The Screengrab

Everybody complains that big Hollywood movies don't show enough awareness of current events, but a lot of people get just as uncomfortable when their escapist entertainments seem to be getting to close to reminding them of what they were hoping to get their minds off when they fled to the theaters. Last year, a full-blown media circus sprung up in Britain around the still-unsolved case of Madeleine McCann, a three-year-old girl who was reported missing from the Portugal resort where she and her family were on vacation. (The case received a lot of media attention partly because the parents actively sought it out in their public calls for help in finding their daughter, which in turn attracted shout-outs from celebrities.) One side effect of the case is that Ben Affleck's cracking directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, which happens to deal with a murky case involving a lost little girl, had its English premiere postponed out of deferrence to sensitive feelings stirred up by the actual case. (Affleck himself has said, "We are acutely aware of the situation... we don't want to release the movie if it is going to touch a nerve or inflame anyone's sensitivities." Now, with the movie finally slipping into British theaters, Andrew Hubert does a quick run-down of other high-profile releases that had to bob and weave to keep from being overshadowed from actual events, in many cases unsuccessfully. Perhaps the most obvious forerunner to Gone Baby Gone in this department is The Good Son, which was made at a time when its star, Macaulay Culkin, was seen as having worn out his welcome as America's favorite twinkling child freak.

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“PETER BOYLE’S BAR,” THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (1973)



Peter Boyle's Boston Irish bar in The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a low-key, specialized place, a dimly lit oasis where the community's down-and-out, aging petty criminals, such as Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum), can seek refuge, wet their whistles, and bitch and moan a little about the cruel hand dealt to them by the fates. Mind you, we don't mean to imply anything by referring to it as "Peter Boyle's bar."  Boyle, who definitely works there managing the counter, does slip once in conversation with the federal agent (Richard Jordan) he deals information to and calls it his bar, and Jordan has to correct him: "You mean you work for a man who has a liquor license, right? You're a convicted felon." "Like I said," replies Boyle without missing a beat, "I work for a man who has a liquor license. I forget sometimes." Boyle must have some wicked student loans to pay off, because even with the gig at the bar and whatever he gets from Jordan, he still has to hold down a second job as a hit man. When Boyle sells out Alex Rocco and his crew of bank robbers to Jordan and the big boys think that Mitchum might have been the rat, Boyle ties everything up neat as a pin by agreeing to whack Mitchum for his treachery, and even makes sure the job will be easy to perform by plying Mitchum with free booze until he's practically ready to be poured into his coffin. Somehow we feel certain that the man who has the liquor license will understand.

And what goes together better than booze and violence, you may ask? Why, milk and ultra-violence, as we jet overseas for a little in-out, in-out with the gang at the...

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Sydney Pollack has died at the age of 73, ending a recent struggle with cancer. As a young theater buff, Pollack, who grew up in South Bend, Indiana, went to New York after graduating high school and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, where he first studied under and later served as assistant to the legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner. Early in his career, Pollack appeared on Broadway in A Stone for Danny Fisher and The Dark Is Light Enough as well as on TV, incluyding episodes of Plyahouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and Have Gun, Will Travel. After Burt Lancaster, who he would later direct in the late sixties in The Scalphunters and Castle Keep, suggested that Pollack consider directing, he stepped behind the camera for work on several TV series and eventually broke into movies with the 1965 The Slender Thread. He brought a skilled rapport with actors and a taste for old-Hollywood glamour to his feature film work, and he became associated with certain high-caliber performers who placed a lot of trust in him--particularly Robert Redford, who he directed in seven starring roles, beginning with the 1966 Tennessee Williams adaptation This Property Is Condemned and including the winner of the 1985 Academy Award for Best Picture, Out of Africa. They also worked together on The Way We Were with Barbra Streisand, probably the most successful of Redford's old-style romances, Jeremiah Johnson, Three Days of the Condor, Havana, and The Electric Horseman, which paired Redford with Jane Fonda. Pollack was also an important figure in Fonda's career, having directed her in the 1969 They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which marked her transformation from sex-kitten comedienne to hard-edged dramatic actress. That picture went a long way towards establishing Pollack as a new-style Hollywood pro; it won Academy Award nominations for Fonda, Pollack, and Susannah York, and earned Gig Young a Best Supporting Oscar for his brilliant performance as a dance-marathon emcee.

