Coming before a movie, the name “Allan Dwan” under the director’s credit connotes a no-frills simplicity—his nickname was “Practicality Dwan”—a simplicity touching on purity. When I am exhausted with movies, movies, ever more movies, all clangorously insisting on making their impression felt, I need only return to the healing springs of Allan Dwan, and a measure of innocence is regained.
Tag Archives: Anthology Film Archives
Bombast #65
In his peripatetic career, Ulmer, born in 1904 in the present-day Czech Republic, cast off films like so many seeds along the winding path of his thirty-five year career. With a diverse, uneven, and fecund output not lending itself to comprehensive retrospective, Ulmer’s films tend to be screened in the same piecemeal fashion that they were made.
Docutopia #3: The End of the American City on Film
These films argue that, like the storms and government mismanagement that ruined the lives of New Orleans’ lower-class communities, there’s a larger tragedy that’s been unfolding across America’s mid-sized cities for the last several decades. Its effects have been just as damaging as a hurricane, leaving urban wastelands and widespread poverty in its wake.
