Author Archive for: ‘Ronnie Scheib’

Sam Fuller occupies a pretty unique place, or rather places, in the Canons of Film Criticism. For the Cro-Magnites, Fuller is the great American primitive, swinging through the trees with a camera between his toes – he may have a pea brain but he sure got big eyes – and rhythm. For the outlying Solar Plexites, Fuller’s a down-home, funky …

Introduction In 1980, Ronnie Scheib wrote an explicitly polemical auteurist piece on the films of Ida Lupino [1] . In 1996, Scheib visited Melbourne under the auspices of the Melbourne International Film Festival for the presentation of an Ida Lupino retrospective. Taking time out from her duties for the Festival, Metro organized a round table with Scheib – participants included …

In Wim Wenders’ The American Friend, actor-director Dennis Hopper kills off filmmaker Sam Fuller (star of Hopper’s then seemingly last movie, The Last Movie, about a filmmaker making his last movie). Hopper’s character is a shady middleman art dealer caught between a dead artist who isn’t really dead (portrayed by director Nicholas Ray) and a dying art restorer who isn’t …

In his hagiography of American cinema, the Gospel according to St. Andrew, Sarris consigns Ida Lupino to outer limbo in a single sentence: “Ida Lupino’s directed films express much of the feeling if little of the skill which she has projected so admirably as an actress.” Not content with thus summarily dispatching Lupino’s lifetime opus, Sarris, “while on the subject,” …

(‘Tex Arcana: The Cartoons of Tex Avery’, first published in Gerald Peary & Danny Peary (eds) The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology New York: Dutton, 1980. Republished with permission of the estate of Ronnie Scheib.) [To some admirers, he is, after Disney, the single most important figure in the history of animation, a surrealist genius whose self-reflective intrusions into …

It’s not often a film comes along with a title that neatly sums up an entire decade, but Back to the Future seems to have done just that for the 1980s. Admittedly, “Forward to the Past” might have done just as well (if not at the box office). But any way you slice it, what with Star Wars 1 -111(The …

It would not be hard to “rediscover” scriptwriter Charles Schnee. Start out with his undisputed terrain, the Hollywood-on-Hollywood film: The Bad and the Beautiful and Two Weeks in Another Town, in themselves sufficient claim to fame. Throw in another couple of unquestioned masterpieces, They Live by Night and The Furies. Revalidate an underrated masterwork, Westward the Women, thereby distinguishing the …

It seems that my compatriots, many of whom are increasingly put off by the elections, are making their way to the cinema as a barometer of their political sentiments, box office tickets thus replacing ballots. On one particular night at a New York multiplex, the traditional autarkic ritual of popcorn eating was brutally interrupted when the audience who’d come to …