Sam on Hair-Raising Horror in B classic of the 1950′s: “I Bury the Living”

 

by Sam Juliano

While the 1950’s are rightly known as the decade where the term “art house” really came into being, and a period that produced some of the greatest musicals and strong sociological statements from Hollywood, it is also a time when science fiction and low-budget horror made its mark.  Films like Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, Howard Hawks’s The Thing, and Fred M. Willcox’s Forbidden Planet were seminal and influential works in their genre, while horror films like Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, Hammer studio’s Dracula, and camp cheapies like William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill, were all the popular rage.  Films like Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters seemed to blend characteristic elements of both genres, adding to the mix an unmistakable strain of tongue-in-cheek humor.

Advertisements

Read Full Post »

Paths of Glory (no 27)

 

by Allan Fish

next up in the World War I commemorative series…

(USA 1957 86m) DVD1/2

Do not be afraid to ask for credit for our way of refusing is very polite…

p  James B.Harris  d  Stanley Kubrick  w  Stanley Kubrick, Calder Willingham, Jim Thompson  novel  Humphrey Cobb  ph  Georg Krause  ed  Eva Kroll  m  Gerald Fried  art  Ludwig Reiber

Kirk Douglas (Col.Dax), Ralph Meeker (Cpl.Paris), Adolphe Menjou (Gen.Broulard), George Macready (Gen.Mireau), Wayne Morris (Lt.Roget), Joseph Turkel (Pvt.Arnoud), Timothy Carey (Pvt.Ferol), Richard Anderson (Maj.Saint-Auban), Emile Meyer (Priest), Peter Capeli (Col.Judge), Suzanne Christian (Girl), Bert Freed, Harold Benedict,

…and do not be afraid to go over the top, because if you don’t, we’ll shoot you anyway.  When people come to discuss that most arbitrary, futile and, in some respects, distasteful subject of what the worst war in memory is or was, answers vary according to age, country and creed.  This will always be the case and it is perfectly understandable.  To everyone brought up during or, worse still, fighting through a war, that war is the worst in history.  One thinks even now of C.Aubrey Smith in The Four Feathers berating the younger generation that the Crimea was when “war was war and men were men.”  He knew no better either.  But in reality, with the deepest respects to the fallen of all other modern wars, when I think of war I cannot help but think of the so-called Great War.  Never have more men been lost in so short a period of time for seemingly no purpose while actually taking part in military battles.  And for me, Paths of Glory showed the reason for this better than any film before or since.

Read Full Post »