Tennessee Johnson, I Spit on Your Grave and Adaptation: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
These days, director William Dieterle is best remembered for his dreamy, stylized melodramas of the mid-to-late 1940s (I’ll Be Seeing You, Portrait of Jennie), but in his own time his greatest successes were mostly sturdy prestige biopics like The Story of Louis Pasteur and The Life of Emile Zola. A key transitional film was 1941’s The Devil and Daniel Webster, which introduced a supernatural element to Dieterle’s work and paved the way for a return to the German expressionist style in which he had worked as an actor. Before the delirious flights of fancy to come, however, Dieterle made one last return […]
by Jim Hemphill on Nov 13, 2020
