It’s hard not to be, at least, somewhat impressed with The Vampire Bat, if only because it came out in 1933 as a knockoff Universal horror pictures. Except at this point, there’d only been Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy. The Vampire Bat brilliantly resembles a Universal horror picture in every way but the filmmaking. There’s […]
Entries Tagged as 'Fay Wray'
The Vampire Bat (1933, Frank R. Strayer)
June 14th, 2009 · No Comments
Tagged: Dwight Frye· Edward T. Lowe Jr.· Fay Wray· Frank R. Strayer· Majestic Pictures· ★
Thunderbolt (1929, Josef von Sternberg)
December 24th, 2008 · No Comments
Thunderbolt has some excellent use of sound. It’s a very early talky and I’m hesitant to say any of its uses were innovative, because the word suggests others picked up on the techniques and developed them. Most of Thunderbolt’s singular sound designs didn’t show up again in Hollywood cinema for over twenty years. The way […]
Tagged: Charles Furthman· Fay Wray· Herman J. Mankiewicz· Jules Furthman· Paramount Pictures· ★
Below the Sea (1933, Albert S. Rogell)
September 24th, 2008 · No Comments
Below the Sea really should be good. It’s got a great–somewhat startling when viewed today–opening, it’s got excellent special effects and Albert S. Rogell has some fantastic composition. But it all goes wrong.
The opening is set in 1917 on a German U-boat. It’s carrying gold through the Caribbean and gets sunk following a battle with an […]
Tagged: Albert S. Rogell· Columbia Pictures· Fay Wray· Jo Swerling· ⓏⒺⓇⓄ
Navy Secrets (1939, Howard Bretherton)
September 19th, 2008 · No Comments
Low budget filmmaking–both today and in the past–has always been the most successful when the narrative takes the budget into account. Navy Secrets takes place over one day, with most of the locations being in cars, apartments or restaurants. In other words, easy sets. There’s one slightly more complicated scene in a park. The scenes […]
Tagged: Fay Wray· Harvey Gates· Howard Bretherton· Monogram Pictures Corporation· Steve Fisher· ★★
King Kong (1933, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack)
September 5th, 2008 · No Comments
King Kong is a perfect film. I don’t think I’d realized before. It’s always hard to talk about films like Kong, influential standards of American cinema. I want to talk about how its structure still sets the tone for modern films–the gradual lead-in (it’s forty-some minutes before Kong shows up), the non-stop action of the […]
Tagged: Bruce Cabot· Edgar Wallace· Ernest B. Schoedsack· Fay Wray· James Ashmore Creelman· Merian C. Cooper· RKO Radio Pictures· Robert Armstrong· Ruth Rose· ★★★★
One Sunday Afternoon (1933, Stephen Roberts)
September 3rd, 2008 · No Comments
One Sunday Afternoon suffers from some of the standard play-to-film problems. The scenes go on too long, especially in the first half, which only contains three real scenes. The opening, which is a lengthy, seemingly direct adaptation from the play, features Gary Cooper and Roscoe Karns talking to each other as way of establishing the […]
Tagged: Fay Wray· Gary Cooper· Grover Jones· James Hagan· Jane Darwell· Paramount Pictures· Stephen Roberts· William Slavens McNutt· ★★½
The Cobweb (1955, Vincente Minnelli)
August 28th, 2007 · No Comments
A more appropriate title might be The Trouble with the Drapes, but even with the misleading moniker, The Cobweb is a good Cinemascope drama. Cinemascope dramas went out some time in the mid-1960s. Vincente Minnelli is great at them. In The Cobweb, he turns a little story (I can’t believe it’s from a novel–it must […]
Tagged: Charles Boyer· Fay Wray· John Paxton· Lauren Bacall· Lillian Gish· Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer· Paul Stewart· Richard Widmark· Vincente Minnelli· William Gibson· ★★★
