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peterbogdanovich Peter Bogdanovich
Blogdanovich is the blog of director, producer, writer, actor, film critic, and author Peter Bogdanovich. He has directed over 25 feature films including international award winners The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon, Daisy Miller, Saint Jack, Mask; cult favorites Targets, Texasville, Noises Off, They All Laughed, and A The Thing Called Love, among stars he’s introduced: Cybill Shepherd, Tatum O’Neal, Madeline Kahn, John Ritter, Sandra Bullock; has directed stars Audrey Hepburn, Barbra Streisand, Michael Caine, Cher; best-sellers Who the Devil Made It: Who the Hell's In It, The Killing of the Unicorn; standard texts John Ford, This is Orson Welles; and was a recurring guest-star on the popular HBO series The Sopranos.

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Peter Bogdanovich

An Affair to Remember

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • May 21, 2012 11:59 AM
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  • 2 Comments
Reviews
Multiple-Academy Award-winning director Leo McCarey, the man who teamed Stan Laurel with Oliver Hardy and supervised all their best silent work, also made perhaps the quintessential screen love story because he knew how to keep the humor in it. Actually, he made the same story twice, with two different casts, 18 years apart. The first one, Love Affair (1939), starred Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, the second had Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr and served as the catalyst for Nora Ephron’s successful 1993 comedy, Sleepless in Seattle: That’s 1957’s AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER (available on DVD).
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More: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Leo McCarey, An Affair to Remember, Meg Ryan

Hawthorn

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • May 12, 2012 6:15 PM
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  • 0 Comments
Hawthorn (also known as Whitethorn, May Tree, Haw-tree, Thorn-apple, Red Haw or Hog-apple) is a large genus of the Rose Family which flowers at this time with white (in some species, red or pink) blossom called “may;” its fruit, a small dark-red berry, is called “the haw.” The tree is generally considered the best plant for hedges. Turks use a branch of Hawthorn-blossom as an erotic symbol because its scent carries for many men a strong connection with female sexuality, a fact celebrated in medieval England by the May custom of plucking flowered Hawthorn-boughs and dancing around the maypole.
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More: A Year and a Day Calendar

Two by Lang: 'The Woman in the Window' & 'While the City Sleeps'

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • May 7, 2012 3:20 PM
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  • 4 Comments
Features
When Alfred Hitchcock made his first thrillers in the mid-1920s, he was often praised as “an English Fritz Lang,” Lang then being world famous for making nightmarish German crime pictures in the silent era, culminating with such 1930’s sound classics as M (about a child murderer) in Germany, and Fury (about a lynch mob) in the U.S., where he lived and worked from the mid-30s. When asked, Hitch always counted Fritz among his biggest influences, but film history being so fast-moving and fickle, from the mid-1940s onward, Lang was occasionally referred to as “the German Alfred Hitchcock.”
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More: Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, The Woman in the Window, While the City Sleeps

Make Way for Tomorrow

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • April 30, 2012 11:51 AM
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  • 7 Comments
Reviews
Until a short while ago when the invaluable Criterion Collection made it part of their series of classics, one of the hardest-to-see, most personal, least commercial and least known of quality pictures to come from the American studio system was Leo McCarey’s profoundly touching 1937 drama (with some comedy) about a loving old married couple and their thoughtless grownup children, MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (available on DVD, with a video introduction for which I was interviewed). It was among Orson Welles’ favorite films, and as he used to say, “It would make a stone cry!”
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More: Make Way for Tomorrow, Criterion Collection, Cary Grant, Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi

To Be Or Not To Be

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • April 22, 2012 7:02 PM
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  • 7 Comments
Blogs
Perhaps the first modern black comedy is the one the incomparable Ernst Lubitsch made a couple of years after his most heartwarmingly human film The Shop Around the Corner (1940); I’m referring to that brilliantly mordant satire on actors and Nazis, the 1942 swan’s song for the luminous Carole Lombard, and Jack Benny’s finest big-screen hour, TO BE OR NOT TO BE (available on DVD).
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More: To Be or Not To Be, Ernst Lubitsch

Willow & Blackthorn

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • April 14, 2012 1:18 PM
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  • 1 Comment
Blogs
Willow is a tree that has been sacred in numerous religious beliefs and rituals dating back to the Old Stone Age, from which were found funerary flints shaped as willow-leaves. The words “witch,” “wicked” and “wicker” are all derived from the same ancient word for Willow, and all Druidical human sacrifices were offered at the full moon in wicker-baskets.
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More: A Year and a Day Calendar

Easter Parade

  • April 6, 2012 12:30 PM
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  • 7 Comments
If you want to see an Easter-related picture, you don’t have much choice: The monopoly is held by the 1948 Fred Astaire-Judy Garland-Irving Berlin charmer, EASTER PARADE (available on DVD).  The movie was conceived, written and prepared by MGM’s Arthur Freed musical unit to star Gene Kelly, but shortly before shooting was to begin, Kelly badly twisted his ankle.  Two years earlier, Astaire—after a string of box-office disappointments, and with Kelly clearly in ascendance—had announced his retirement.  Now, though, MGM asked Fred to come back and replace Gene.  He did, the picture was a smash, and Astaire had another decade of starring roles.
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More: Picture of the Week

The Crowd Roars

  • March 31, 2012 12:16 PM
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  • 6 Comments
When he was sixteen, and until he was about twenty-one, Howard Hawks helped build racing cars and drove them to earn a living, getting to know the sort of men drawn to this highly dangerous profession as well as the women attracted to them.  He used all these first-hand experiences to create his fourth sound film—-made right after he had directed the original Scarface—-the now little-known, rarely-seen but fast-paced, exciting, quite typically Hawksian 1932 racing drama starring a young James Cagney in only his ninth picture (in less than three years), THE CROWD ROARS (still not available for home viewing, which is a shame Warner Bros. Video or their TCM arm hopefully will soon remedy; and not to be confused with the 1938 Robert Taylor boxing picture of the same title.)
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More: Picture of the Week

Rebecca

  • March 24, 2012 12:04 PM
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  • 11 Comments
Alfred Hitchcock’s first American film was originally going to be about the sinking of the Titanic. When he arrived at the Port of New York in 1939, the producer David O. Selznick (who had signed the Englishman to a long-term contract) met him and immediately spirited Hitch off to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to see the ocean liner Selznick had bought to portray the doomed ship. Hitchcock told me that Selznick had said, “There you are, Hitch, make the most of it!” And, the director went on, he had thought to himself: “Let’s see now... ‘Make the most of it, make the most of it...’ I’ve got it! We’ll start on a close-up of a rivet, and pull back!”
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More: Picture of the Week

Alder

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • March 18, 2012 4:35 PM
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  • 0 Comments
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More: A Year and a Day Calendar

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