Saccharine Symphony
June 29, 1942

The new Disney cartoon Bambi is interesting because it’s the first one that’s been entirely unpleasant. The robust irrationality of the mouse comedies has been squelched completely by the syrup that has been gradually flowing over the Disney way. In an attempt to ape the trumped-up realism of flesh and blood movies, he has given up fantasy, which was pretty much the magic element. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck lived in a beautiful escape land,…

Hollywood Blues
June 22, 1942

For esthetes there is nothing so much fun as kicking the movies around. It is the obscenity of the arts, they say, and it’s been that way since the day Griffith’s Intolerance failed at the box office. The esthetes are usually pale, one-sided people, who, if they can’t see the perfect, see nothing at all. But the movies don’t do much to prove them wrong. Take the picture Syncopation. It is the third Hollywood attempt…

“It’s something that obsesses me: the idea of where, how we approach, and where we finally reach our personal death scenes. Nowadays, when people talk of the Gothic cinema, they’re really talking about camp. It’s very sad, because the Gothic is a tremendous cultural influence, not a funny thing at all.”
—Nicolas Roeg

A LONG-TIME cameraman (since 1947) on some unique projects, Petulia for Dick Lester and The Masque of the Red Death for Roger Corman, Nicolas Roeg is an…

The tough ad for Point Blank is misleading. An Andy Warhol silk-screen effect, Lee Marvin’s Planter’s Peanut head is seen alongside a gun barrel pointed at Times Square. This smashing blue-red-black-white ad suggests Action, in the Hammett-Chandler tough-cop tradition. You sort of expect to see Sleet Marvin and Angles Dickinson. They’re there in recognizable form only.

Whatever this fantasy is about, it is hardly about syndicate heist artists, nightclub owners, or a vengeful quest by a crook named Walker (Marvin)…