Shoot the Glass

The Killing is a little movie about a big heist. Clocking in at only 84 minutes, Kubrick has really stripped this down to essentials. Basically, it’s about a bunch of guys who are gonna rip off the race track. They all have different jobs to do: there’s Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), an ex-con who’s the [...]

What intrigued me most about High Noon was the story I had heard about how John Wayne and Howard Hawks both hated it, and went on to make Rio Bravo as a right-wing response to it. Apparently, Wayne saw it as an allegory for blacklisting, which he himself had actively supported. In an interview, he [...]

Musicals have always been a bit hit and miss with me. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. I don’t know why I waited to long to see this — I’ve owned the DVD for probably five years now.
As with most musicals, the story is secondary, and that is the case here too. In fact, the [...]

The African Queen is yet another classic I had overlooked for some reason. The IMDb plot summary writes: “In Africa during World War I, a gin-swilling riverboat captain is persuaded by a strait-laced missionary to use his boat to attack an enemy warship.” This sounds completely bonkers, yet it completely makes sense within the confines [...]

I had never seen this movie, and let me tell you why: it wasn’t available on DVD for the longest time. I finally got my hands on it, and immediately sat down to watch it.
Right from the start, you can tell (if you didn’t know already) that it’s based on a play (written by Frederick [...]