian Marquand, Dan Duryea, George Kennedy, Gabriele Tinti, Alex Montoya, Peter Bravos, William Aldrich, Barrie Chase.

Cinematography: Joseph Biroc...

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.***Robert Aldrich was an in-between-days kind of filmmaker, flourishing as television was conquering cinema, graduating from being an assistant director to Lewis Milestone and Joseph Losey. Hollywood was already in decline/transition as he found his footing. Aldrich rarely knew the security of a studio contract, was usually a struggling independent, was pushed around by stars and producers, and went into a career decline in the seventies with a series of projects which either failed to find an audience or failed to deserve one. Some of these films have enthusiastic admirers, but Aldrich was unable to realize passion projects like The Sheltering Sky, which he had hoped to film from Paul Bowles' novel,...

It’s cold-blooded murder, I tell ya! Feisty Ruth Gordon goes undercover to find the evidence of homicide at Geraldine Page’s desert home, where companion-housekeepers keep disappearing. Robert Aldrich produced this marvelous, E-Ticket battle between celebrated actresses, and the result is a creative new solution for retirement finance problems!

What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1969 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 101 min. / Street Date January 8, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Geraldine Page, Ruth Gordon, Rosemary Forsyth, Robert Fuller, Mildred Dunnock, Joan Huntington, Peter Brandon, Michael Barbera, Peter Bonerz, Richard Angarola, Claire Kelly, Valerie Allen, Martin Garralaga.

Cinematography: Joseph Biroc

Film Editors: Frank J. Urioste, Michael Luciano

Original Music: Gerald Fried

Written by Theodore Apstein from a novel by Ursula Curtiss

Produced by Robert Aldrich

Directed by Lee H. Katzin (and Bernard Girard)

Few fans of Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen realize that he used the windfall profits...

What seemed too raw for 1955 still packs a punch, as Robert Aldrich takes a meat cleaver to the power politics of the old studio system. Monstrous studio head Rod Steiger has just the leverage he needs to blackmail frazzled star Jack Palance into signing the big contract. But will Hollywood corruption destroy them all?

The Big Knife

Blu-ray

Arrow Academy

1955 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 111 min. / Street Date September 5, 2017 / 39.95

Starring: Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Jean Hagen,

Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Ilka Chase, Everett Sloane, Wesley Addy, Paul Langton, Nick Dennis.

Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo

Art Direction: William Glasgow

Film Editor: Michael Luciano

Original Music: Frank De Vol

Adapted by James Poe from the play by Clifford Odets

Produced and Directed by Robert Aldrich

Robert Aldrich’s 1940s film apprenticeship was largely spent as an assistant director for strong, creative filmmakers that wanted to do good personal work free of the constraints of the big studios.

Forgotten amid Robert Aldrich’s more critic-friendly movies is this superb suspense picture, an against-all-odds thriller that pits an old-school pilot against a push-button young engineer with his own kind of male arrogance. Can a dozen oil workers and random passengers ‘invent’ their way out of an almost certain death trap? It’s a late-career triumph for James Stewart, at the head of a sterling ensemble cast. I review a UK disc in the hope of encouraging a new restoration.

The Flight of the Phoenix

Region B Blu-ray

(will not play in domestic U.S. players)

Masters of Cinema / Eureka Entertainment

1965 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 142 min. / Street Date September 12, 2016 / £12.95

Starring: James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Hardy Krüger, Ernest Borgnine, Ian Bannen, Ronald Fraser, Christian Marquand, Dan Duryea, George Kennedy, Gabriele Tinti, Alex Montoya, Peter Bravos, William Aldrich, Barrie Chase.

Cinematography: Joseph Biroc

Stunt Pilot: Paul Mantz

Art Direction: William Glasgow...

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How did Kiss Me Deadly come to be restored? The real question should be, how did filmdom lose track of its original ending in the first place? Savant uncovers evidence that may explain when, and why, United Artists mutilated the finish of Robert Aldrich’s apocalyptic film noir.

(Note: The images below with text can be enlarged for reading, just click on them.)

Before home video the final home for Hollywood films was Television. Robert Aldrich’s 1955 Kiss Me Deadly never saw a theatrical reissue, and it dropped out of major TV visibility in 1962. I saw the documentation in United Artists’ legal folder on the film. To secure capital to launch more movies, Robert Aldrich sold all of his ‘Associates and Aldrich’ pictures back to UA after their original releases were concluded. More papers showed Kiss Me Deadly being included in at least two TV syndication packages, and then each time pointedly removed.

The quintessential shot in Robert Aldrich’s filmography is that of a close-up, held for a smidgen longer than the normal length one would think appropriate for such a shot. The face the camera is focusing on is usually a signifier of the most central element in Aldrich’s films: tension. Whether it’s melodrama (Autumn Leaves, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?), war pictures (Too Late the Hero, Attack!), or Westerns, both sober and jocular (Ulzana’s Raid and 4 For Texas, respectively), ideological and external forces wrestle within the psyche that defines Aldrich’s cinema. Metrograph's all-35mm retrospective in New York offers us the opportunity to survey the oeuvre of the auteur who hammered out his cinematic legacy with the vigor of an undoubtedly indignant and irreverent artist. Too Late the Hero (1970)Consistency across genre and modes of filmmaking marks Aldrich as one of the last great studio auteurs,...

