The Sunday Intertitle: Komplete with Kops So, after teaching Charlie Chaplin the one bit of film technique he needed, for the first few years of his career, at least (contiguity editing: the principle that if a character gets kickout of sh…

dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/04/19/t...

You owe it to yourselves to see the most horrible, destructive and chaotic silent comedy ever: dcairns.wordpress.com

His death mask exists, in the Berlin Film Museum, so you could theoretically plonk that atop his skeleton/embalmed form and get a good estimate of his height. Not saying you SHOULD, of course.

Given my love of Italian cinema and especially comedy, crazy it's taken me this long to see GUARDI I LADRI. dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/04/17/t...

Saw it as a teen and found Jimmy Stewart so likeable an actor I didn't even register his plunge into obsession as unappealing! Midge is the only really decent one, though.

I care in Vertigo. The Birds is fascinating because of the fainthearted attempt at screwball and then Evan Hunter's discomfort with the mother-son stuff. Have you read Me and Hitch?

Well that's certainly true. Does this make it "fun" though?

First, go into detail about the strangeness and complexity.

The Way the Future Wasn’t I was looking in a second-hand paperback of The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein at his list of predictions for the future. This was published in 1966 I believe. RAH presages his predictions by claimin…

Robert Heinlein made some predictions. How's he doing? dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/04/16/t...

Pants on Fire LA BUGIARDA — THE LIAR — is a Luigi Comencini comedy I hadn’t rushed to see despite my love for the great man. Maybe I wasn’t sure how an Italian movie of 1965 would handle …

Catherine Spaak sexy and funny and near-psychopathically committed to her complicated love life in LA BUGIARDA. dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/04/14/p...

"I was cured, all right."

TORA TORA AND STILL MORE TORA! dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/04/13/t...

Question marks often get left off film titles, even being considered unlucky in some quarters. IMDb and Wikipedia include a ? but of course they're unreliable. Anyway, I'd like to talk to you about Fin! Your cousin Alistair Young emailed you about my project.

Billy Bletcher, pursued by a giant lobster. dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/04/11/l...

David Melville Wingrove returns (eternally) with more Cinema de Papa: Cocteau! Delannoy! Marais!
dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/04/08/p...

D’Oh! Strange errors abound. In his 1986 episode of The South Bank Show, a kind of autobiographical study which can be viewed as a complimentary work to his two volumes of memoirs, Michael Powell speaks …

tracing the Michael Powell-James Finlayson connection. If there is one.
dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/04/07/d...

I'd love to read Billy Wilder's screenplay about the filming of KING OF KINGS...

No, in the Bebe Daniels silent FEEL MY PULSE, which is plenty fun.

La Cava cast him as a creep, too.

Probably true of many regular critics too! QT is uniquely positioned to openly say "If I were making this film, this is what I'd do/intend" and have people be interested. He trips himself up by assuming that Scorsese's motivations are remotely like his own.

On Spec The library had Quentin Tarantino’s book Cinema Speculation so I borrowed it. Very readable, but slightly overbearing, hectoring, in its tone. Some of QT’s observations are interesting,…

The loud opinions of Tarantino collide with an unproduced script by the Coens. dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/04/03/o...

Own Trumpet Dept. Got my comp of TROUBLE IN PARADISE from Criterion (4K and Blu). Made a video essay for this one with editor Stephen C. Horne. Farran Smith Nehme wrote the booklet essay — all chums together! …

Proud and chuffed to have contributed a video essay to this beauty: dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/04/02/o...

Always heard it as "You used to be able to miss better than that."

I saw the trailer for Goodbye Emmanuelle at the cinema as a kid. It was just shots of a woman walking on a beach. "We are unable to show you any other scenes," I think it said. Also, "Emmanuelle says goodbye to the island she has loved... THE ONLY WAY SHE KNOWS HOW!!!"

Listeners Had a very nice double bill of REMBRANDT and GOYA. More on Francisco Goya later. The Rembrandt Van Rijn bio was the 1936 Alexander Korda one with Charles Laughton, which prompted some thoughts. But…

Two fantastic monologues by Charles Laughton, buoyed up by judicious use of reaction shots. What's the story? Edward Dmytryk has one he wants to sell you. dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/03/31/l...

Throw the bokeh at him I was sick in bed with a cold and Claude Miller’s GARDE A VUE (1981) proved just the medicine. But I was getting a deja vu vibe which finally crystallized when I remembered PILE OU FACE (1980…

Claude Miller's GARDE A VUE very very fine. Creepy crime actorfest. dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/03/28/t...

A Girl Called Fred THE STRANGE AFFAIR (1968), directed by David Greene, is one I’d always been interested in– I like his SEBASTIAN and I START COUNTING a whole bunch. But this one seemed to have vanished.…

“THE STRANGE AFFAIR (1968), directed by David Greene, is one I’d always been interested in... The idea of Michael York as a police constable (Peter Strange) in swinging London is an intriguing one...” (by @dcairns.bsky.social)

dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/03/26/a...

A Girl Called Fred THE STRANGE AFFAIR (1968), directed by David Greene, is one I’d always been interested in– I like his SEBASTIAN and I START COUNTING a whole bunch. But this one seemed to have vanished.…

THE STRANGE AFFAIR is strange all right, also problematic. dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/03/26/a...

Song Sung Blue Richard Eichberg is an interesting case, a director who worked partway through the Nazi period on big movies, and seems to have had some trouble getting himself denazified, since he didn’t ma…

HippFest 2026 offered Anna May Wong at her VERY best, beyond anything I expected from her.
dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/03/25/s...

More @HippFest! dcairns.wordpress.com/2026/03/22/b...