The Locarno Film Festival is justly renowned for its retrospectives, and this year is no exception. But rather than an individual director or star, this edition is dedicated to a studio: Columbia Pictures with “The Lady with the Torch” celebrating the studio’s centenary.
With 44 films from well-known titles such as Orson Welles’s “The Lady from Shanghai” (1947) and Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat” (1953) to more obscure gems like Frank Borzage’s “Man’s Castle” (1933) and Earl McEvoy’s “The Killer that Stalked New York” (1950), curator Ehsan Khoshbakht has created what he calls an “unofficial history” of the studio in its heyday, as controversial president Harry Cohn dragged Columbia from poverty row to Academy success.
Variety sat down to speak with Khoshbakht (who is also the co-director of Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato Festival) about the retrospective.
Variety: What role does the retrospective play in Locarno?
Khoshbakht: Very recently, I was...
With 44 films from well-known titles such as Orson Welles’s “The Lady from Shanghai” (1947) and Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat” (1953) to more obscure gems like Frank Borzage’s “Man’s Castle” (1933) and Earl McEvoy’s “The Killer that Stalked New York” (1950), curator Ehsan Khoshbakht has created what he calls an “unofficial history” of the studio in its heyday, as controversial president Harry Cohn dragged Columbia from poverty row to Academy success.
Variety sat down to speak with Khoshbakht (who is also the co-director of Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato Festival) about the retrospective.
Variety: What role does the retrospective play in Locarno?
Khoshbakht: Very recently, I was...
- 8/13/2024
- by John Bleasdale
- Variety Film + TV
Man's Castle.“When you’re dead, you get a hunk of earth. When you’re alive, all you’ve got is that hunk of blue.” This is how Bill (Spencer Tracy), the restless hero of Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle (1933), explains his insistence on sleeping under the open sky. Borzage’s films always cast their eyes heavenward with exalted sincerity; they offer no sop to modern irony or cynicism. No one should watch them who is not prepared to be enraptured.The essence of Borzage’s romanticism resides in the enchanted spaces his lovers create together: sometimes a semi-permanent home, like the Parisian garret in 7th Heaven (1927), at other times a fleeting idyll of shared fantasy, like the abandoned plantation mansion where the outcast couple in Moonrise (1948) waltz amid the shadows and cobwebs. These magical playhouses are spaces of care and refuge as much as dreamy eroticism; in Man’s Castle,...
- 4/18/2024
- MUBI
Indie producer Harry Cohn, brother Jack and their associate Joe Brandt created the CBC Film Sales Company in 1918. And on Jan. 10, 1924, the trio formed the Poverty Row studio, Columbia Pictures. According to Enclyclopedia.com, by the mid-20s “Cohn had gained reputation as one of the industry’s toughest businessmen.” That’s putting it mildly.
Though “B” movies and series such as The Three Stooges, “Blondie” and “The Lone Wolf” were the bread and butter of the studio, Cohn slowly attracted top talent and directors and turned such newcomers as Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, William Holden and Kim Novak into stars.
Frank Capra changed the fortunes of the studio. Signing with Columbia in 1928, he made 25 films for Columbia. His optimistic, common man movies attracted critics and audiences alike during the Depression. His 1934 screwball comedy “It Happened One Night,” penned by Robert Riskin and starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, swept the Oscars winning five.
Though “B” movies and series such as The Three Stooges, “Blondie” and “The Lone Wolf” were the bread and butter of the studio, Cohn slowly attracted top talent and directors and turned such newcomers as Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, William Holden and Kim Novak into stars.
Frank Capra changed the fortunes of the studio. Signing with Columbia in 1928, he made 25 films for Columbia. His optimistic, common man movies attracted critics and audiences alike during the Depression. His 1934 screwball comedy “It Happened One Night,” penned by Robert Riskin and starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, swept the Oscars winning five.
- 1/8/2024
- by Susan King
- Gold Derby
There are a lot of familiar faces in the just announced 2014 Telluride Film Festival line-up, but as much as this fest is about what's officially announced, it's also about what's not mentioned as secret screenings are pretty much what makes Telluride such a buzzy fest, though this year a little bit of snow may also be part of the conversation. As for the titles announced so far you have Venice early standout Birdman, Jon Stewart's Rosewater, The Imitation Game and Jean-Marc Vallee's Wild along with a Ton of Cannes crossover pics including Foxcatcher, The Homesman, Leviathan, Mommy, Mr. Turner, Red Army, Wild Tales and Two Days, One Night. There is plenty of Toronto crossover with many of this pics as well, which also includes Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes, the new Martin Scorsese documentary The 50 Year Argument, Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence and Ethan Hawke's Seymour among others.
