“I be done seen about everything when I see an elephant fly.” Dumbo is, I think, one of the most charming of the classic Walt Disney animations. The movie was produced on a relatively low budget after the financial failures of the expensive Pinocchio and Fantasia. Its a brisk 64 minute fable of a baby…
The Parallax View
The Parallax View is possibly the most paranoid of a small wave of paranoid thrillers from the 70s. Several of these (including Klute and All The President’s Men) were also directed by Alan J Pakula. Here, Warren Beatty stars as a crusading journalist who comes to realise that all witnesses a political assassination are steadily…
Psycho II
I recall Psycho II being a better movie than it had any right to be. Whilst the idea of making a sequel to arguably Hitchcock’s most famous movie might seem like sacrilege, Psycho II was more than the abject cash-in that might have been expected. I remember the shift from black and white to colour in…
Cool Hand Luke
“What we have here is a failure to communicate….” These are the last words spoken by Paul Newman’s Luke, a fiercely disruptive convict, whom the authorities are determined to crush in 1967’s classic prison drama. Unbroken to the last, he parodies the exact words spoken to him by the warden before being shot. Cool Hand…
The Final Conflict
The Final Conflict was the concluding chapter in The Omen trilogy (well, it was until someone had the bright idea to flog a dead horse with Omen IV…) I always found it a poor fit with the previous two movies, the basic premise being that the Devil’s son Damien is now a grown adult, intent…
The Italian Job
The Italian Job has so many great moments, its one of the most memorable British films of the 60s, I reckon. Who doesn’t love the endlessly quotable dialogue (“You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”), or cheeky thief Michael Caine and his gang’s escape from a gridlocked Turin in a fleet of Mini…
Man Of 1000 Faces
Lon Chaney was one of the greats of silent cinema. A master of disguise, he would go to extreme (and – for him – extremely painful) lengths to transform himself into The Hunchback Of Notre Dame and The Phantom Of The Opera, amongst other horror movie icons. Still, he was perhaps an unusual subject for…
Forbidden Planet
Memorabilia from Forbidden Planet makes for some of the most collectible movie items out here. If I had an original release US poster I would be a rich man. But I have to make do with this rather less valuable 60s re-release Spanish herald (plus my Australian poster for The Invisible Boy – not a sequel…
Frenzy
Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film, is somewhat divisive. Hitchcock returned to the UK after many years in Hollywood to deliver undoubtedly the nastiest (and arguably most misogynistic) of his movies. Hitch takes advantage of relaxing censorship to deliver some very graphic, brutal murder set-pieces. Its something of a return to form, however, after the very boring…
Scum
Scum remains one of the toughest and most disturbing watches of all British movies of the 70s. A harsh look at the brutal life inside borstals, it was originally planned for TV, but it got banned and was subsequently remade to be released in cinemas. I still remember the scene where a pre-fame Ray Winstone…