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Jim Thompson was tailor-made for Hollywood success.  He worked there for some time, and found early success with no less august a personage than Stanley Kubrick; he worked on the screenplay for Kubrick's terrific late-period noir The Killing and wrote the stunning war movie Paths of Glory in its entirety.  Later on, a number of very fine films would be made from his novels, including two different versions of The Getaway of differing success, as well as The Grifters, After Dark My Sweet, and Coup de Torchon, Bertrand Tavernier's masterful adaptation of his Pop. 1280.  Thompson's books carried a bleak criminal sensibility that was perfect for the noir era, and he wrote terrific, snappy dialogue that sounds great coming out of actors who have a feel for his work.  Due to a combination of bad luck (many of his projects were prematurely scuttled by studio interference or money problems), politics (he was blacklisted in the McCarthy era due to his leftist leanings), and his own personal demons (he was plagued by alcoholism and innumerable other issues), Thompson never became the motion picture legend he could have been.  Though critics have rediscovered his work, previously relegated to pulp status, and he's undergoing a similar reassessment to Raymond Chandler, many of his best books remain unadopted for the big screen.  That's a shame, but not as bad as the fact that what's arguably his greatest accomplishment -- the nasty but near-perfect noir novel The Killer Inside Me -- actually did get made into a movie, but a movie that's been almost entirely forgotten, and with good reason.

With The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson created one of the most chilling portraits of pure psychotic evil ever committed to paper, but it's not just a bloody thrill-ride trash novel the way that serial killer novels developed in later years.  Lou Ford, the novel's main character, is a man of surprising depth, and Thompson's unfolding of the character is a psychological portrait that transcends its pulp origins and becomes something worthy of Dostoevsky.  Ford is the sheriff in a small mining town in Montana, trusted by everyone; he's such a folksy character, straight out of cowboy art, that even his fellow townsfolk, hearing the endless cliches and banal observations he spouts, think of him as somewhat simple-minded.  But Lou Ford has a secret:  a twisted mind and a history of dark childhood abuses by his physician father have turned him into a monster.  He's far more intelligent than he lets on, putting up his stupidity as a show to allay suspicion from his grim hobbies.  As he puts it, "When things get a little rough, I go out and kill a fewpeople, that's all."  In fact, part of his downfall is that he assumes everyone else is as stupid as they think he is.  Ford is under no illusions about his future:  he describes himself as "waiting to be split down the middle", the inevitable result of the double life he's committed to lead.  But in the meantime, a lot of people are going to get hurt by the man Lou Ford is, and the man people think he is.  In 1976, Western veteran Burt Kennedy (Welcome to Hard Times, Support Your Local Sheriff) brought Thompson's greatest novel to the screen.  

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Usually, Hollywood is a tad standoffish about tackling the great novels. If they do it right, they win the admiration of critics, but risk losing the mainstream audience, who will think of their project as snooty and highbrow. If they do it wrong, people still won't go see the movie, plus the critics will turn the whole thing into a laughingstock. Producers are generally willing to let someone take a crack at one of the classics once and only once, and then only if they're an established filmmaker and there's nothing too controversial about the book. How, then, did not one but two movie versions get made of one of the most inflammatory, misunderstood and potentially dangerous books of the 21st century — a book that not only quite openly asks us to identify, to a certain degree, with an effete intellectual pederast, but which was written by one of the pioneers of postmodernism? Some might suggest that certain producers and/or directors simply jump at the chance to cast a movie starring a hot nymphet, but we are not so cynical here at the Screengrab, oh goodness no. We will not speculate how it came to pass that two high-profile film adaptations of Vladimir Nabokov's brilliant, subtle, subversive and daring story came to pass — one of them, by a titan of the silver screen, made less than a decade after the novel's publication and the other, by a flaky British director whose movies have always been a heartbeat away from softcore porn — and instead focus on the respective qualities of the two films.

