The man on the podium was short and stocky, grizzled and growling, with a chewed cigar in one hand and an elegant conductor’s baton in the other. One contemporary newspaper described him as looking “more like a fight promoter than a musician.” Yet whenever that baton began to sway and the Paramount orchestra began to play, magic was birthed into the world, magic that sounded like this:

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That’s a beautiful melody titled “The Call of the Faraway Hills,” and it was written for the movie Shane by one of Hollywood’s premier musical talents, the composer Victor Young. He was, in the words of his colleague and best friend, the equally great composer Max Steiner (King Kong, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, The Searchers), “a very, very talented composer, excellent orchestrator, and wonderful violinist” whose seemingly endlessly inventive stream of lush melodies during a two-decade career as head of Paramount Pictures’ music department came to define Hollywood film scoring.

Born the poor son of a Chicago opera singer in 1900, a chance encounter with an old violin at the age of five (and his mother’s fateful decision to have the instrument re-stringed for him to play with) turned him into a child prodigy. When his mother died a few years later, both Victor and his sister were sent to live with their grandparents in Poland, where they attended the Imperial Conservatory in Warsaw. Both graduated with honors and played in orchestras all across Europe, but came back to America in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and postwar economic strife in Eastern Europe (at one point a starving Victor, impounded in a German prison, played a three-hour concert for the guards on his violin in exchange for a simple bowl of soup). (more…)

A Los Angeles Times article I read recently made me chuckle. It began by wearily tossing an exhausted barb at the 3-D phenomenon sweeping Hollywood: “With sighs of relief, critics last week took off their Polaroid glasses and looked at a couple of old-fashioned, two-dimensional films.” The big-screen photography of one of those pictures drew particular attention, with one critic noting that “It gives reality a true third dimension. . . the kind of 3-D you cannot get with mechanical tricks or by any other means except a rich comprehension and ingenious mastery of the visual storyteller’s art.”

Well, let me fess up. I read the article recently, yes — but in a fifty-year-old copy of the Los Angeles Times. The paper was dated May 6, 1953, and the two-dimensional film being praised for bucking Hollywood’s push towards 3-D was Shane.

It was a time when TV was cutting deeply into movie profits, and studios were scrambling to win back the wandering eyeballs of America. Cinerama, an ambitious, three-projector widescreen extravaganza, debuted in New York in the fall of 1952, with its test film This Is Cinerama garnering front-page fanfare and great acclaim. Bosley Crowther, the Roger Ebert of his time, gasped that it gave the audience “the same sensations. . . felt on that night, years ago, when motion pictures were first publicly flashed on a large screen. . . People sat back in spellbound wonder. . . as though most of them were seeing motion pictures for the first time.” In a single evening, the development of all-new expansive formats had become a fait accompli, and studios immediately began looking for ways to capitalize on the buzz. (more…)

If there is one overriding theme coursing through reviews of Smokey and the Bandit, it is superficiality. Read through the mountain of pieces out there, and you’ll continually be assaulted with adjectives like “silly,” “mindless,” “breezy,” “fun,” and “stupid.” Taken together, they blend into a gargantuan wall of polite derision. Even those who genuinely adore the movie scoff at efforts to peek under the film’s thematic hood. Burt Reynolds himself has stated that “Anybody who would take that picture seriously needs a psychiatrist.”

Well, I disagree. A movie’s effect on the culture is often independent of intellectual considerations. The passage of years highlights a film’s vintage regardless of pedigree or awards. Father Time has a sneaky way of giving even erstwhile pop-culture artifacts a rich patina of nostalgia and meaning. And so it happens that light-footed entertainments like Smokey sometimes have lessons to teach, if only we can muster the wisdom to listen.

Let’s return for a moment to the film critic Gary Arnold, who in the summer of 1977 penned a lengthy appreciation of Smokey for The Washington Post. Along with Star Wars, Hal Needham’s film was dominating the domestic box office, especially at the drive-in theaters that were still fairly common in rural America. Given the movie’s success and the CB phenomenon, an article about the picture was a no-brainer. But what’s interesting about Arnold’s essay is how he goes beyond mere cinematic merit and expands his analysis into the realms of culture and politics: (more…)

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“Close-ups, affectionate or noble, are held at leisure; long shots are sustained long after their narrative role has been performed. A marginal figure is suddenly dwelt on, lovingly enlarged to fill the center of the screen. Informed with heightened emotion, a single shot, unexpectedly interposed — a ragged line of men marching into nowhere, one of them playing a bugle-call on his harmonica — assumes a deeper significance than is given by its function in the story. This is one of the properties of poetry. They Were Expendable is a heroic poem.” – Lindsay Anderson

The wondrous shots about which Mr. Anderson writes were masterminded by John Ford, but they were brought to life on film by Joseph H. August (1890-1947), one of the great cinematographers of the age. It was August who memorably crafted the hauntingly beautiful images of night-fog and shadows for Ford’s The Informer (1935), which won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Director. He also lensed now-classic movies like Gunga Din and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (both 1939), and during the war served as a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserves. (more…)