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Manhattan Murder Mystery

Last week I watched an excellent portrait of actress Diane Keaton in the Sky Arts Discovering series. It was so good that I was inspired to view again Manhattan Murder Mystery and Godfather Part Two. Manhattan Murder Mystery works on many levels not least a murder investigation. Larry Lipman [...]

November 24, 2020 // 0 Comments

Fedora/Billy Wilder

I am reading a novel by Jonathan Coe called Mr. Wilder and Me. The narrator works in the film world and in chapter two she recalls a dinner in Hollywood in the 70s with the renowned director Billy Wilder who knows the father of her travelling companion. Billy Wilder was making the film Fedora [...]

November 18, 2020 // 0 Comments

Pause for reflection

Yesterday for my sins I spent time at my computer with Good Morning Britain – ITV’s early morning magazine show – on this occasion featuring its supposed ‘box-office couple’ presenters Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid, providing ‘moving wallpaper’ accompaniment in the background. By [...]

November 3, 2020 // 0 Comments

Rebecca/Netflix

If you have not seen the Alfred Hitchcock 1940 version with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, nor read Daphne du Maurier’s novel, you might enjoy this recent adaptation which director Ben Wheatley is anxious to point out is not a remake. The plot of two Mrs de Winters – one dying in a [...]

October 23, 2020 // 0 Comments

Legacy of Agatha Christie

Last Saturday there was a tribute on Channel 5 to Agatha Christie to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles.   The programme was narrated by Nigel Havers and various actors who had appeared in televised adaptations – and the [...]

October 14, 2020 // 0 Comments

World War II and cinema

I very much enjoyed this Sky Arts 3 part series on cinema and World War Two. They assembled most of their usual film historians – Ian Nathan, Bonnie Greer, Derek Malcolm, but right wing columnist Simon Heffer also contributed. War films are a genre I like and believe underrated. At their best [...]

October 10, 2020 // 0 Comments

North by Northwest 1959

The other day a good friend told me he knew someone living on his own who derived much pleasure from Cary Grant films. For me the king of Romantic Comedy was at his peak with Alfred Hitchcock directing him in films like To Catch a Thief and North By Northwest.   Yesterday in that fallow period of [...]

September 28, 2020 // 0 Comments

I stand corrected

I am grateful to a reader and friend for pointing out an error. In a recent piece I said that Winston Churchill was not a movie buff. In fact he loved the cinema and converted the dining room at Chartwell to a private cinema. His favourite film was Lady Hamilton starring Laurence Olivier and [...]

August 27, 2020 // 0 Comments

Mervyn LeRoy, Sean Connery and Nazi Titanic

Over the weekend I caught up with The Directors series on Mervyn Le Roy, watched a tribute to Sean Connery on his 85th birthday and a documentary on a Goebbels-backed film on the Titanic. I suspect  that Mervyn LeRoy is a name with which you are unfamiliar. He made Little Caesar and Fugitive from [...]

August 23, 2020 // 0 Comments

Christopher Lee and cricket loving film stars

In May 1959 C.P. Snow delivered a lecture at Cambridge entitled The Two Cultures which subsequently became a book. It was about the ignorance of academics in the humanities on science and science on the arts. No such cultural separation exists at the Rust. We on the arts side pride ourselves on our [...]

August 11, 2020 // 0 Comments

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