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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

Hail the Conquering Hero

  • November 30, 2011 12:37 PM
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As questions of morality, ethics and honor in our society become ever more ambiguous, it might be salutary to see an American comedy of the highest order dealing with these troubling issues, made while World War II was daily in a different way bringing them vividly to the fore. During 1944, the inimitable Preston Sturges wrote and directed one of his most enduring works with these themes: HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO (available on DVD). It was the seventh picture in that most extraordinary run of eight consecutive movies over four years, all brilliantly conceived, written and directed by Sturges (here’s the Link to a piece I did on this very special picturemaker years ago).
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Comanche Station

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • November 14, 2011 11:06 AM
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Among hip Western connoisseurs both here and abroad, there have been four really memorable, artistically consistent director-star series in the genre’s sound era: eight John Ford-John Wayne features (from Stagecoach to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance); four Howard Hawks-Wayne pictures (including Red River and Rio Bravo); five Anthony Mann-James Stewart sagas (from Winchester ‘73 to The Man from Laramie); and seven intimate ones from Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott.
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Sadie Thompson

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • November 3, 2011 10:28 AM
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  • 2 Comments

James Cagney once told me he had worked with eighty directors in his career, “But there’s only five I’d call a real director.” Which was what? “A real director is a guy who, if I don’t know what the hell to do, can get up and show me!” Pioneer Raoul Walsh, with whom Cagney did four memorable pictures, was definitely one of those five. The best example of his acting abilities (most famously he was John Wilkes Booth in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of A Nation) can be seen in Walsh’s own vigorous adaptation of the classic Somerset Maugham short story and stage play of South Seas sex and repression, Rain, starring the immortal Gloria Swanson as that notorious lady of easy virtue, SADIE THOMPSON (available on DVD). The film is another of the glories of 1928, that last extraordinary year of silent pictures, which I wrote about at length in my Special Comments blog of January 30, 2011.
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The Champ

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • October 13, 2011 7:22 AM
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  • 3 Comments

“You are not a director,” actor-director Vittorio De Sica once said, “until you have directed a child.” De Sica had proved himself memorable in this area with three of his post-war Italian neo-realist films, The Children Are Watching Us (1944), Bicycle Thief (1948) and Shoeshine (1946). Two other films that come immediately to mind for extraordinary child performances are Jackie Coogan in Charlie Chaplin’s first feature-length Tramp picture, The Kid (1921), and another Jackie—-Jackie Cooper in the powerful four-handkerchief 1931 King Vidor production co-starring ever-popular Wallace Beery as THE CHAMP (available on DVD). Of course, Vidor had already distinguished himself with a touching child performance in his classic humanist drama of three years before, The Crowd, a silent picture I couldn’t recommend more highly (though it is currently not available on DVD).
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Shock Corridor

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • October 5, 2011 4:26 AM
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Samuel Fuller was a real hero. Long before he ever directed a movie, he had already had an extremely rich and colorful life. He was a crime reporter for a New York tabloid, a published novelist, and then a corporal throughout America’s involvement in World War II, going wherever the First Infantry (known as “The Big Red One”) went, which was practically every major theater of operation in the western hemisphere. Sammy was on the beach at Normandy on D-Day, and at the liberation of concentration camps. Wherever he was, he usually carried a 16mm camera and filmed a great many of these events (as he would do throughout his life—including the first day my first-born child came home from hospital). Upon his return, he was suffering from noise fatigue and battle shock to such a degree that for a while he could not bear to hear even the tap of finger to table.
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Destry Rides Again

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • September 28, 2011 4:28 AM
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  • 6 Comments

Among the most entertaining of non-”auteur” star vehicles——made at a time when stars often were not only good actors but unique personalities as well——is the first pairing of America’s innocent James Stewart (as he was always billed in pictures, never Jimmy) and Europe’s worldly Marlene Dietrich, out in the Wild West of 1939’s Destry Rides Again (available on DVD).

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Bluebeard

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • September 21, 2011 11:27 AM
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The career of director Edgar G. Ulmer, one of diehard film buffs’ major cult favorites, is an object lesson in the triumph of talent, courage, ingenuity and passion over time and money. Ulmer rarely had more than a minuscule budget and six days to shoot an entire feature; this is one to two days shorter than TV directors today are given to film a one-hour (actually more like 48-minute) series episode. The discipline and resourcefulness required to be able to turn out any sort of full-length product in that short a time is impressive by itself, forget about also revealing a strong personality and an often vivid style as Ulmer did repeatedly in numerous Poverty Row classics like the nightmarish Detour (1946), or the uncompromising Ruthless (1948), or the remarkably atmospheric period horror tale of 19th century Paris, 1944’s BLUEBEARD (available on DVD). The star is the legendary patriarch of one of our most enduring acting families, John Carradine, in a role he always ranked high among his best.
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The Birds

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • September 14, 2011 12:43 PM
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  • 5 Comments
The special edition of Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 Judgment Day thriller, The Birds (available on DVD), carries not only various production notes, cut scenes from the script, storyboard sketches, trailers, other promotional footage, Tippi Hedren's screen tests--with actor Martin Balsam, and with Hitchcock's off-camera voice directing and kidding around--but also an eighty-minute documentary that goes into enormous and fascinating detail about how this technically most difficult picture was made 48 years ago. Long before computer generated images were even dreamed of, Hitchcock conceived a production so challenging that he himself knew never to raise the issue, "Can it be done?" Because, he told me at the time, "Then it would never have been made. Any technician would have said 'impossible.' So I didn't ever bring that up, I simply said, 'Here's what we’re going to do.'"
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The Dirty Dozen

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • September 7, 2011 3:54 AM
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One of Robert Aldrich’s most subversive (and financially most successful) films is his 1967 color and wide-screen World War II saga of legalized criminality, THE DIRTY DOZEN (available on DVD). Aldrich had first dealt with this war eleven years earlier in his violently gripping cult picture, Attack! (1956), which featured the brilliant Lee Marvin in a strong supporting role. In The Dirty Dozen, Marvin takes the lead, playing--with his usual restrained gusto--a maverick major who recruits twelve condemned soldier-misfits for a suicidal mission behind enemy lines; if they survive, they’ll be reprieved.
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The Grapes of Wrath

  • By Peter Bogdanovich
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  • August 31, 2011 3:25 AM
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  • 8 Comments
In 1995, when Bruce Springsteen recorded the title song for his moody, introspective album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, he was not only thinking about the leading character of a famous John Steinbeck novel concerning the Depression plight of displaced Okies, but also of Henry Fonda’s unforgettable portrayal of this role in the celebrated 1940 John Ford film version of THE GRAPES OF WRATH (available on DVD). Bruce was wondering what exactly had become of Tom Joad’s ghost, the spirit of that archetypal American idealist who told his mother just before he left the family for good: “...Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there... Wherever there’s a fight so that hungry people can eat, I’ll be there...” Springsteen was lamenting the apparent loss of that special nature which galvanized us, took us to victory in the Second World War--that crusading indignation and anger at injustice. Indeed, it’s difficult to watch The Grapes of Wrath today without a heartsick feeling of nostalgia for the Roosevelt years that seemed to inspire such sentiments.
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