As told to Adela Rogers St. John (Photoplay magazine, September, 1921) “The only thing a man never regrets saying about a woman is nothing” “I wouldn’t marry the most beautiful woman in the world if she asked me. A beautiful … Continue reading →

For way too long the films of Satyajit Ray were only seen, either theatrically or on home video, in not-so-good-looking prints. The justification being a combination of precarious shooting conditions, film stock of low quality and poor archiving conditions. Being … Continue reading →

TCM has just announced a fourth volume in the Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics series, again under the auspices of Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation and featuring five titles. So Dark the Night (1946) has an intriguing plot, an unlikely leading man … Continue reading →

Blu-rays– The lavish Barbra Streisand musicals Funny Girl (1968) and Hello Dolly! (1969) are out in flawless transfers. Twilight Time’s edition of Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (1965) carries both the truncated original theatrical cut and the extended revision of a few years back. … Continue reading →

Actor, writer, producer and director Bryan Forbes began his film career in the late 1940s. His short stature would preclude star parts and he played supporting roles in films such as The Million Pound Note (1954), An Inspector Calls (1954), The Colditz Story (1955), Passage Home (1955), … Continue reading →

A special effects wizard who continued and expanded the stop-motion technique pioneered by his idol Willis O’Brien (with whom he worked on Mighty Joe Young/1949 and The Animal World/1956), Ray Harryhausen began to make a name for himself when he … Continue reading →

We failed to mention it before, so here’s what’s in store from Olive this month. Stanley Donen once again demonstrates his tremendous gift for transposing a stage play about love among sophisticated adults (as previously evidenced in Indiscreet/1958 and Once More, with … Continue reading →

The British Film Institute has announced its summer releases on DVD and Blu-ray. Of special note is the third and final installment of The Complete Humphrey Jennings, which will see all of the great documentarian’s films available on home video. … Continue reading →

Beginning tonight and continuing every Friday in May, the American feed of Turner Classic Movies will offer the second installment of Friday Night Spotlight, a festival of movies picked by a guest programmer. Actress Illeana Douglas chose as her theme … Continue reading →

Following their Blu-rays of This Is Cinerama (1952) and Windjammer (1958), Flicker Alley announces for October two further discs of travelogues shot in the three-panel process. Cinerama Holiday (1955) follows an American couple seeing the sights in Switzerland and Paris, and a Swiss couple being awed by … Continue reading →

It was announced today that the Canadian-born singing star who helped save Universal’s fortunes when she was a teenager has passed away. Durbin’s disarming personality and vocal ability kept her a box-office favorite until her self-imposed retirement in 1948. Since … Continue reading →

Earlier this month Warner Archive pleased a great number of its customers with the release of Forbidden Hollywood Volume 6. Today WA brings April to a glorious close with the announcement of Volume 7. And this one is a corker, … Continue reading →

It fell to France’s Wild Side to be the first to release Howard Hawks’ seminal western Red River (1948) on Blu-ray. And, as one would expect from the label, the end result speaks of great care and attention to detail. Even though … Continue reading →

Among the photos added to A Certain Cinema today there’s one showing Joan Crawford and the camera operator of her latter-day vehicle Flamingo Road (1949), Ellsworth Fredericks (it can be seen in our gallery dedicated to directors of photography, Masters of Light). … Continue reading →

June/July will bring five new Blu-rays from Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series. Murnau’s Tabu (1931) and Kaneto Shindo’s Naked Island (1960) and Kuroneko (1968), previously issued by MOC on DVD, will get the high-definition treatment. D.W. Griffith’s almost centenary The Birth of a Nation (1915) will come in … Continue reading →

A very nice surprise from the UK this week. Network released the first of three volumes of hard-to-find films from the library of Ealing Studios and its predecessor, Associated Talking Pictures. Ealing films have been a staple of TV and … Continue reading →

Last week Warner Archive made available a sixth volume in the Forbidden Hollywood series of Pre-Code delights. This one gathers together four stimulating titles. Downstairs (1932) was a pet project of star John Gilbert, who supplied the original story and plays a … Continue reading →

Blue-rays– Twilight Time offered Henry King’s delicate handling of the miracle of Lourdes, The Song of Bernadette (1943), just in time for Easter. The other two releases from the company were decidedly less ethereal: Brian De Palma’s The Fury (1978) and John Carpenter’s … Continue reading →

To our friends around the globe, best wishes for Easter. For fun photos of stars wearing bonnets and pointed ears, visit our gallery Easter Greetings!