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It’s no surprise that the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s highly controversial adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ sci-fi masterpiece A Clockwork Orange would prove to be almost as great a firestarter as the movie itself.  After all, music plays a huge – and hugely divisive – role in the movie:  music is all that the nihilistic, savage street thug Alex DeLarge truly loves; music is what makes one of his most vicious attacks so unbearable, as he brutally attacks an innocent while crooning the main theme from the classic musical Singin’ in the Rain; and music is what makes his brainwashing ‘treatment’ at the hands of the government so objectionable, as the Ludovico Technique not only robs him of his ability to do violence, but fills him with nausea when he hears the gorgeous strains of Beethoven’s 9th.

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Being a mime in the movie business usually entails getting punched in the face, but Dan Richter managed to parlay his trapped-in-an-invisible-box skills into a key role in “one of the most influential and important sequences in film history.” No, not the tennis scene from Blow-Up; you’ll remember Richter for hooting, beating his chest and – most famously – throwing a bone in the air.

Not only did Richter play “Moonwatcher,” the ape-man who invents weapons of mass destruction in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, he also choreographed the “Dawn of Man” sequence that opens the picture. “It so happened I was teaching private classes in mime in London at the time,” Richter told our man Bilge Ebiri at New York magazine’s Vulture blog. “Anyway, I was asked if I would go out and let Stanley pick my brain. I said, "If you give me twenty minutes, a stage, leotards, and some towels, I can show you how to do it."

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This past week marked the thirty-first anniversary of the death of Jim Thompson, the cult-object writer who worked on the scripts of Stanley Kubrick's The Killing and Paths of Glory, but whose real gift to film history was a shelf's worth of pulp novels (The Killer Inside Me, The Getaway, The Grifters) so intense and obsessive in their seaminess that they amount to a double-dog-dare to the movies: You think you're the repository of forbidden daydreams? Put this on the big screen! Two versions of The Getaway, including one with Sam Peckinpah's name in the credits, softened the relationship between the husband and wife bank robbers on the lam (the star of the Peckipah version, Steve McQueen, having objected to the less cheerful elements of a screenplay treatment turned in by Thompson himself); Coup de Torchon, directed by Bertrand Tavernier and based on Pop. 1280, is in motherfucking French! Even the best of all Thompson adaptations, Stephen Frears's The Grifters, is handsomely mounted and has a good vicious streak but keeps it distance from the vortex of Thompson's deeply felt hatefulness; it maps the dragon's lair down to the last molted scale but resists the urge to fling you in there by your feet and nail the door shut behind you.

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Cinematical asks the musical question, “Have you had enough of musicals based on movies?” According to Monika Bartyzel, “Variety reports that Bubble Boy is getting some workshop musical treatment. Bubble freakin' Boy…Just you wait -- one day we'll get to see Carmen Electra's boobs bouncing around not in 3D splendor, but rather a musical version of Scary Movie. She'll run through the audience, a light spray of water hitting her as she tries to run from the killer in her underwear ... while singing.”

Movie City Indie pays tribute to the 40th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey with a veritable galaxy of links to online goodies, including some of the reviews Kubrick’s epic received on first release.

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The science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died, at 90, in his adopted home of Sri Lanka. Clarke broke into publishing through Astounding Science Fiction magazine and later served as "science adviser" to the British adventure comic strip Dan Dare, eventually becoming revered as a major figure of the genre as the author of such books as Childhood's End. To movie lovers, though, Clarke will always be best remembered for his work on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. That movie grew out of "The Sentinel", a story Clarke first wrote in 1948 as an unsuccessful entry in a BBC competition; later published under the title "Sentinel of Eternity", it introduced the concept of the monolith which would anchor the screenplay that Clarke and Kubrick eventually assembled, drawing on other stories by Clarke, such as "Encounter at Dawn." While Kubrick made the movie, Clarke wrote a novel, also called 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was published shortly after the novel's release. Technically, the book, being based on the screenplay, might be called a novelization, but it was intended not as a cheap tie-in but as a work that could stand on its own while also serving as a complementary work to the movie.

