The Furniture: Yul Brynner Blows Up a Bridge

Daniel Walber's series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Yul Brynner, who were celebrating this week for his centennial, was in a lot of very expensive movies. His biggest year was 1956, with The King & I, Anastasia and The Ten Commandments - a combined budget of over $20 million. But there were plenty to follow. Studios saw Brynner as a generic racial and ethnic “other,” which got him cast in all sorts of bloated historical, international, orientalist pictures. Which also means, of course, that many of his movies are entirely worthy of consignment to the dustbin of Hollywood history.

Intriguingly, though, he did occasionally work beyond Hollywood. In the late 1960s he joined Orson Welles, Sergei Bondarchuk, Franco Nero and Curd Jürgens in Yugoslavia for The Battle of Neretva. A World War Two Partisan film directed by Veljko Bulajić, a Partisan veteran himself, it ranks as the most expensive production in the history of Yugoslavia - and potentially in Brynner’s career, as some estimates push it into Ten Commandments territory...

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Horror Actressing: Eva Green in "Dark Shadows"

by Jason Adams

I don't think before today that I've written of a terrific performance trapped inside a truly terrible movie for our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series. (No Frankenhooker is actually a terrific movie, don't you dare.) But we do what we have to in order to bow down to a stellar queen like Eva Green here on the occasion of her 40th birthday, and unfortunately for me that meant suffering through for a second time Tim Burton's 2012 big-screen flop of a reboot of the Dark Shadows television soap opera. Oh the exquisite agony, but she really is that good...

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Behold the Pfirst image from "French Exit"

by Nathaniel R

Given the disarray of the 2020 movie calendar we definitely weren't expecting Sony Pictures Classics to begin promoting French Exit today. But they posted the photo above along with this cursive promise...

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The New Classics: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

By Michael Cusumano 

The best genre parodies are so full of affection for their targets that they can’t help but make a superior example of the very thing they aim to satirize. It can be fun to throw tomatoes at a genre’s contrivances and cliches from the outside, but titles such as Young Frankenstein or Down With Love circumvent your ironic detachment to provide the far more satisfying experience of playing with these tropes from inside a story you care about. 

This kind of rare pleasure is one of the reasons Shane Black’s crime caper comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang has amassed the following it has since it underperformed in theaters back in 2005. Black’s film actually does double satirical duty, lampooning both the world of Raymond Chandler-esque noir and the world of the hyper-masculine, wise-ass body cop action movies of the 80’s and 90’s, a subcategory Black helped to inflate to absurd levels as the big gun screenwriter behind films like Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout...

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Anna Magnani in Hollywood

by Cláudio Alves

In 1957, the Italian actress Anna Magnani received her second and final Oscar nomination. She had won the Best Actress prize two years before thanks to her first Hollywood movie, the adaptation of Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo, in which she gives a volcanic performance that's still considered, by many, as one of the best winners in the category's history. Still, despite such a glorious start, her career in American pictures was short-lived, encompassing only four films made between 1955 and 1969.

On one hand, Hollywood's mistreatment of a great actress is heartbreaking. On the other, Magnani's tenure in the American film industry feels right for her legacy, reflecting how one of a kind she was and how this acting titan resisted any and all attempts of assimilating her into the model of traditional stardom…

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