Samuel Fuller was trying to find a home for his pet project The Big Red One, intended as an epic account of the 1st Infantry squadron Fuller himself had been a part of in World War II, when studio head Jack Warner instead talked him into making Merrill’s Marauders. As Fuller writes in his [...]

As the weather cools and the leaves fall, the Lists Project’s oversized, bespectacled head emerges once again. After working my way through the 1940s and 1950s, the decade of radical changes is now up. The 1960s marked a stinging decline in the quality of Hollywood films, but the international output blossomed beyond expectation, enjoying perhaps [...]

It’s easy to forget just how good John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate is. Despite the director’s lofty accomplishments, especially throughout the 1960s, he’s most remembered for this film and, perhaps, decades of struggles afterwards, probably reaching a low point with the Marlon Brando abomination The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1996. [...]

So many times I’ll look forward to seeing a film only to lose patience when I’m actually watching it, disappointed that my expectations haven’t been met. Then something extraordinary happens: the ending. Great endings should enhance everything you’ve seen earlier in the film. More than making up for the viewer’s wandering attention [...]

The Collector is a terrifying film, much more so than the dozens of progeny it’s spawned, either directly or not, in the forty-plus years since the film was released. The story of a man so obsessed with “collecting” that he catches another human being for the purpose of making her fall in love with him [...]

Through a happy coincidence, the letter ‘B’ plays a vital role in this entry. For some unknown reason, I find myself drawn to films beginning with that letter, both in watching and in writing. I’ve written about this sort of ‘B’ film more than any other letter, as evidenced by my index. [...]

Pitfall was the debut feature from Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara, newly celebrated by the Criterion Collection in a superb four-disc box set. It’s what one might describe as an art film, less concerned with narrative and tying up loose ends than creating disturbing images that become etched into the viewer’s mind. But what images. Surreal [...]

Marvin.  Lee Marvin. 
An odd thought, but can you imagine Lee Marvin as James Bond?  Ignoring the accent, he would have been incredible, bringing the sadistic and amoral side to Bond that Daniel Craig has adopted in Casino Royale.  Marvin is one of those actors that make me question the auteur theory.  I normally write about films in the [...]

Click, clack.  Click, clack.  Click, clack. 
Clad in a sharp grey suit, Walker pounds his way down a fluorescent-lit airport hallway.  For the entirety of Point Blank, Walker is the proverbial man on a mission.  All he wants is his money (or so he says), and he’s ready to take it by any means necessary.  Lee Marvin portrays Walker [...]

The fallacy of truth in cinema is as much the main subject of Shohei Imamura’s A Man Vanishes as the investigation into the disappearance of a Japanese businessman that initially appears to be the focal point of the 1967 film. The director, whose films have been the subject of a Brooklyn retrospective the past [...]