Hats off to Larry Gormley, who spent the better part of five years creating a zoomable graphic that “chronicles the history of feature films from the origins in the 1910s until the present day.” 2000 films, across 20 genres and 100 years, all presented in one artful display. Nicely done.
You can purchase a print copy, or simply enjoy the visual display online. Enjoy.
via @coudal
For Frank Sinatra’s 100 birthday today, we’re bringing back to the top a post from our archive that highlights the 1954 noir film, “Suddenly.” In this public domain flick, Sinatra played the role of a psychopath. And he played the role convincingly, getting some very fine reviews from The New York Times. Enjoy the film and our original post from 2012 below:
Tricky business, casting a world-famous musician in a movie’s starring role: it seems you must either craft the part to perfectly match their persona, or to run perfectly against it. Nicolas Roeg, that inimitable employer of singers to his own semi-fathomable cinematic ends, has rigorously explored this range of possibilities. David Bowie seemed the only possible choice for the terminally lonely alien of The Man Who Fell to Earth, just as Art Garfunkel seemed the last possible choice for the psychosexual tormentor of Bad Timing.
I personally regret that Roeg never got to work with Frank Sinatra, used to such striking effect by John Frankenheimer in The Manchurian Candidate and Otto Preminger in The Man with the Golden Arm. To hold those pictures up against, say, the Rat Pack free-for-all of Ocean’s Eleven is to understand that casting against persona, though on average the riskier option, produces more fascinatingly contradictory performances. In the 1954 noir Suddenly, available free on Archive.org, you can watch an early example of this in Sinatra’s career, when director Lewis Allen turns him into a psychopath bent on assassinating none other than the President of the United States.
Given the project’s unquestioned B‑movie context, critics regarded Sinatra as having made a reasonably rich meal of this villainous part. “Mr. Sinatra deserves a special chunk of praise,” wrote the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther. “In Suddenly he proves a melodramatic tour de force.” Variety also looked favorably upon him: “Thesp inserts plenty of menace into a psycho character, never too heavily done, and gets good backing from his costar, Sterling Hayden, as sheriff, in a less showy role but just as authoritatively handled.” Yes, you read that right: this movie pits Frank Sinatra against Sterling Hayden. Sinatra and his crew of killers take over a small-town hilltop family home, the ideal vantage point from which to shoot the passing President. Then Hayden, the town’s sheriff, turns up to check things out. How will this clash of titanic personalities resolve? Hit play and find out whether “the number-one man in the nation,” as Suddenly’s sensationalistic poster puts it, falls victim to this “kill-hungry hoodlum.”
You will find Suddenly listed in our collection of Free Noir Films and also our larger list 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The Normandy Invasion, otherwise known as “Operation Overlord,” was launched by the Allies on June 6, 1944. On that day — D‑Day — American, British and Canadian troops landed on five separate beachheads in Normandy, on the western shores of France. By the end of August 1944, the Allies had liberated all of northern France and started marching towards Nazi Germany.
At the time, the filmmaker George Stevens (1904–1975) was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps. Dwight D. Eisenhower, tasked with planning and carrying out the Allied invasion of Normandy, wanted film crews present at the invasion to provide footage for a documentary film. Stevens took charge of the Special Motion Pictures Unit and gathered a group of cameramen and writers dubbed the “Stevens Irregulars”. They used the standard Army motion picture stock, 35 mm black and white newsreel film. But they also brought along a hand-held camera and some 16 mm Kodachrome color film. Stevens shot several hours’ worth of color footage from France, Belgium and Germany. The scenes from the liberation of Dachau concentration camp are particularly shocking and left their mark on the lives of the cameramen. In 1994, Stevens’ son used this film footage to assemble the documentary George Stevens: D‑Day to Berlin.
Bonus material:
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
The motion picture you are about to witness may startle you. It would not have been possible, otherwise, to sufficiently emphasize the frightful toll of the new drug menace which is destroying the youth of America in alarmingly increasing numbers. Marihuana is that drug — a violent narcotic — an unspeakable scourge — The Real Public Enemy Number One! Or at least that’s how the opening crawl of Reefer Madness tells it.