Shelley Winters, Christopher Jones and Diane Varsi star in American-International's most successful 'youth rebellion' epic -- a political sci-fi satire about a rock star whose opportunistic political movement overthrows the government and puts everyone over 35 into concentration camps... to be force-fed LSD. Wild in the Streets Blu-ray Olive Films 1968 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 97 min. / Street Date August 16, 2016 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98 Starring Shelley Winters, Christopher Jones, Diane Varsi, Hal Holbrook, Millie Perkins, Richard Pryor, Bert Freed, Kevin Coughlin, Larry Bishop, Michael Margotta, Ed Begley, May Ishihara. Cinematography Richard Moore Film Editor Fred Feitshans Jr., Eve Newman Original Music Les Baxter Written by Robert Thom from his short story "The Day it All Happened, Baby" Produced by Burt Topper Directed by Barry Shear

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Back around 1965 - 1966 we endured this stupid buzzword concept called The Generation Gap, a notion that there was a natural divide between old people and their kids.

What would seem the perfect project for tough-guy director Robert Aldrich still commands a high reputation with some. Ambitious top-dog hobo Lee Marvin squares off against Ernest Borgnine's nearly demonic railroad conductor who routinely murders bums that dare to hitch a ride. The mayhem culminates in a battle on a moving flat car, between Ernie's log chain and Lee's fire ax. But the poetic dialogue and allegorical pretension may be more lethal. Emperor of the North Blu-ray Twilight Time Limited Edition 1973 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 120 min. / Ship Date September 8, 2015 / available through Twilight Time Movies / 29.95 Starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Keith Carradine, Charles Tyner, Malcolm Atterbury, Simon Oakland, Harry Caesar, Hal Baylor, Matt Clark, Elisha Cook Jr., Joe Di Reda, Liam Dunn, Diane Dye, Robert Foulk, Sid Haig, Vic Tayback, Dave Willock, Lance Henricksen. Cinematography Joseph Biroc Art Direction Jack Martin Smith Film Editor Michael Luciano Original Music Frank De Vol...

All week long our writers will debate: Which was the greatest film year of the past half century. Click here for a complete list of our essays. How to decide in the grand scheme of things which film year stands above all others? History gives us no clear methodology to unravel this thorny but extremely important question. Is it the year with the highest average score of movies? So a year that averages out to a B + might be the winner over a field strewn with B’s, despite a few A +’s. Or do a few masterpieces lift up a year so far that whatever else happened beyond those three or four films is of no consequence? Both measures are worthy, and the winner by either of those would certainly be a year not to be sneezed at. But I contend the only true measure of a year’s...

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will open the 2014 edition of the TCM Classic Film Festival with the world premiere of a brand new restoration of the beloved Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! (1955). TCM’s own Robert Osborne, who serves as official host for the festival, will introduce Oklahoma!, with the film’s star, Academy Award®-winner Shirley Jones, in attendance. Vanity Fair will also return for the fifth year as a festival partner and co-presenter of the opening night after-party. Marking its fifth year, the TCM Classic Film Festival will take place April 10-13, 2014, in Hollywood. The gathering will coincide withTCM’s 20th anniversary as a leading authority in classic film.

In addition, the festival has added several high-profile guests to this year’s lineup, including Oscar®-winning director William Friedkin, who will attend for the screening of the U.S. premiere restoration of his suspenseful cult classic Sorcerer (1977); Kim Novak, who...

Kim Novak to attend Cannes 2013 Vertigo screening Kim Novak will be in attendance at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, festival organizers have announced. Novak will be present at a Cannes Classics screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 psychological thriller Vertigo, which has been recently restored. For all it’s worth, Vertigo was the top movie at the most recent (2012) Sight & Sound decennial poll of film critics and filmmakers. (Photo: Kim Novak Vertigo.) Vertigo was also a source of controversy in early 2012, when Kim Novak took out an ad in one of the trade publications claiming she felt she had been violated ("I want to report a rape") after finding bits from Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo music in Ludovic Bource’s eventually Oscar-winning The Artist score. Besides the Vertigo screening, Kim Novak will also be a presenter at Cannes’ closing ceremony on Sunday, May 26. According to the festival’s press release, Novak first...

The tough, anarchic moviemaker Robert Aldrich, who cut his directorial teeth as an assistant to Chaplin, Renoir, Polonsky, Losey and others, was the chief countervailing force to the complacency of Hollywood during the Eisenhower years. He was merciless towards Tinseltown itself in three movies about the industry. First in The Big Knife (1955), a movie inspired by the brutal studio boss Harry Cohn and the left-wing actor John Garfield. Second in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), a ripe slice of Grand Guignol melodrama, the only film co-starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, as show-biz sisters bound together by terrible secrets. Bette is a crazy, alcoholic former child-star, who's the virtual jailer of the crippled Joan, once a major star. Re-released for the 50th anniversary, this frightening, darkly comic picture is much influenced by Sunset Boulevard. The third film, The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) starring Kim Novak, is even more perverse,...