- 8/28/2014
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
Telluride — With all the reindeer games going on in the fall festival world, a lot of the drama and mystery surrounding Telluride's perennially on-the-lowdown program began to seep out like a steadily deflating balloon this year. Toronto, Venice and New York notations of "World Premiere," "Canada Premiere," "New York Premiere" or "International Premiere" and the like made it all rather obvious which films were heading to the San Juans for the 41st edition of the tiny mining village's cinephile gathering, and which were not. But the fact is, if you're in it just for the surprises — or certainly, for the awards-baiting heavies — you're never going to be fully satisfied by the Telluride experience. That having been said, this year's program might just be the most exciting one in my six years of attending. Starting with all of the stuff we were expecting, indeed, Cannes players "Foxcatcher," "Mr. Turner" and "Leviathan...
- 8/28/2014
- by Kristopher Tapley
- Hitfix
Brian De Palma's new film Passion was one of our favorites at the Toronto International Film Festival. I raved and rambled on about the film in one of our correspondences (though, as you'll see, I was wrong about one key facet of the film's production):
A remake of the solid Alain Corneau corporate thriller Love Crime, De Palma plunges without hesitation into the iconography, audience expectations, and conventions of noirs, sex thrillers, corporate intrigue, post-Hitchcock films and Brian De Palma movies themselves, retaining the shell appearance of all of these things but hollowing them from the inside out. The result is something out of late Resnais—a study of a study. And that study, of course, is of the cinema image. Remember how Rebecca Romijn watches Stanwyck in Double Indemnity at the beginning of Femme Fatale, as if taking notes? The characters in Passion have taken notes from...
A remake of the solid Alain Corneau corporate thriller Love Crime, De Palma plunges without hesitation into the iconography, audience expectations, and conventions of noirs, sex thrillers, corporate intrigue, post-Hitchcock films and Brian De Palma movies themselves, retaining the shell appearance of all of these things but hollowing them from the inside out. The result is something out of late Resnais—a study of a study. And that study, of course, is of the cinema image. Remember how Rebecca Romijn watches Stanwyck in Double Indemnity at the beginning of Femme Fatale, as if taking notes? The characters in Passion have taken notes from...
- 10/1/2012
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
Clark Gable, Loretta Young, The Call of the Wild Judy Lewis, out-of-wedlock daughter of Loretta Young and Clark Gable, died of cancer on Friday, Nov. 25, at a retirement home in the Philadelphia suburb of Gladwyne. She was 76. Young, who was an ardent Catholic, and Gable, then married to Maria Franklin Langham (17 years his senior) had an affair while starring in William A. Wellman's 1935 adventure drama The Call of the Wild. Young had just turned 22, Gable was 34. In a manner similar to the absurd stories of so many Hollywood melodramas of the period, after learning of her pregnancy Young took off for Europe. Upon her return months later, she was reported ill and convalescing at a hospital in the Los Angeles suburb of Venice, where Judy was born Nov. 6, 1935. When the girl was almost two, Young officially adopted her (and a boy, later returned) from an orphanage in San Francisco.
- 12/1/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
The new wave 40 years early. The soft side of Jean-Pierre Melville. Nicole Kidman makes the unmakeable. Somewhere out there is an alternative history of film – David Thomson unearths 10 lost works of genius
Erotikon (1920)
Forget 1920, this is an absolutely modern comedy about romance and sex, directed in Sweden by Mauritz Stiller. We should remember that when MGM brought Greta Garbo from Sweden in the mid-20s, she was almost baggage in the deal that hired Stiller, one of the sharpest and most sophisticated of silent directors, but a man who would be crushed by Hollywood. Stiller needs to be recovered (like his contemporary, Victor Sjöström), and Erotikon has an instinct for attraction and infidelity that simply couldn't be permitted in American films of the same period. It's also marvellous to see that, nearly 100 years ago, Swedish cinema was in love with its country's cool light and with actresses as warm but ambiguous as Tora Teje,...
Erotikon (1920)
Forget 1920, this is an absolutely modern comedy about romance and sex, directed in Sweden by Mauritz Stiller. We should remember that when MGM brought Greta Garbo from Sweden in the mid-20s, she was almost baggage in the deal that hired Stiller, one of the sharpest and most sophisticated of silent directors, but a man who would be crushed by Hollywood. Stiller needs to be recovered (like his contemporary, Victor Sjöström), and Erotikon has an instinct for attraction and infidelity that simply couldn't be permitted in American films of the same period. It's also marvellous to see that, nearly 100 years ago, Swedish cinema was in love with its country's cool light and with actresses as warm but ambiguous as Tora Teje,...
- 8/19/2010
- by David Thomson
- The Guardian - Film News
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