Free Republic

Dirty Harry was released near the end of 1971 and became an immediate hit, and just as immediately began a feud between its star, Clint Eastwood, and Pauline Kael, one of the most influential movie critics in America. In her review, published in the New Yorker on January 15, 1972, and titled "Dirty Harry: Saint Cop", Kael called the film "a kind of hardhat The Fountainhead" and "an almost perfect piece of propaganda for para-legal police power." "When you're making a picture with Clint Eastwood, you naturally want things to be simple, and the basic contest between good and evil...

~Favorite Songs that are in Movies ~ Day O (Banana Boat Song)*Video*

The Baby Boom were mostly still in their cradles or unborn when The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer came out in 1947, which makes the film a historical document – one of our first glimpses of a generation gap forming in postwar America. The whole idea of the teenager is really less than a century old, and by the late '40s it was edging out the "bobby-soxer" – a largely female phenomenon that was launched into public consciousness with the shrieking fans who descended on Frank Sinatra's performances at the Paramount Theater in New York during the war. In his book...

snip The film is the middle picture in a trilogy that began in 1968 with If.... and would conclude in 1982 with Britannia Hospital. All three films are centered around a character named Mick Travis, played by Malcolm McDowell, and share a cast of actors who, in O Lucky Man!, play multiple roles. But the Mick in all three films is not the same person as much as a type – student rebel in one picture, ambitious young man in another, cynical media professional in the third. The character grew as McDowell's skill as an actor and onscreen persona developed...

Christopher Nolan made his way to Las Vegas to talk up “The Odyssey,” his historical drama based on Homer’s Greek epic... “Why ‘The Odyssey?’ ‘The Odyssey’ is a story that has fascinated generation after generation for 3,000 years,” Nolan mused. “It’s not a story. It’s the story.” Nolan treated exhibitors to an extended look at “The Odyssey,” which opened with Damon’s Odysseus, shirtless on the beach with a burly beard. He’s been gone a long time and admits to Calypso (Charlize Theron) that he “can’t remember anything before Troy.” Most of the footage revolved around “the story of the horse”...

Audrey Hepburn remains closely associated with Breakfast at Tiffany's, but the film's lead role was first offered to Marilyn Monroe. Now, Hepburn's oldest son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, 65, is offering insight into why he thinks Monroe ultimately turned it down. Truman Capote, who wrote the original novella, had drawn inspiration from the blonde bombshell— something Ferrer believes may have made the role less appealing. “I can understand why Marilyn said no, because she probably felt like she was going to be playing herself,” Ferrer told the outlet. “It's not very interesting, but if you take someone like Audrey Hepburn, which...

Ethnic humour has become one of those things we don't do well anymore, or simply won't do because nobody wants to lose their job. Back when it was still tolerated – about fifteen or twenty years ago – what was left of ethnic humour (as practiced by comics like Dave Chappelle or Chris Rock) was gatekept by a single, unbreakable rule: you can only make an ethnic joke if you're a member of the ethnicity that's the butt of the joke. Now, of course, this is largely off the table because nobody thinks the risk is worth it anymore. I...

Hollywood Decline: Sony Pictures Set to Lay Off Hundreds Signage for Sony Group Corp. displayed at the CP+ Camera and Photo Imaging Show in YokohamKiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images Warner Todd Huston8 Apr 2026140 3:25 Sony Pictures Entertainment is reportedly set to lay off hundreds of employees across its TV, film, and corporate offices as Hollywood continues to contract. According to Variety, one of the top layoffs will be that of Colin Davis, EVP of Comedy Development. Sources tell the paper that the layoffs are not “cost driven” but are “targeted and strategic” and are an effort to reorganize for...

Photo At first glance, watching the Criterion Collection‘s new 4K Blu-Ray release of 1976’s Network, it’s hard at first to match up the volcanic anger of Paddy Chayefsky’s writing with what we remember about the state of television in the mid-1970s. It all seems so quaint and nostalgic in retrospect — the news came in reassuringly small dabs of a half-hour of local info at 6 p.m., followed by a half-hour of national news at 6:30, rather than today’s competing 24-hour news channels on the cable dial. Weeknights ended with the urbane yet accessible and largely politically neutral Johnny Carson...

Film excels at metaphor — Show, don’t tell, is the rule of cinema. Christians, however, can’t seem to resist using film as a high-tech flannel board. The result is more akin to propaganda than art, and propaganda has a nasty habit of hardening hearts. Jesus began many of his parables with the phrase, “The kingdom of God is like …” He would respond to questions with parables — instead of stating the answer outright, he allowed his audience to make the connections themselves. The things of heaven are too large to be fully grasped by the human mind. They are...

