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.

Peter Bogdanovich

The John Ford File: Part 2

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • July 3, 2012 2:01 PM
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  • 1 Comment
T H E   J O H N   F O R D   F I L E (P A R T  2)

The John Ford File: Part 1

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • June 24, 2012 7:32 PM
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  • 15 Comments

Heather

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • June 20, 2012 2:20 AM
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  • 2 Comments
HEATHER The Tree of the Summer Solstice June 20 - Oak 11

A Year and A Day Calender: Oak

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • June 9, 2012 12:00 AM
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  • 2 Comments
OAK The Tree of Endurance & Triumph JUNE 10 - JULY 7

Two With Grant by Hawks: 'His Girl Friday' & 'Monkey Business'

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • June 1, 2012 12:04 AM
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  • 8 Comments
If you miss Cary Grant as much as I do——and I mean not only the movie star, the actor, the man, but also the kind of civilized style and ebullient, urbane and witty persona the name calls to mind——then here are two good opportunities (out of many more) to see the original article.  Both were made by Grant’s favorite director (they did five pictures together), the legendary “gray fox of Hollywood,” Howard Hawks.

An Affair to Remember

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • May 21, 2012 11:59 AM
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  • 5 Comments
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).

Hawthorn

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • May 12, 2012 6:15 PM
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  • 1 Comment
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.

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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  • 5 Comments
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.”

Make Way for Tomorrow

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • April 30, 2012 11:51 AM
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  • 7 Comments
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!”

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
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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