Also known, in other forms, as Tell Your Children, The Burning Question, Dope Addict, Doped Youth and Love Madness, the film has spent the past forty years accruing cult credibility on the (highly overlapping) midnight-movie and cannabis-culture circuits. That peculiar spelling of what we know as marijuana reveals only a whiff of its distinctive blend of hand-wringing salaciousness, aggressive squareness, and sheer ignorance. Keith Stroup, founder of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, spotted the movie’s unintended comedic potential back in 1971, when he bought a print and began college-campus screenings. It today draws more prolonged, disbelieving guffaws and chortles than ever before.
Since Reefer Madness has fallen into the public domain, you can hold your own midnight screening nearly without effort by watching it online. Behold the deeply askew motion picture that began as a church-funded morality play, got into the hands of early exploitation-film icon Dwain Esper (he of 1934’s Maniac, 1937’s How to Undress in Front of Your Husband, and 1938’s Sex Madness), and wound up as an uproarious mainstay of hazy university auditoria. While the film clearly knows nothing of marijuana or its real effects — or, seemingly, of the real effects of any narcotic — that doesn’t stop its script from yielding a host of resonant lines. These run from the “straightforward question” of whether “you have, perhaps unwillingly, acquired a certain habit through association with certain undesirable people” to the recollection of having been “high enough to take over the marines and the navy” to that immortal imperative, “Bring me some reefers!” Laugh if you must, but bear in mind the final words from the solemn Dr. Carroll: “The next tragedy may be that of your daughter’s… or your son’s… or yours… or yours… or yours!”
You can always find Reefer Madness in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Halloween has long since passed, granted. But given the overabundance of Christmas decorations even now arising all around us, a bracing splash of horror won’t go amiss. This goes double when the splash comes from George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, urtext of the modern zombie movie. It goes triple when you can watch it free online. (It’s been uploaded in high-definition video, no less, an absolute essential for lo-fi, low-budget gorefests.) Though only released in 1968, the movie appears on the internet legally due to its distributor not indicating their copyright on the film prints. They removed the original title cards, which displayed the considerably less catchy original title Night of the Flesh Eaters, but forgot to put the copyright statement back in with the new ones.
If Night of the Living Dead strikes you as somewhat déclassé for a site like Open Culture, ask yourself whether you’ve actually seen the movie. If you haven’t, then it seems you suffer from a vast gap — a vast, zombie filled gap — in your awareness of twentieth-century cinema culture. The film has even won institutional validation. Just read the titles of these real articles: “Rewriting the Dead: The Tension between Nostalgia and Perversion in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead,” “Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing Night of the Living Dead,” “Greek Gifts: Vision and Revision in Two Versions of Night of the Living Dead,” “A Modern Meditation on Death: Identifying Buddhist Teachings in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.” If you’re looking for a PhD. thesis topic, you may have turned up too late to this particular movie. But it’ll certainly take your mind off gift shopping.
You can always find Night of the Living Dead in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More. Look in the Noir, Thriller, Horror and Hitchcock section.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Long before iPhones, Garmins, and Google Maps conspired to make cartographic sheep of us all, Chevrolet had a vested interest in glamorizing anything to do with four wheels, including the process that put maps in a supposedly adventurous, car-buying public’s hands. Caught Mapping (1940), like so many of the short, informative films the automotive giant engineered with director Jam Handy and “the cooperation of State Highway Departments,” has all the earmarks of its time:
Gorgeous black and white cinematography? Check.
Fetishistic regard for anything that might possibly be described as “the latest technology” (including a big sheet of acetate and a really big camera)? Check.
Jaunty male narrator sucking all the nonchalance out of period slang? Say, fella, what are you “driving” at? Check.
