1950s
Kieron Tyler
John Lee Hooker’s recording career began on Friday 3 September 1948. He’d attracted the attention of the Kiev-born Bernard Besman, who was in Detroit after his family moved there in 1926 following five years in London’s East End. By the 1940s Besman, who played piano, was a veteran of dance bands and also worked as a booker. In 1946 he began working with records. At the time of encountering Hooker, Besman co-owned Sensation Records. Its early, pre-Hooker, signings included The Todd Rhodes Orchestra, Lord Nelson and his Boppers and the Doc Wiley Trio – who variously traded in boogie, jazz and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Vast of Night’s premise scarcely guarantees originality. Non-science-fiction buffs scoping Amazon’s film listings will probably move on quickly when they learn it’s about two late-'50s teenagers discovering that an alien space craft is hovering over their rural New Mexico burg. But Andrew Patterson’s sparkling directorial debut is an object lesson in how to revitalize an over-familiar narrative with fresh-seeming characters, visual daring, ladles of wit, and atmosphere to burn.Patterson uses the tropes of the extra-terrestrial visitation scenario to investigate Eisenhower-era Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Over the years, the legend of The Apu Trilogy has been much-repeated. Now widely considered India’s greatest filmmaker, Satyajit Ray was little more than a small-time commercial artist when, failing to find a sponsor for his script, he assembled what few funds he could in order to begin filming. Come the first day, Ray had never previously directed a scene, he had a still-photographer (Subrata Mitra) for a cinematographer, and a composer (Ravi Shankar) who was essentially unknown. Together, they combined to produce a set of films that have been acclaimed ever since as masterpieces of arthouse Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Coming in at around four hours, in two parts, this 2015 documentary is ostensibly about Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, but really, via the prism of his existence, it’s as much about America’s journey through the first two thirds of the 20th century. What other life intersects so neatly with such a scattershot selection of key names – Franklin D Roosevelt, Elvis Presley, Lucky Luciano, Mia Farrow, Louis B Mayer, Edgar J Hoover, Louis Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King, Eli Wallach, and on and on. It’s a compulsive biography that, like the man it covers, never slows, and never grows Read more ...
graham.rickson
Humphrey Bogart. John Huston. Gina Lollobrigida. Peter Lorre. Truman Capote! What could possibly go wrong? There’s the screenplay for starters: Capote gets top billing, and I’d long understood that he and Huston together wrote 1953's Beat the Devil on the hoof, script pages being typed up only minutes before they were handed to the cast. Huston adapted a novel by journalist Claude Cockburn, whose late son Alexander later complained that fans of the film “professed to find evidence of Capote’s mastery in every interstice of the dialogue… but his contribution was limited to some concluding Read more ...
graham.rickson
There’s a scarily prescient scene at the start of Henry Cass’s 1950 black comedy Last Holiday, a village surgery’s waiting room crammed with coughers and wheezers. Poor George Bird (Alec Guinness) is a tad under the weather too, but being mistakenly diagnosed with the fatal Lampington's Disease by an overworked GP proves to be a life-changer.Bird gleefully resigns from his job selling farming machinery, cashes in his savings, buys a second-hand Saville Row suit and heads off to an upmarket seaside hotel to enjoy his final few weeks in comfort. Under threat of death, Bird at last feels alive. Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Fire and Rain”. Who doesn’t recall James Taylor’s first number one 50 years ago! Born in Carolina and a “graduate” of the 1960s Greenwich Village music scene, Sweet Baby James has given the world some enduring songs and been part of some of music’s greatest scenes. American Standard is his 19th album, his first in five years, and it’s a refreshing dip into the Great American Songbook – “songs I grew up with that I remember really well, that were part of the family record collection”. As indeed they were for many of us.This is classy comfort food which will appeal to those familiar with both Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Lesley Manville’s thrilling career ascent continues apace with The Visit, which marks American playwright Tony Kushner’s return to the National Theatre following the acclaimed Angels in America revival nearly three years ago. But Manville’s whiplash-smart assuredness in a role that calls for a star and gets one proves one of the few invigorating aspects of a long and spirit-depleting evening. Told across three acts (the second one only 40 minutes) with two intervals, the play fills the National’s largest stage with a huge cast, almost all of whom – Manville Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any knowledge of the Hank Williams narrative heavily influences how he is perceived. He died at age 29 on New Year’s Day 1953, in the back of a car while travelling to a show in Ohio. His schedule was punishing. A day earlier he had played in West Virginia but a storm meant he could not fly from one show to the next.He had spina biffida and was in constant pain. There were prescribed painkillers, self-medication and a long-standing problem with alcohol. He missed shows. Contracts were cancelled due to drunkenness. He had married Audrey Sheppard in 1944 but they fought. Divorce came in 1952. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
British cinema has done so badly by Christmas that the revival of a film that parses the nature of the festival while mining its potential for sparking family strife is cause for celebration. Long neglected, The Holly and the Ivy (1952) has been handsomely restored by StudioCanal and deserves to become a seasonal staple alongside Scrooge (1951), Comfort and Joy (1984), and the BBC adaptation of Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings (1986), which is currently available on YouTube only. The Holly and the Ivy was adapted by Anatole de Grunwald from Wynyard Brown’s West End hit. Set on Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Edward Norton has wanted to adapt Motherless Brooklyn since Jonathan Lethem’s acclaimed novel was first published 20 years ago. His film (as producer, writer, director and star) is an obvious labour of love, an evocative, entertaining, old-fashioned gumshoe noir, which fits snugly within the traditions of the genre while offering a refreshingly atypical hero.Forget Bogart’s Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, or Nicholson’s J.J. Gittes – sharply tailored, fast-talking, ineffably cool. Lionel Essrog (Norton) is a fledgling private eye with Tourette’s Syndrome, who can’t help but fire off spontaneous Read more ...
mark.kidel
This new Eureka! boxset of 4K and 2K restorations provides ample evidence as to why Samuel Fuller was venerated by such a wide range of film-makers, including Godard, Wenders, Scorsese and Tarantino. Often characterised as a purveyor of pulp cinema, Fuller was much more than that: his command of filmic story-telling across a multitude of genres – western, film noir, war film and melodrama – was exceptional. He had a very special mastery of film language, a fine sense of when to go from wide to close shot, change the pace of editing unexpectedly, and move the camera at the service of Read more ...