Elia Kazan
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Back to One, Episode 76: Carroll Baker
Carroll Baker’s work in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll and Jack Garfein’s Something Wild is just as impressive and valuable as any performance delivered by her legendary Actors Studio contemporaries Marlon Brando and James Dean. So why isn’t she talked about in the same way? After the simultaneous sensation and scandal of Baby Doll (it was condemned by the Legion of Decency), Baker became a star, but she spent most of her career either avoiding sex-symbol roles or begrudgingly accepting them. Despite a handful of other great performances (Giant, Cheyenne Autumn, The Big County, Station Six-Sahara), conflicts with studios, producers, and […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Sep 24, 2019 -
Watch: “Kazan, Scorsese and The Departed“
With Silence out soon, it’s Martin Scorsese season. This video essay by Cole Smith looks at Elia Kazan’s approach to staging interior and urban spaces in films such as A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, then moves on to consider his influence on Scorsese’s The Departed. New Yorkers: the film shows on 35mm this Saturday at the Museum of the Moving Image.
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 12, 2016 -
Spell of the Cat People
I was watching TV late at night, in a motel room. Having been on the highway all day, I just wanted to get the speeding landscape out of my face and eyes. I searched through the channels for something that had some gravity to it. Something that would pour molasses all over the spinning tires in my mind. Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People had just started. Within a minute, it had blasted the day away, and rolled me like a black-and-white wave. Soft, hypnotic, thunderous. The movie came out of the TV, went into my head and then down into my […]
by Noah Buschel on Apr 18, 2014 -
Nebraska Star Bruce Dern on Alexander Payne and “the Dernsies”
This interview with Bruce Dern was originally published following the Cannes Film Festival, where Nebraska premiered. If you ever have the good fortune of getting a press pass that grants you access to a roundtable with a Hollywood star, there are few actors out there who could provide a better interview than Bruce Dern, who recently won a Best Actor award at Cannes for his performance in Alexander Payne’s comedic drama, Nebraska. A planned 20-minute roundtable with a few grizzled journalists turned into a half-hour sprawling monologue of memories and observations on movie production, gently flavored with imitations of Hollywood […]
by Chuck Tryon on May 26, 2013
