The controversy stirred up by Raoul Walsh’s classic gangster film, White Heat—starring James Cagney as the deranged killer Cody Jarrett, American cinema’s most notorious psychopathic and deranged urban outlaw—was exactly what the director loved: fiction that made waves. This was the reason he made movies: for Walsh, controversy was good drama, therefore, good storytelling. Yet when American...
Orson Welles’ 1958 psychological and visual masterpiece Touch of Evil has been reshaped and reconstituted with no less frequency than an Alfred Hitchcock film in the hands of a feminist. The film – which brought us those great “screen lovers” Mexican-American cop Vargas (Chariton Heston) and swampy, I-am-your-worst-nightmare Quinlan (Welles) — was taken from Welles by Universal...
Leolo, the autobiography of a young boy, is a story with many subjects — each of them fiercely, heart-wrenchingly imagined. On one hand, it’s a story about the dark side of one of the darkest families ever committed to celluloid; on the other hand, it’s a child’s surrealistic voyage of revenge against this brood, mounted with language that is at once visceral and angrily funny...
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