For a long time it was a cinematic cause célèbre. Admirers of Sam Peckinpah’s work dreamed of the possibility that his first big budget western, Major Dundee (1965), severely changed by its producer from the director’s envisioned version, would one … Continue reading →

The harm done by knee-jerk, baseless or just plain uneducated observations on boards and comments sections on the Internet is too vast to even consider. One area in which gross misapprehension due to basic lack of knowledge directly affects the … Continue reading →

It has everything to look great on Blu-ray. Frantisek Vlácil’s Marketa Lazarová (1967) runs close to three hours and offers a succession of stunning black-and-white Scope images that bring its Medieval setting vividly to life. This raw, complex, somewhat confusing meditation on … Continue reading →

The contraption that allowed stars to rest without wrinkling their costumes is the theme of our new photo gallery.

Talk about starting in features with a bang. In 1946, René Clément, who had been making short films since the mid-1930s, not only gave Jean Cocteau an assist in directing La belle et la bête/Beauty and the Beast and put writer-star … Continue reading →

It seems that there is nothing written nowadays about John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941) without mention that it beat Citizen Kane (1941) at the Academy Awards. The merits of awards are, of course, relative, but it certainly is no shame on … Continue reading →

Everything taken into account, Damiano Damiani will probably be best remembered for the films dealing with organized crime, the judicial system, and political and civil responsibility that popped in his filmography beginning with Il giorno della civetta (1968) and extending into … Continue reading →

Blu-rays– Criterion gave Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) the kind of bells and whistles treatment that has made the company synonymous with scholarly editions since the early days of laserdisc. Completing Criterion’s slate for the month were Kenji Mizoguchi’s imperishable … Continue reading →

The rediscovery of pioneer filmmaker Albert Capellani, spearheaded a few years ago by Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, proceeds unabated. Now it’s the Cinémathèque Française’s turn to promote a showing of his films, starting tomorrow with Germinal (1913), and continuing through … Continue reading →

He would have turned 100 today. However, John Garfield was just 39 when he suffered the fatal heart attack that cut short a brilliant career. Yet, in the thirteen years between his electrifying film debut in Four Daughters (1938) and his final … Continue reading →

Mention Wake of the Red Witch (1948) to a film fan and the reaction will undoubtedly be, “Yes, the John Wayne flick.” Some might even advance that Wayne’s production company, Batjac, was named after a trading corporation in the film. However, in … Continue reading →

Here’s one to provoke keen anticipation here at A Certain Cinema. There was talk a couple of years back of a possible DVD box set to come out in France comprising a number of films from the Cinémathèque Française library … Continue reading →

Among the new blu-rays it will be bringing out in May, Criterion included two titles from the impressive slate of westerns that Delmer Daves directed in the 1950s, a decade that saw the pinnacle of the genre with the introduction … Continue reading →

Had he been alive, Frank Tashlin would have turned 100 the day before yesterday. Alas, he died much too young at age 59 in 1972. What’s worse, he had not directed since 1968. The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell was not … Continue reading →

Coming from the theater, blonde, blue-eyed, husky-voiced Mariangela Melato began her film career in 1970. A year later she achieved prominence with Elio Petri’s Cannes Festival winner La classe operaia va in paradiso/Lulu the Tool. She consolidated her position as one of Italy’s finest … Continue reading →

Italian cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller achieved fame as Elio Petri’s close collaborator, starting with A ciascuno il suo/We Still Kill the Old Way in 1967 and continuing with Un tranquillo posto di campagna/A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di … Continue reading →

Blu-rays– The year started auspiciously with two of John Ford’s finest, How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Quiet Man (1952), leading the pack. Twilight Time’s duo consisted of Blake Edwards’ terrific thriller Experiment in Terror (1962) and the spy spoof Our Man Flint (1966). From Criterion: … Continue reading →

One of the great names in cinematography, Douglas Slocombe became a centenarian yesterday. Slocombe belongs to a formidable generation of British cinematographers that came to be regarded as the nec plus ultra of the craft in the 1960s and 1970s, … Continue reading →

In France, Gaumont has announced its Classiques lineup for the year. January and February are entirely given to a sextet of Maurice Pialat films: Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (1972), Loulou (1980), À nos amours (1983), Police (1985), Sous le soleil de Satan (1987), and Van Gogh (1991). April brings … Continue reading →

Olive Films will release ten new titles from the Republic archives on March 26, all available on both Blu-ray and DVD. Four star John Wayne: Westward Ho (1935), The Lawless Nineties (1936), Wyoming Outlaw (1939), and A Man Betrayed (1941). Aside from the hopelessly brainless The Atomic Kid (1954), … Continue reading →

The new batch is a tantalizing feast of cinematic delights. Beginning with a new Eclipse box comprising DVDs of four lesser-known Masaki Kobayashi films that cry for discovery (The Thick-Walled Room/1953, I Will Buy You/1956, Black River/1957, The Inheritance/1962). As for blu-rays, there’s … Continue reading →