Movies Til Dawn

Dame Margaret Rutherford, the star/host of my father Frank De Felitta's 1964 documentary which I've posted below, was not quite the quaint and cozy biddy that her screen persona offered. Indeed, I've unearthed (without a lot of effort--thanks to Wikipedia) some rather startling facts about her. Who would have thought, for instance, that Dame Margaret's father "suffered from mental illness, having suffered a nervous breakdown on his honeymoon, and was confined to an asylum. He was eventually released on holiday and on 4 March 1883, he murdered his father, the Reverend Julius Benn, a Congregational church minister, by bludgeoning him to death with a chamberpot; shortly afterward, William tried to kill himself as well, by slashing his throat with a pocketknife. After the murder, William Benn was confined to the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Several years later he was released, reportedly cured of his mental affliction, changed his surname to Rutherford, and retur...

I have more--much more--to say about George Stevens, my favorite major Hollywood filmmaker of yore. And I'll get to some of it. But I was put off from continuing the series based on the sudden unavailability of youtube clips of "Shane" and the undeservedly obscure "Something To Live For" (both had been posted in complete versions until literally moments before I began writing about Stevens--or so it seems)...and, to be honest, the constant snorts of derision about Stevens work began to become tiresome to me. As a filmmaker, I am less interested in arguing movies with others than many buffs might be. To me films are dreams and you either have them or don't. But the steady stream of negativity I encountered when discussing Stevens depressed me and without the necessary clips to prove my case I found myself developing a massive case of blog avoidance-the very thing that led me to abandon my beloved on-line magazine this past Xmas to begin with. I hope that in t...

I had a plan: to work our way through "Shane", my favorite Stevens film and my favorite western, in order of the film's narrative. There's much to discuss after all--the magnificent fight scene of course, the methodology whereby Stevens creates multiple stories within a given scene simply by allowing the main conflict to play out while tracking reactions of other people looking over at others for their reactions. (I'm surprised this isn't done more--was Stevens surprised too?) Most importantly, there's the fact that Stevens somehow made a movie wherein two people fall in love--Ladd and Jean Arthur--never act upon it, never exchange a word about it and are clearly affected for life by the encounter. How this is transmuted--is it through the boy?--remains a mystery to me. But it's there and I mentioned it to George Stevens Jr. who seemed to agree that it was very much at the heart of this mysteriously powerful films emotional resonance. But I'm aban...

If in some theoretical desert island scenario you were forced to pick only one ten minute youtube clip with which to live with for the rest of your days, I would strongly suggest part four of "A Place In the Sun" which contains three of Stevens most daring and ravishing scenes and certainly two of cinema's all time greatest close ups. The other day I posted the long take of Clift getting two phone calls in his rooming house, shot from the other room and with the actors face (and hence his emotional responses) not visible. That scene resides squarely in the middle this chunk of the film. But this section begins with another daringly long take similarly designed to make you feel the static quality of George Eastman's shut-down feelings--his overall numbness--when stuck with Shelley Winters woefully unexciting Alice, the girl-who-would-prevent-him-from-having-Liz/Angela. This is the night that Eastman returns to Alice's shabby room for the pathetic birthday party ...