Anyone who has made a list before knows the labor of love required to whittle down dozens or hundreds of your favorites to select just a few. Instead of picking one single favorite film from each decade, sometimes I wished I could have made a …
Continue ReadingFaust (1926) and The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)
Legends become so enmeshed in the cultural consciousness that they appear in numerous forms and adaptations centuries after their initial creation. The German folktale Faust is one such tale, inspiring dozens of books, plays, operas, and films since its first iteration in 16th-century German literature. …
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 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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