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With a few notable exceptions, the elaborate main title sequence has gone the way of the drive-in double feature. In fact, many of today’s movies eschew opening credits altogether, opting to plunge the audience directly into the experience and saving the who-did-whats for last. There’s something to be said for that, but we feel a vital part of the moviegoing experience is being neglected, whether it’s the establishment of tone or mood, or just a playful visual riff on the film’s themes. Join us now for a journey of sight and sound we like to call The Twelve Greatest Opening Credits in Movie History.

PSYCHO (1960)



If you only know the name of one title designer- and chances are you do- the designer would almost certainly be Saul Bass. Before Bass came on the scene, the opening titles of films were mostly utilitarian, occasionally interesting to look at but primarily a way to honor the studio's obligations to the principal cast and crew. But this began to change after Bass was hired by Otto Preminger to design the opening credits to The Man With the Golden Arm, with his cutout-style animation working in tandem with Elmer Bernstein's score to create a title sequence that's arguably as good as the film that follows. Bass went on to work with Preminger numerous times, as well as filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Robert Aldrich, John Frankenheimer, Robert Wise, and later, Martin Scorsese. But for our money, Bass was never better than when designing titles for Alfred Hitchcock, which he did on three occasions. Any of these (the other two being Vertigo and North by Northwest) would be a worthy entry for this list, but we're going with their final collaboration, 1960's Psycho. For one thing, it's the most deceptively simple of Bass' classic output, with little more than white titles on a black background occasionally shoved aside by grey bars. A perfect rhythmic match to Bernard Herrmann's legendary score, Bass' titles are a classic case of "less is more"- a more complex animation might have given the game away, but Bass preserves the mystery of what is to come while still managing to set the tone for the film before we even see a frame shot by Hitchcock. And this was Bass' greatest breakthrough, to take what was once considered an overture to the feature film and turn it into an organic element of the movie itself.

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Back in 1970, Pauline Kael, reviewing Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, praised it for its "blessed profanity" and wrote, "I salute M*A*S*H for its contribution to the art of talking dirty." (Altman's father reportedly put it another way, warning members of the family to stay away from the theaters because "Bob made a dirty movie!") There's been a lot of cusswords under the bridge since then, so much that when a playwright-turned-moviemaker such as Martin McDonagh gives his actors some floridly profane lines to speak, it isn't even worth a concerned piece in the Arts & Lesiure section from the kind of writer who'd pitch a fit if language half as dirty turned up on one of his kid's rap CDs. So when somebody has managed to distinguish himself by cussing in a movie in a way that stays with you, a salute is in order. Andrew Dice Clay, watch and learn.

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)


It may not seem like such a big deal now, but seen in context, at the end of a big old-style Hollywood movie, spoken by Clark Gable in response to a tearful lover's plea, it's easy to imagine what a shocker it must have been at the time. God knows that, sixty years later, my own grandmother was just starting to recover from the shock. You can just see the fabric of civilization starting to come apart.

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It's often difficult to know exactly what it takes to qualify someone for the title of 'major American filmmaker', other than the obvious qualifications of being an American.  Some people, like Terrence Malick or Stanley Kubrick, get the nod for quality despite a major lack of quantity; others will never reach that status despite prodigious output because they're pure hacks.  But there are a few whose status is forever in dispute due to wild inconsistency; although there aren't many filmmakers whose reputation is mixed because they have such vast catalogues that it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff, it does happen on occasion.  And if anyone qualifies for such a debate, it's Richard Fleischer.

