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Making his move from editor (Citizen Kane, The Devil and Daniel Webster, and The Magnificent Ambersons) to director in the early 1940s, Robert Wise wasted little time jumping into a variety of arguably B-grade pictures (like the Val Lewton sequel The Curse of the Cat People, the Guy de Maupassant adaptation Mademoiselle Fifi, and back again to Lewton for the marvelous Robert Louis Stevenson tale The Body Snatchers).

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Following his directorial debut, the 1967 Sonny and Cher vignette flick Good Times, director William Friedkin struggled through a couple of projects before landing his first really provocative title with 1970’s The Boys in the Band. Of course, following that would be The French Connection and so on and so forth. But prior to that, Friedkin helmed a period piece penned and produced by Norman Lear, The Night They Raided Minsky’s, which more or less depicts the accidental invention of stripping during the golden period of burlesque. Plagued by various production issues, including the death of Bert Lahr (you know him as the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz) during filming, the initial cut of the film was famously termed ‘disastrous,’ and the title would be retooled for nine months by editor Ralph Rosenblum and finally see release a year after production ended. While not quite charming or as...

Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine' 1938: Jean Renoir's film noir (photo: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine') (See previous post: "'Cat People' 1942 Actress Simone Simon Remembered.") In the late 1930s, with her Hollywood career stalled while facing competition at 20th Century-Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power's wife), Simone Simon returned to France. Once there, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine. An updated version of Émile Zola's 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine is enveloped in a dark, brooding atmosphere not uncommon in pre-World War II French films. Known for their "poetic realism," examples from that era include Renoir's own The Lower Depths (1936), Julien Duvivier's La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937), and particularly Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) and Daybreak (1939).[11] This thematic and...

'Cat People' 1942 actress Simone Simon Remembered: Starred in Jacques Tourneur's cult horror movie classic (photo: Simone Simon in 'Cat People') Pert, pouty, pretty Simone Simon is best remembered for her starring roles in Jacques Tourneur's cult horror movie Cat People (1942) and in Jean Renoir's French film noir La Bête Humaine (1938). Long before Brigitte Bardot, Mamie Van Doren, Ann-Margret, and (for a few years) Jane Fonda became known as cinema's Sex Kittens, Simone Simon exuded feline charm in a film career that spanned a quarter of a century. From the early '30s to the mid-'50s, she seduced men young and old on both sides of the Atlantic – at times, with fatal results. During that period, Simon was featured in nearly 40 movies in France, Italy, Germany, Britain, and Hollywood. Besides Jean Renoir, in her native country she worked for the likes of Jacqueline Audry...

Pyshka, 1934, directed by Mikhail Romm. Romm was an intermittently successful Soviet filmmaker who toed the line, making two biopics of Lenin. The fact that Pyshka was sonorized in 1955, with a voice-over, score and sound effects added, suggests that he was still well-regarded then. Romm had a fantastic eye for composition, light, and character. I don't know too much or have too much to say about him, but I think these images speak for themselves, and it's probable that his own Wwi experience informs the shots of dead soldiers that begin the story, by far the movie's most vivid sequence.

Pyshka is adapted from Guy de Maupassant's story Boule de Suif, which has an interesting cinematic history. One of Maupassant's semi-propagandist works dealing with the Franco-Prussian war, it's been bent to the purposes of a number of different filmmakers, nations, and era.

Basically, the story tells of a party...

Acknowledging Apache Drums (1951) as the forgotten Val Lewton movie, we must also acknowledge that it's not quite as special as Cat People or Isle of the Dead or any of the others in the chiller cycle, but it does bear comparison with the lesser-known Mademoiselle Fifi and it certainly beats the pants off of Youth Runs Wild.

If the conservative nature of the western format reins in some of Lewton's more sophisticated tendencies, it also allows others to stand out in bold relief, and if director Hugo Fregonese is no Jacques Tourneur, nor even a Mark Robson, he's a perfectly amicable journeyman.

Admitting a certain B-movie banality, what's striking is how Lewton is able to continue his preoccupations into what might seem an alien genre, so that Apache Drums resembles, at numerous times, a supernatural/psychological horror movie, in which the horror is dually located in the American Indian "other,...

In 1942, at the age of 38, Val Lewton was named the head of Rko Studios’ horror unit.  As part of his job, he was to follow three rules.  His films had to cost the studio less than $150,000, his films had to run under 75 minutes in length, and his supervisor’s would be supplying the names of each film.  For the next four years, Lewton would write and produce nine horror films, each of them earning a status in history as black and white horror classics.Nine for nine.  That’s not a bad batting average for a young producer in Hollywood, particularly when dealing with horror films.  Of these nine films, Lewton had a hand in writing the screenplays for three of them.  Of these three, perhaps the most famous is 1945’s ‘The Body Snatcher.’

Based on the short story from the 1880s by Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Body Snatcher’ tells...

Kurt Kreuger, a Swiss-German actor often cast as a Nazi officer in World War II movies and who later became a realtor, has died. He was 89. Kreuger died on July 12 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after a stroke, according to his friend Lynne Riehman. The actor was born in Michenberg, Germany and was raised in Switzerland. In the 1950s, he appeared in more than 20 films, including Mademoiselle Fifi, his first major role. Kreuger's good looks made him 20th Century Fox's third most-requested male pin-up photo. Although he tried to break free from his stereotyped image, Kreuger was frustrated by the studio, who refused to cast him in different types of roles. He moved to Europe in the 1950s where he appeared in German films. His last film was The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, released in 1967. After acting on television through the 1960s, Kreuger became a successful realtor in Beverly Hills, California.