Harold Lloyd has always been one of my favorite filmmakers. I fondly remember watching Safety Last on my dinky laptop in my college apartment trying my best to keep my laughter at a minimum to not disturb my studying roommate. I knew from that moment …
Continue ReadingVincent Price as Joseph Smith in Brigham Young (1940)
The Hollywood studio system was an intricate, and well-oiled machine in the 1930s and 40s, an oligarchy of a handful of studios that controlled the production, distribution, and exhibition of films with an iron fist. During their height, movie studios scrupulously controlled the careers and …
Continue ReadingThe Ten Commandments (1923): DeMille’s Silent Biblical Epic
It’s not very often that a filmmaker gets to remake his or her own movie. Directors are lucky enough to make two separate movies let only the same movie twice! There are however a few examples of a director looking back to their earlier days …
Continue ReadingWhat Makes a Great Film
I recently watched Ingmar Bergman’s classic The Seventh Seal for the first time. To be brutally honest, I didn’t enjoy it that much. Maybe it was because I watched it with my roommates who mistook it as a horror flick when we brushed past it …
Continue ReadingPolice Squad: Testimony of Evil (Dead Men Don’t Laugh)
While there is a healthy and thriving academic, critical, and popular interest in classic film, classic television hasn’t always been treated so kindly. Early television series from the 1940s and early 50s have similar survival rates to silent pictures, with numerous episodes and entire …
Continue ReadingThe Cameraman (1928): Buster Keaton’s Last Great Silent Film
There is a well-known story among Damfinoes that after Buster Keaton’s film’s debut in the Arbuckle vehicle The Butcher Boy (1917), he asked to take home a movie camera with him off the set. Buster took the camera apart and put it back together again …
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