Ernest Borgnine is to be honored by TCM with a 24-hour marathon of some of the recently deceased actor’s finest films.

Beginning at 6 a.m. Et on July 26, the channel will begin with The Catered Affair and run through The Legend Of Lylah Clare, Pay Or Die, Torpedo Run, Ice Station Zebra, The Dirty Dozen, Marty, From Here To Eternity, The Wild Bunch, and Bad Day at Black Rock. There will also be multiple showings of Borgnine’s Private Screenings interview with channel host Robert Osborne, an hour-long episode filmed in 2009.

Must-see movies on the list are Marty, which...

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has announced that an Ernest Borgnine 24-hour marathon has been set! The iconic, Oscar-winning actor died Sunday at age 95, but his brilliant cinematic contribution lives on!

On July 26, TCM will show 10 films starrign Borgnine and will also include replays of the actor's 2009's Private Screenings interview conducted by host Robert Osborne.

Here's the schedule:

6 Am Et, The Catered Affair (1956)

8 Am, The Legend Of Lylah Clare (1968)

10:30 Am, Pay Or Die (1960)

12:30 Pm, Torpedo Run (1958)

2:30 Pm, Ice Station Zebra (1968)

5:15 Pm, The Dirty Dozen (1967)

8 Pm, Private Screenings: Ernest Borgnine (2009)

9 Pm, Marty (1955)

10:45 Pm, From Here To Eternity (1953)

1 Am, The Wild Bunch (1969)

3:30 Am, Bad Day At Black Rock (1955)

5 Am, Private Screenings: Ernest Borgnine (2009)

Source: Deadline...

Turner Classic Movies has set a 24-hour marathon of movies starring Ernest Borgnine, who died Sunday at age 95. On July 26, the cable channel will devote its programming to 10 films starring Borgnine, including a couple of replays of its hourlong 2009 Private Screenings interview with channel host Robert Osborne. Here’s the schedule: 6 Am Et, The Catered Affair (1956); 8 Am, The Legend Of Lylah Clare (1968), 10:30 Am, Pay Or Die (1960); 12:30 Pm, Torpedo Run (1958); 2:30 Pm, Ice Station Zebra (1968); 5:15 Pm, The Dirty Dozen (1967); 8 Pm, Private Screenings: Ernest Borgnine (2009); 9 Pm, Marty (1955); 10:45 Pm, From Here To Eternity (1953); 1 Am, The Wild Bunch (1969); 3:30 Am, Bad Day At Black Rock (1955); 5 Am, Private Screenings: Ernest Borgnine (2009). Related: Hammond On Ernest Borgnine: Oscar-Winning Actor Who Broke Hollywood Mold...

In a salute to the extensive lifelong career of Hollywood great and Academy Award winner Ernest Borgnine, who passed away at the age of 95 this past weekend, TCM will feature an all-day marathon of some of Borgnine’s most memorable performances, as well as TCM’s Private Screenings: Ernest Borgnine special. Lineup for the memorial day of programming Thursday, June 26, will be as follows: 6am: The Catered Affair (1956) 8am: The Legend of Lylah Clare 10:30am: Pay or Die 12:30pm: Torpedo Run 2:30pm: Ice Station Zebra 5:15pm: The Dirty Dozen 8pm: Private Screenings: Ernest Borgnine 9pm: Marty 10:45pm: From Here to Eternity 1am: The [...]...

Better late than never with the shill…I mean the Wow Look At All These Great Things! (And, all joking aside, I do mean that sincerely.)

We’ve finally done it. We’ve reached the end of our biggest year ever here at Trailers From Hell, a year with a lot of growing pains and a lot of triumphs. So allow me to extend some seasonal greetings to you, readers, watchers, visitors and strangers who may have just now stumbled upon our humble little site. (If you’re of the latter group, really, what took you so long?) We can only hope to keep growing the site though (please tell your friends!), and our always-amazing, never-ceasing stable of gurus only increases the realm of greatness we hope to bring you.

In the spirit of the season — that spirit being crass consumerism, of course — we thought we might direct your attention...

In the Hollywood melodramas of tough-guy auteur Robert Aldrich (Kiss Me Deadly), the world of show business is a nefarious, ulcer-inducing nest of vipers populated by parasites, the deluded, and the nakedly ambitious. And those are on good days. The Legend Of Lylah Clare, Aldrich’s cyanide-laced 1968 valentine to Hollywood, exists in the long, haunted shadow of faded stardom and abandoned dreams. Aldrich’s acidic drama also lives in the harsh, unflattering shadow of two films similar enough to invite unkind comparisons: Aldrich’s 1962 classic What Ever Happened To Baby Jane—another overheated melodrama about pathetic would-be players ...