How does one approach Shirley MacLaine? With respect? Surely. With admiration? Maybe. With awe? Possibly. If The Apartment is as close as any to being your favorite film, you probably do so equipped with something related to that movie, book-wise. Arm twisted for no apparent reason, I’d probably choose The Apartment, along with It’s a [...]

There are two reasons I’ve been anxious to see Hold Back the Dawn. One is Billy Wilder and the other is a nonexistent cockroach. I’ve brought this up before, but it’s a good enough story that you really can’t tell it too many times. When Wilder was still under contract as a writer for Paramount, [...]

When looking at Billy Wilder’s films as director, there are four that especially stick out in terms of incompatibility with the rest. The Emperor Waltz is a Bing Crosby musical and generally regarded as unsuccessful on most every level. The Spirit of St. Louis, despite being a fine film, puts Wilder in studio-constricted biopic land. [...]

In the Criterion Collection’s monthly newsletter, they ask a prominent figure associated with a previously released title to compose a list of ten favorite selections among the Criterion catalog. Even though it was just released this past week, I know for certain that I would choose their Ace in the Hole DVD if that question [...]

Context is everything in movies. In any particular scene, a line of dialogue can elicit hearty laughs if given the right set-up while the same exact line might cause an audience to break down into tears when used in a different situation. The idea of context is just as important for directors and, [...]

Recently, I found myself in Los Angeles (part of a quixotic excursion in the name of bowler hats and oversized apples) strolling around (1) a tiny, but well-known cemetery, (2) a brand new state-of-the-art theater, and (3) a secluded portion of the Hollywood Walk of Fame just past some construction. The common denominator for [...]

There are prescient movies, ahead of their time enough for modern viewers to appreciate a retained relevance or uncanny vision into how society would reflect portions of films past, and then there’s Ace in the Hole. What amazes me most about Billy Wilder’s 1951 master work isn’t just how eerily accurate he captured the [...]

As the DVD medium enters its second decade, consumers have been blessed with more titles than many of us can find the time to watch. Nevertheless, there are still many, many deserving films from Hollywood’s golden age that remain unreleased. Warner Bros. and Fox are mostly doing their part to rectify the situation, [...]