Category Archive for: ‘Issue 10 – First Release’

Aldrich & Associates special section On 2 August 1998, the Aldrich & Associates symposium took place in Melbourne. Unusually, this event had no budget and no official or institutional status or sponsorship. It was Adrian Martin’s idea: he knew that David Sanjek would be in Melbourne for the first Cinesonic conference, and that Sanjek had presented a paper on Aldrich …

Uploaded 30 June 2000 Robert Aldrich was born in 1917 to a Rhode Island banking family, related on his mother’s side to the Rockefellers. His privileged youth led to a blue-ribbon university at which he devoted his energies to football, and to booking and promoting dance bands. During this period, he became interested in the movies. He directed thirty of …

Uploaded 30 June 2000 Hardboiled private eye meller from the Mickey Spillane pen, featuring blood, action and sex for exploitable b.o.[1] To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises.[2] In early November 1954, Robert Aldrich submitted a …

Uploaded 30 June 2000 In Robert Aldrich’s The Angry Hills (USA 1959) – scripted, like Kiss Me Deadly (USA 1955), by A. I. Bezzerides – there is a rather odd and remarkable self-portrait offered by the suave, murderous political villain of the piece (Marius Goring), a true movie-Nazi by office and by ideology. These are his first words, spoken as he steps briskly and …

Uploaded 30 June 2000 Robert Aldrich’s oeuvre has been described as firmly situated in a “man’s world, [where] the talk is rough, the camaraderie close, and the action violent and heroic”.[1] If it is a man’s world in Kiss Me Deadly (USA 1955), it is conversely a world dominated by women. In this early Aldrich work, the talk is as much characterised …

Cover Introduction When I first saw Jigsaw, a film released by United Artists in 1949, it reminded me strongly of Kiss Me Deadly, a film released by United Artists in 1955. My original idea for this paper was to trace the resemblances between the two, implying some kind of ancestral relation. However, when I looked at the two of them “back-to-back” as …

Uploaded 30 June 2000 As coincidence would have it, Robert Aldrich’s western Vera Cruz and Robert Warshow’s seminal essay on the genre, “Movie chronicle: the westerner” both appeared in 1954. [1] And both, in their own way, star Gary Cooper. Vera Cruz is a picaresque tale of two American soldiers of fortune in Mexico – Cooper and Burt Lancaster – who sell their services to the …

Uploaded 30 June 2000 This essay discusses three Robert Aldrich films that deal with the worlds of film production. The first is The Big Knife (USA 1955), a bitter, hyper-real tragedy set within the Hollywood studio star system, and which in 1955 was the first film to be produced under the Associates and Aldrich banner. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (USA 1962), a …

Uploaded 30 June 2000 * All Movie Guide’s review of Kiss me deadly http://allmovie.com/cg/x.dll?UID=10:09:12|PM&p=avg&sql=A27523 * Classic Movies: the Golden Years: a good list of links to books about Aldrich, a filmography, movie reviews, articles and biographical material, posters and videos http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/9766/aldrich.html * Tim Dirks’ review of Kiss me deadly at Filmsite.org http://www.filmsite.org/kiss.html * E! Online (award-winning entertainment site): links to specific Aldrich films http://www.eonline.com/Facts/People/0,12,39178,00.html …

Uploaded 30 June 2000 What gets people into the theatre to watch the rest of the picture? This scene [scene 176] does. The audience, knowing or unknowing, has been sitting waiting for it. We have to bring off the most erotic, provocative English-language sex scene that anyone has photographed. We have to bring it off truthfully. [1] Theories of lesbian …

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, …

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 …

Uploaded 30 June 2000 The recent proliferation in the United States of shootings by adolescents of parents and peers has occasioned yet another ritual of moral hand wringing over the violence encountered in the popular media. Rather than focus upon any systematic resolution of the causes of these homicides – the ease of gun ownership, for example – attention has …

Uploaded 30 June 2000 Robert Aldrich is among the most important Hollywood filmmakers. His uncompromising assaults on the America of McCarthy and Nixon, while hardly endearing him to the Academy, give his work an integrity and relevance such overtly ‘political’ directors as Stanley Kramer could only dream of. World for Ransom (USA 1954) was the first in a series of films that …

Uploaded 30 June 2000 The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could …