Author Archive for: ‘Bill Krohn’

Screening the Past > Articles by: Bill Krohn

The Birds

Camille Paglia, The Birds. British Film Institute: BFI Film Classics. 1998 ISBN 0851706517 104pp A$19.95 (Pb) Evan Hunter, Me and Hitch. Faber & Faber. 1997 ISBN 0571193064 96pp US$12.95(Pb) Uploaded 1 July 1999 Camille Paglia’s BFI Film Classics monograph on The Birds is an odd duck, and Evan Hunter’s alternately warm and bitter memoir of writing that film, Me and Hitch, is a croaking raven of …

Joe Dante’s American Apocalypse

Uploaded 1 December 2001 In the jargon of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, Joe Dante is a low-norm satirist. (High-norm satire, of which Horace would be a good example, is not practiced today.) This can be puzzling for critics who analyse films for political messages, because the low-norm satirist, without necessarily being a conservative in his politics, tends to appeal …

Once Upon a Time in America

Adrian Martin, Once Upon a Time in America BFI Publishing, 1998 ISBN 0-85170-544-8 Uploaded 15 September 1998 Adrian Martin’s monograph on Sergio Leone’s last and greatest film is one of the best entries in the BFI’s distinguished Classics and Modern Classics series, which already boasts volumes by the likes of Salman Rushdie, Richard Corliss, fellow Aussie Sam Rohdie, Jonathan Rosenbaum …

Adorno on Aldrich

Uploaded 30 June 2000 When Theodor Adorno happened to see one of Robert Aldrich’s episodes of Four Star Playhouse (USA 1952-1956) about Willy Dante, gambler/club owner in the lineage of Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca, he was not aware that he was watching a film by Robert Aldrich, or even that he was watching an early example of what is now called television noir, …

Sodom and Gomorrah The Auteur and the Potboiler

Uploaded 30 June 2000 When Robert Aldrich undertook to make a biblical epic in 1961, he had enough artistic successes under his belt (Kiss Me Deadly, USA 1955, Vera Cruz, USA 1954, The Last Sunset, USA 1961) to earn him a reputation as one of Hollywood’s leading auteurs. So much so that when Sodom and Gomorrah (Italy/France 1962) was released, Movie, which had joined with Cahiers du cinema in …