When Francis Ford Coppola was writing the first version of the script that would be released as Patton in 1970, he was so spoiled for anecdotes and incidents that he was able to ignore gems like one that occurred a few days after V-E Day, when General George S. Patton was in his headquarters in the Bavarian town of Bad Tölz. A Soviet general presented himself and demanded a meeting with Patton, who told his aides to "bring the bastard in." Patton's Soviet counterpart demanded that a river boat used by German soldiers to cross the Danube and surrender to...

Before Angel Studios released the animated movie David late last year, it released an animated movie based on the life of Jesus Christ, called The King of Kings, around Easter. The movie did remarkably well at the box office, and it was a movie that sparked my curiosity due to the fact that its approach was different in the sense that it was framed by how Charles Dickens taught the account of Jesus Christ to his kids. The Story: The movie opens up during the part of Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol, where the character of Ebenezer Scrooge, the self-absorbed...

When you think of biblical epics in film, what comes to mind? Do you envision Charlton Heston hefting the Ten Commandments in, well, The Ten Commandments? Or maybe Charlton Heston locked in a life-or-death chariot race in Ben-Hur? Or Charlton Heston in … well, you get it. Charlton Heston was in a lot of those movies. But one biblical epic that Charlton Heston wasn’t in? The Prince of Egypt. The 1998 film wasn’t produced by Old Hollywood, but a different kind of studio: DreamWorks Animation. Though the inspiration for the film—wasn’t far off from Old Hollywood. DreamWorks co-founder and former...

As we enter the Sacred Triduum, Hollywood is celebrating Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), if not always the underlying message contained on those two ancient stone tablets Moses received at Mount Sinai c. 1446 BC. The American biblical epic, starring Charleton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as Pharaoh Ramses II, was a filmmaking masterpiece three years in the making. Narrated by DeMille himself, it tells the story of Moses as an infant, as related in Exodus 2:5, rescued by Pharoah’s daughter, played by Nina Foch, who, discovering the crying babe lying in a papyrus basket in the...

A call came to my home one night in late June 2003: “Do you want to see The Passion?” Of course, I did. Everybody in Christendom did... Looking back now, it’s hard to believe how the political fuss pretty much overwhelmed any discussion of the artistic merits of the movie. No one could have fathomed in that moment that Gibson would be the first victim of the cancel impulse, as his stunning and very personal movie about Jesus arguably destroyed his career, even as it made him the wealthiest man in Hollywood. Few faith-based filmmakers have any idea what makes...

In Preston Sturges' posthumous memoir Sturges by Sturges, finished by his widow Sandy and published in 1990, the director recounts an outlandish story from his childhood that would end up inspiring one of the most chaotic sequences in his 1942 screwball masterpiece The Palm Beach Story. His mother, a socially and culturally ambitious woman who was friends with dancer Isadora Duncan and had an affair with satanist Aleister Crowley, had brought him to Dresden while she worked on an operetta and the two of them (plus maid) were heading back to Paris in a train compartment stuffed with masses of...

George Lucas could be forgiven if he felt triumphant on March 22, 1976. That was the day cameras started rolling on Star Wars, his epic movie project that had already been underway for two years. Despite the success of his previous film, the coming-of-age story American Graffiti, the director struggled to secure studio support for his new movie, and he even considered quitting the business before studio Fox decided to back him. “I really wanted to hold on to my own integrity,” he told Rolling Stone later. “So, I was going to try to write a very interesting project. Right...

The 13th Academy Awards – the ones where The Philadelphia Story was nominated in six categories – were the first held with sealed envelopes to keep the winners secret. For the very first awards in 1929 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel the winners had been announced three months in advance; there were only 270 people in attendance, the ceremony only lasted fifteen minutes and it wasn't broadcast. For the next decade the Academy did its best to make the awards an event, but they announced the winners hours before the ceremony and in 1939 the L.A. Times published a leaked...

There's a clip on YouTube of director Samuel Fuller in the early '80s talking about the opening scene of his classic 1953 film noir Pickup on South Street. He would be about seventy years old at the time but he's full of energy and enthusiasm, as you would be if you were Samuel Fuller being interviewed for what I presume is French television. Fuller was and had been for decades something like a deity for French cineastes (the director had moved to France around this time) and he would never have an audience this avid anywhere else in the world....

I watched this last night and was blown away by how stupid it was. It had a good plot but the character portrayal of the military and executive government officials under the stress of nuclear missile launched against the US was horrific. Every one involved from the initial launch detection to the president issuing the go code was so overcome with stress that they couldn't focus and function. Missile commander left his position, SECDEF committed suicide, blah blah blah.