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Released late last year as part of the Stanley Kubrick Director’s Series boxed set, the latest version of the Full Metal Jacket DVD boasts a commentary and interviews with various members of the film’s creative team, from actors Vincent D’Onofrio and Lee Ermey to executive producer Jan Harlan and steadicam operator John Ward. Several voices are conspicuously absent: I’m not sure what Matthew Modine’s excuse is, but Stanley Kubrick is dead, and so is Gustav Hasford.

If that last name doesn’t ring a bell, you’ve probably never stumbled upon Private Joker’s Homepage. Compiled and maintained by Hasford’s cousin, comic book writer Jason Aaron, this massive site is dedicated to the memory of the man who wrote The Short-Timers, the 1978 novel upon which Kubrick’s Vietnam epic was based.

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What is it about alternate cuts? A cynical marketing tool to sell an old movie or the chance for the filmmakers to finally unveil their true vision of the film? In the old days, studios wouldn't bother with keeping trims and outtakes; better to dump them in the sea and save the space for something more worthwhile. Most of the great filmmakers suffered from this. Orson Welles couldn't reconstruct his version of The Magnificent Ambersons, and even more recently, William Friedkin couldn't find the footage to finally unleash his preferred cut of Cruising. In the old days, if you wanted to see the alternate cut of a movie, you had to go to another country. Graham Greene didn't dig the shortened version of Once Upon A Time In The West, so he told his readers to go to Paris to see the uncut version. Friedkin went apeshit when he found out that Sorcerer, his beloved remake of The Wages of Fear, had been completely re-cut by the European distributors, so that the opening character prologues instead appeared as flashbacks, usually whenever a character was just about to blow up. Here, though, is a list of ten alternate cuts that are well worth your time. — Faisal A. Qureshi

BLADE RUNNER (1982, Dir. Ridley Scott)

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Filmmakers disappear for all sorts of reasons. Eccentric geniuses like Kubrick and Malick are known for taking many years between projects and working in complete secrecy. Actors (Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando) and writers (Dalton Trumbo, Stephen King) may dabble with one-and-done efforts and never return to the director’s chair. An Ed Burns may make a big splash with his debut, churn out a series of increasingly lame follow-ups, and eventually find himself releasing his films directly to iTunes.

For this inaugural edition of Vanishing Act, we set the wayback machine for the summer of 1999, when Blair Witch mania swept the nation.

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It's hard to think of a movie more divisive — both at the time it was filmed and today — than Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess' dystopian social satire A Clockwork Orange.  The novel was already controversial enough (the film, as brutal as it seemed upon its release in 1971, actually toned down much of the book's violence, and substituted a consensual sex scene for Alex's rape, in the novel, of two preadolescent girls), and while the film did what it could to make a savage treatment of youth violence palatable to censors, it still earned an X rating in the United States and raised such objections in the UK that Kubrick voluntarily withdrew it from release, and stipulated that it not be shown there again until after his death. 

Even beyond that, both book and movie are plagued with inconsistencies, misinterpretations, and resentment:  the novel was released in the United States without its critical final chapter (it was finally restored in 1986), which entirely changes the reader's perceptions of what had gone before.  Kubrick himself had only a minimal interest in remaining faithful to his source material (which had been given to him as a gift by his friend and favorite writer, Terry Southern), while Burgess — paid only a pittance for the film rights — had his own misgivings about a movie version of his then-notorious book. "I feared that the cutting to the narrative bone which harmed the filmed Lolita," he said, "would turn the filmed A Clockwork Orange into a complementary pornograph — the seduction of a minor for the one, for the other brutal mayhem.

The writer's aim in both books had been to put language, not sex or violence, into the foreground; a film, on the other hand, was not made out of words."  A Clockwork Orange was, indeed, made not out of words, but out of images, and it was those images — often of vicious sociopathic behavior to which the viewer is made an uncomfortable witness and even accomplice — that defines the movie just as the elegant (and deliberately deceptive) use of language defines the book.

