Marlowe

(This is the first of many reviews of made-on-demand discs I’ll be doing at The Digital Fix during the month of June. A few select write-ups, such as this one, will be cross-posted here at clydefro.com)

A country blonde Kansas girl retains California private detective Philip Marlowe for $50, hoping he can find her brother. When [...]

Otley (Screen Classics by Request)

It wasn’t long ago that Sony finally entered my good graces. Like a white knight for older films on DVD, the formerly most negligent of all studios picked up the slack left behind when Warner Bros. and Fox virtually abandoned proper releases of their back catalogs. Over the last two years Sony’s commitment to putting [...]

If you’re into Japanese incest and mythological curses…

…have I got the film for you - Profound Desires of the Gods. It’s available via the Masters of Cinema line, on Blu-ray only and restricted to play just on Region B or region-free machines so the possible audience for this release is limited. If you have those capabilities or simply want to read my [...]

Eyes Without a Face

The bookends of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) consist of a wordless journey, given demented affection by Maurice Jarre’s score, to dispose of a female corpse dressed in men’s clothing and the escape of one animal after another, culminating in the brutal poetry of angry dogs attacking their captor and [...]

Underworld U.S.A.

There’s an exhilaration that comes from watching a Sam Fuller picture. You know it’s Fuller who wrote it. You know he was the one barking from behind the camera between cigar puffs. You know he took pieces of his own experiences - maybe something from the newspaper days or his time in WWII - and [...]

The Last Cowboy

When I attended a conversation with Kirk Douglas a couple of years ago he mentioned that his personal favorite among all of the films he’d done was Lonely Are the Brave. I wasn’t familiar with that title, but soon learned that there had not yet been a DVD release either in R1 or the UK. [...]

Bullitt

Steve McQueen’s guarded blue eyes drive this Peter Yates film just as the actor forcefully guides his title character’s ‘68 Mustang in that iconic car chase. The number of close-ups Yates gives McQueen is surprising until you realize each and every one works. When Yates cuts to McQueen as San Francisco Police Lt. Frank Bullitt, [...]

More on Dassin

The Film Forum retrospective on Jules Dassin has just ended, right when I return to the area. Anyone arriving to this piece via search or otherwise who caught The Rehearsal, A Dream of Passion, or He Who Must Die is encouraged to share an opinion. Those were the titles I didn’t get a chance to [...]

The Melville Way

Drastic measures require as much self-advertisement as possible when it comes to the films of Jean-Pierre Melville and only a smidgen of views over at DVD Times. I’m not sure what happened, but suspect the new look of the DVD Times site may have resulted in fewer visitors and, thus, fewer peeks at reviews. Whatever [...]

Mister Buddwing

I propped up Mister Buddwing a couple of weeks ago in my weekly TCM picks. Some minor research left me hesitant but entirely intrigued. James Garner as a guy who wanders around the streets of Manhattan in search of himself sounded familiar. I’ve never experienced memory loss or found myself in Central Park without any [...]