Category: Reviews

Reviews of Classic Films

A Perhaps Line — A Review

Posted on February 28, 2015 by

By Elizabeth Kropf Gary Swaim’s book A Perhaps Line asks readers to not only wrestle with the division between the material and immaterial, but with the placement of the poems themselves. The poems are divided into two sections, “Poetry of the Material…

Posted in Reviews Tagged with: Adam and Eve, coma, Dante, Gary Swaim, Milton, poems, poetry

Little Drummer Girl, a Review

Posted on October 2, 2014 by

kenkuhlken

When I was seventeen, just out of high school and still in deep grief for my best friend, dead from riding shotgun while a careless fellow drove, I picked up Feodor Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment. For the next several days,…

Posted in Reviews

Red River

Posted on February 2, 2012 by

kenkuhlken

Red River (1948), directed by Howard Hawks, relates the story of Tom Dunson (John Wayne) and the enormous cattle ranch he has built up in Texas. Unfortunately, there is no market left for cattle in Texas, so he decides to…

Posted in Reviews Tagged with: classic films, Howard Hawkes, John Wayne, Red River, Rio Bravo, westerns

The Great Dictator

Posted on December 22, 2011 by

kenkuhlken

Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) satirizes Adolf Hitler and the growth of National Socialism in Germany with Chaplin in a dual role as dictator Adenoid Hynkel and a persecuted Jewish barber. Hynkel implements policies of strict control on the…

Posted in Reviews Tagged with: Chaplin, comedy, Hitler, Mussolini, The Great Dictator

Marty

Posted on December 7, 2011 by

kenkuhlken

In director Delbert Mann’s 1955 drama Marty, the title character (played by Ernest Borgnine) is an overweight 34 year-old Bronx butcher, unpopular with women, who lives with his mother. One night at the Stardust Ballroom, he meets plain, shy schoolteacher…

Posted in Reviews Tagged with: classic films, Ernest Borgnine, Marty, Paddy Chayevskli. 1950s

The Innocents

Posted on October 20, 2011 by

kenkuhlken

Director Jack Clayton’s 1961 adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (with a screenplay co-written by Truman Capote), The Innocents stars Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, a newly-hired governess of an English playboy’s country estate, watching over two…

Gold Diggers of 1933

Posted on September 15, 2011 by

kenkuhlken

Reviewed by James Garfield A 1933 musical comedy directed by Mervyn LeRoy and set during the then-raging Great Depression, Gold Diggers of 1933 stars Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Aline MacMahon, and Ginger Rogers as starving actresses looking for a break…

Posted in Reviews Tagged with: classic films, Ginger Rogers, Great Depression, New York

Category: Reviews

A Perhaps Line — A Review

Little Drummer Girl, a Review

Red River

The Great Dictator

Marty

The Innocents

Gold Diggers of 1933

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