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Soon you’ll be nestled all snug in your bed, and perhaps visions of sugarplums will dance in your head. Being a Screengrab reader, however, it’s more likely that you’re entertaining visions of the snazzy new Stanley Kubrick Directors Series DVD box set waiting under the tree. But if Santa decides you’ve been more naughty than nice and leaves you a copy of the Uwe Boll Collection instead, there’s no need to lose that holiday spirit. As our gift to you, we’ve put together a very different Kubrick collection consisting of the prickly auteur’s early shorts and rarely-seen first feature. It may be lacking in Malcolm McDowell commentaries and spiffy digital remastering, but we assure you it is the finest YouTube has to offer.

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Andy Serkis has joined the cast of the Spielberg/Jackson Tintin. Looks like this thing is really happening. As a Tintin diehard from days past, I have mixed feelings about that, but we'll just have to see.

The Golden Compass is performing a lot better in those godless "other countries" you've heard so much about; go figure.

Paramount is charging extra for theaters to run Sweeney Todd, and at least one chain is boycotting in protest. Folks, I've seen Sweeney Todd, and it has way too much arterial spray to capture that precious family-holiday mammon. Woe to the family that walks in there by accident.

Morgan Freeman draws nearer to his long-standing goal of adapting Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. That's a very oblique, mysterious book, without a huge amount of action. The only director I can imagine honoring it is (well, duh) Stanley Kubrick. The rumored director — David Fincher — not so much.

— Peter Smith

The Amateurs opens in limited release this Friday. We have absolutely no intention whatsoever of seeing it, because there is the possibility, however remote, that it will contain a nude scene featuring Joe Pantoliano. But it does give us a chance to talk about pornography. Not actual pornography, mind you — as open-minded as this site is, we're pretty sure the bosses aren't going to let us post stills of our favorite scenes from the oeuvre of the Dark Brothers. No, what we're talking about here is movies about pornography. There's been smut on film since there was film, but while Hollywood has always been officially disdainful of its little brother in the Valley, it's also been a bit fascinated as well. Recently, European filmmakers have actually included real sex in their movies and made it work as part of a respectable narrative, but in the U.S., the NC-17 rating is still the kiss of death and violence will likely always be more palatable to the censors than sex. But even in those arty Euro-flicks, the sex is in service of the story and not the other way around; will a genuine porn movie ever be made with a great script, top-notch direction and production, and big Hollywood stars? Probably not. But there will still be movies about pornography; here are five of the best.

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Freixenet champagne has put up a short Martin Scorsese piece, an homage to Alfred Hitchcock apparently based on fragments of a Hitchcock script. Scorsese claims this has has never been done before, but then, there's always A.I., Steven Spielberg's attempt to preserve Kubrick's last project, or the 1998 version of Ed Wood's I Woke Up Early The Day I Died, allegedly made in the style of the cheapo "auteur" himself. Anyway, The Key To Reserva isn't mentioned in the Hitchcock books I have (Hitchcock's Notebooks and the Spoto and McGilligan biographies) and what Scorsese has are just fragments of a scene. But what he accomplishes with it is good fun, paying homage to the Saul Bass titles, the blonde leading ladies, the Bernard Herrmann music and even the obviously faked blue screens. — Faisal A. Qureshi

So, have you heard of this Stephen King fellow? Apparently he’s pretty widely read. Hs popularity as a novelist is matched only by his profligacy — he’s written over thirty novels and hundreds of short stories on his way to becoming one of the best-selling authors of all time. This level of popularity is like heroin to Hollywood producers, and adaptations of his books and stories — as well as original screenplays by King himself, an inveterate movie nerd — have led to an astonishing 100+ films and television shows. Like their source material, though, they’re a decidedly mixed bag: for every Shawshank Redemption, there’s a Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return. And just as King enjoys a decidedly muddled critical reception, films made from his works, while occasionally made by talented filmmakers who find in the material the bones of something great, tend towards third-rate exploitation horror. Still, with The Mist having opened last week, it’s good to remember that a number of genuinely worthwhile projects have made the translation from the mind of King to the big screen. Here are five of the best. 

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