Storyteller
There are no rules until you write them.
Don’t forget to select your favorite films!
“He says the sun came out last night. He says it sang to him.”
In a scene toward the end of William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, a film boldly confronting some painful realities of war decades before it was fashionable, an unemployed and unemployable veteran bombardier, played by Dana Andrews, finds himself wandering through a graveyard of B-17 bombers. Seating himself in the nose of a gutted warplane, he remembers the sensation of the engines starting before…
“Games? Must we?”
It’s fitting that North By Northwest truly gets going when a Madison Avenue Ad exec, played by consummate leading man Cary Grant, finds himself at the wheel of a stolen car and headed for a cliff after having been force-fed a bottle of bourbon by mysterious henchman who’ve mistaken him for someone else. This is, after all, the film one could argue to be Alfred Hitchcock’s least restrained, even if the filmmaker himself was never anything but,…
“I can’t lie to you about your chances… But you have my sympathies.”
While Steven Spielberg and George Lucas enjoy the lion’s share of the credit for changing the extent to which popular cinema could resonate with their respective blockbusters, Jaws and Star Wars, the films that made them household names are rooted in a decidedly established aesthetic. Ridley Scott, on the other hand (along with his brother Tony and directors like Alan Parker and Adrian Lyne) led the way in…
“I go with my partner.”
Behind every great filmmaker are a great many capable people making countless contributions both great and small and often unsung. Every now and then, these ingredients come together in just such a way as to make something timeless. With that in mind, one may wonder why they don’t make movies like this anymore. More to the point, one should wonder why they never, ever made a movie quite like this again. And the answer comes…