The first Fever Dream Double Feature in Film Club history really deserves its own announcement/reminder, so here it is.
John Huston’s THE ASPHALT JUNGLE and Stanley Kubrick’s THE KILLING are so closely related (and yet their directors are so different!) that it makes sense to look at them together. That’s what I’ll be doing anyway. Participants are invited to watch one or other or both or just drop by with their memories of earlier viewings. Monday.
Edgar Ulmer, noting actor William Dieterle’s girth and tendency to play knights in armour, claimed his nickname in the German theatre was “the Iron Stove,” adding, “He was a big guy, not talented…”
As a director, WD could be pretty dynamic, as we’ve seen here recently. But once in a while he could still strap on the metalwear and stomp a movie to smithereens ‘neath his clanking, rollicking hornpipe. Moisten your index finger and turn the page to the Auteurs’ Notebook, where you may learn about the berserkly fatuous horrors of MAGIC FIRE, a botched Wagner biopic which bends the knee before Art, only to have Art teabag it contemptuously in the face.
“Certainly Hitch had a number of quarrels with Ingrid Bergman, with whom up to then he had got on perfectly. Once she was complaining so violently about the method of working, the long takes and the disappearing scenery, that Hitch, refusing to argue, just walked out of the room while her back was turned and went home, only to discover afterwards that she had kept up her monologue without even noticing his absence for another twenty minutes.”
From John Russell Taylor’s Hitch. Not sure how much I believe this one — Taylor’s source is clearly Hitch himself, who wasn’t there during the key part, so it’s hearsay. I suspect a little exaggeration, either by Hitch or his on-set informant.
shadowplay 