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We are free to believe what we believe

Scribes contributing to the Rust have previously offered their opinions upon perception and reality as we find these in the world – whether the subject be ‘fake news’, politics, or the prospect of great movie or music stars being resurrected years after their death and having new [...]

December 1, 2017 // 0 Comments

Hollywood alcoholics

Watching Discovering William Holden on Sky Arts made me think of the great actors we lost to alcoholism: Richard Burton, Errol Flynn, Robert Walker, Veronica Lake and William Holden. One never knows, let alone understands, why anyone falls victim to the bottle and this is certainly  the case with [...]

November 11, 2017 // 0 Comments

The Cincinnati Kid

One of the most enjoyable screen tests is when a big star pits his ability against a great actor. I’m thinking here of Dustin Hoffman v Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man and later on Tom Cruise v Dustin Hoffman in the Rain Man or Michael Caine v Laurence Olivier in Sleuth. In those films the [...]

November 2, 2017 // 0 Comments

Death of Stalin

There is a major problem about Armando Ianucci’s film inasmuch it treats a grotesque subject – the tyranny of Stalin and the subsequent scramble for power – as a comedy … and a not very funny one. The film opens with a live performance of the Moscow Radio orchestra and [...]

October 27, 2017 // 0 Comments

The Party

Older Rusters and readers may remember The Wednesday Play an often obscure dramatic venture into the avant garde on BBC. I felt the same slightly bored detachment that I experienced watching it as I did  during The Party. This might be because it was filmed in black and white and set in the [...]

October 22, 2017 // 0 Comments

Peter Sellers

I was composing a piece in my study on the history of the casting couch in Hollywood and the bullying autocrat when my wife Gail stuck her head around the door to say that unless I created space in the planner section for her recording of Strictly she would delete several of the 20 or so episodes [...]

October 12, 2017 // 0 Comments

Judgment at Nuremberg (1962)

Spencer Tracy was unquestionably a Hollywood great, both a fine actor and a big star though not possessing the conventional hunky good looks of some box office male stars. His career was however, rocked if not racked by excessive drinking and a catholic guilt over his 26 year old affaire with [...]

October 9, 2017 // 0 Comments

The future is already here, as well as in the future

When it comes to the relationship between audiences and movies or television programmes, the different sectors in the entertainment industry are split into quite simple divisions. Firstly, the production – the process of deciding what to make, whom to hire to make it (e.g. scriptwriters, [...]

September 16, 2017 // 0 Comments

Coming to terms with it

Regular readers of the Rust will probably be of a vintage able to recall the Andy Capp cartoon strip drawn by Reg Smythe for the Daily Mirror newspaper. Capp was almost an early version of a British Homer Simpson, a working class Everyman from whose ‘ordinary’ interests in life – pubs, beer, [...]

September 14, 2017 // 0 Comments

QB VII

QB VII is the name of a court in the Palace of Justice in the Strand where a libel action was fought out between an American Abe Cady  a scriptwriter and Adam Kelso Polish born physician accused of carrying out grotesque operations in a death camp to sterilise by castration Jewish inmates without [...]

September 6, 2017 // 0 Comments

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