Stick a Pitchfork in Her, She’s Donne

Val Lewton (and director Mark Robson)’s The Seventh Victim is a deeply divisive film. Extravagantly praised by some (although, to tell ya the truth, I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate this gently nihilistic slice of quotidian terror), it is just as often treated as a weak link in the Lewton series (generally by critics [...]

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The Eighth Victim?

As obsessed as I am with Dieterle, Borzage, Vidor, Lynch, Capra, Fritz Lang, Dreyer, Cassavetes, Sternberg, Wyler, Powell and Pressburger, George Stevens, Sirk, Milestone, McCarey, LaCava, Preston Sturges, Ray, Goulding, Hitchcock, Preminger, Sofia Coppola, Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, Dmytryk, Minnelli, Jacques Tourneur and many others, I am probably even more interested in star personae. So [...]

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Blanc Check

“Film Blanc” (the term was introduced by Peter Valenti, in the pages of the Journal of Popular Film, although I first encountered it through Glenn Erickson) is a politically suspect style of phantasmagoria that came into its own during the exact same period (the 1940s) that its anti-thesis (film noir) flourished (although, of course, both [...]

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