Johnny Guitar was shot in the dramatic landscape of Sedona, Arizona, which before this new Blu-ray release featuring the original 1.66:1 aspect ratio could be glimpsed only at the edges of the frame. While the terrain is still mere background to a melodrama of loyalty and desire, the film’s coloring and staging make much more sense when complemented by the vista of towering, sculptured red mesas.
Film critic Robin Wood once described The Lady Eve as a “perfect film.” Peter Bogdanovich in his introduction to the new Criterion Blu-ray says that “you can’t get a better movie,” and indeed it is a standout comedy in Preston Sturges’s short career, in Barbara Stanwyck’s long career, and among early Forties studio releases. The writing is sharp, smart, and loaded with double entendres that provocatively challenge the mores of the Production Code. Sturges’s script, very loosely based on a story by Monckton Hoffe, takes an elliptical, allegorical detour through the Garden of Eden, aka the Amazon, where there are women, but none of them “white.”
Originally published in Found Footage Magazine Issue #7 March 2021. The article analyses the short film “Personne” by German filmmakers
A cinema of fabric is a cinema that flows, flutters, and drapes; and it is also one that tears, tatters, and shreds. In Joe McElhaney’s elegant book on the cinema of Luchino Visconti, fabric serves as a multithreaded methodology with which the author explores a very distinctive set of films made between 1943 and 1976. Fabric in this account refers to the fabulous costumes and sets of Visconti’s period films, and also to the details of laundry, fashion, and decor of his neorealist films and late melodramas. The contradictions within the auteurist persona of the famous Marxist aristocrat becomes a productive tension in McElhaney’s unraveling of Visconti’s lingering attach ment to romanticism, and his veiled/unveiled identity as a gay man.
The essay examines Stanwyck’s dedication to her craft, which often led her to endure injuries and physical demands, reflecting the invisible labor behind her iconic roles. By compiling decades of her performances, the analysis traces patterns in her star image and her nuanced relationship with horses as both a narrative device and a personal passion.