Of particular interest to those accustomed to navigating digitally is the sheer grittiness of the endeavor. Compare the early European explorer shown ponderously wielding a sextant to the perspiring road scouts (or “map detectives”) crisscrossing Death Valley in an un-airconditioned vehicle, chasing down the sort of construction-related detours or topographical developments that could render a paper map obsolete. One steers; the other updates the most recently published edition in ink, impervious to such hazards as car sickness and bumps in the road. Eventually, the eggheads in the lab take over, translating the intrepid road scouts’ fieldwork into a series of symbols and signifiers as mysterious as hieroglyphs to the modern viewer.
Technological advancements aside, it’s the hands-on aspect that proves most thrilling. Someone should make a movie about these guys for real.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
“Yasujiro Ozu, the man whom his kinsmen consider the most Japanese of all film directors, had but one major subject, the Japanese family, and but one major theme, its dissolution.” So writes Donald Richie in Ozu: His Life and His Films, still the definitive English-language study of this thoroughly Japanese filmmaker. (Richie, perhaps the most astute and experienced living critic of Japanese film, tells more of Ozu in the relevant segment of Mark Cousins’ series The Story of Film.) Despite his Japaneseness, or indeed because of it, Ozu continues, nearly fifty years after his passing, to enthrall generation after generation of western cinephiles. Yesterday we featured a clip from Tokyo-Ga, the documentary wherein Wim Wenders makes a Tokyo journey out of sheer need to seek out the spirit of Ozu. Critically acclaimed French filmmaker Claire Denis has also paid tribute, and above you’ll find a salute to Ozu as inspiration from equally lauded but resolutely deadpan Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki. “Ozu-san, I’m Aki Kaurismäki from Finland,” the Le Havre director explains, readying a cigarette. “I’ve made eleven lousy films, and it’s all your fault.”
What is it about Ozu? The disciplined economy of his stories, dialogue and images accounts for some of it. But he also delivers something less obvious. “Just as there are no heroes in Ozu’s pictures,” writes Richie, “so there are no villains. [ … ] In basic Zen texts one accepts and transcends the world, and in traditional Japanese narrative art one celebrates and relinquishes it. The aesthetic term mono no aware is often used nowadays to describe this state of mind.” And, whether in those words or not, Ozu’s followers savor the expression of mono no aware in his many films, such as An Autumn Afternoon, Tokyo Story, Late Spring, and Good Morning. This sort of thing being better experienced than described, why not watch Ozu’s 1952 picture The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice? (Or 1941’s The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, 1948’s A Hen in the Wind, 1950’s The Murekata Sisters?) To my mind, nothing sums up Ozu’s appeal quite so well as his use of “pillow shots” — simple, static compositions placed in his films for purely rhythmic, non-narrative purposes — of which you can watch one fan-made compilation below. How many filmmakers, Japanese or otherwise, could pull those off?
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
During the 1950s, the pioneering photojournalist Eve Arnold took a series of portraits of Marilyn Monroe. The now iconic photos generally present Monroe as a larger-than-life celebrity and sex symbol. Except for one. In 1955, Arnold photographed Monroe reading a worn copy of James Joyce’s modernist classic, Ulysses. It’s still debated whether this was simply an attempt to recast her image (she often played the “dumb blonde” character in her ’50s films), or whether she actually had a pensive side. (Her personal library, catalogued at the time of her death, suggests the latter.) But, either way, Arnold explained years later how this memorable photo came about:
We worked on a beach on Long Island. She was visiting Norman Rosten the poet.… I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time). She said she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it — but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively. When we stopped at a local playground to photograph she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her. It was always a collaborative effort of photographer and subject where she was concerned — but almost more her input.
You can find more images of Marilyn reading Joyce over at The Retronaut. Of course, you can download your own copy of Ulysses from our Free Ebooks collection. But we’d recommend spending time with this finely-read audio version, which otherwise appears in our list of Free Audio Books.
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The 430 Books in Marilyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?
Stephen Fry Explains His Love for James Joyce’s Ulysses
Henri Matisse Illustrates 1935 Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses
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