Stanley Donen
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Seamless Transitions: Remembering Stanley Donen
In 2003, I was at Columbia University getting a masters degree in film and television. A friend who had just graduated called me with a rather unusual offer. Stanley Donen—the prolific and award-winning director of Singin’ in the Rain and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, who died this February at age 94—was looking for a producer. My friend had been talking to him about taking the job, but when Stanley found out he would be graduating in a few months, he asked him to find someone who was still a student. “It’s a student film,” he said. I didn’t get […]
by Ben Odell on Jun 19, 2019 -
Designing Woman, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and The Fosters: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Blu-Ray and Streaming Picks
By 1957, television was competing with movies in a way that had driven studio films toward the epic widescreen aesthetic of Bridge on the River Kwai and The Ten Commandments, yet the relationship between TV and mainstream cinema was more complex than that of straightforward opposition in terms of style and scale. Although spectacles like those of David Lean and Cecil B. DeMille were designed to draw audiences to theaters for experiences they couldn’t get at home, the fact that older films from the ’30s and ’40s were suddenly accessible on the small screen gave some viewers a thirst for […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jun 8, 2018 -
Kubrick Connections in One Million Years B.C. and Two for the Road; Plus Edge of Seventeen and the Pure Cinema Podcast: Jim Hemphill’s Home Viewing Recommendations
Don Chaffey’s One Million Years B.C. (1966) is probably best remembered for its iconic poster image of scantily clad cavewoman Raquel Welch, but revisiting it via Kino Lorber’s excellent new Blu-ray release reveals it to be a far more — and in some ways less — interesting film than that. Less in the sense that it doesn’t really deliver the sexy goods promised by the famous marketing, but more for film buffs who will delight in the movie’s multitude of connections to other, often wildly disparate, classics of the era. It’s a surprisingly experimental movie in some ways, telling its […]
by Jim Hemphill on Feb 17, 2017
