Women We Love: Catherine Deneuve

Men We Love: John Wayne

The Dead Zone (1983)

Christopher Walken as a less kind, less gentle Johnny Smith

 Despite my love for the works of David Cronenberg, for a long time 1983's The Dead Zone didn't really register on my radar.  I'd seen it when I was a kid, and had it filed away in my brain under "above average Stephen King adaptations."  Given the vast quantity of films based on King's work, that's a file that doesn't exactly beg for reevaluation.   But Cronenberg is a director, like Stanley Kubrick before him, who excels at the peculiar skill of telling other people's stories in a way that enhances rather than diminishes his own authorial voice.  (Indeed, of the twelve films Cronenberg has made from The Dead Zone through next year's Cosmopolis, only two are based on original screenplays.) And so, far from being just another Stephen King adaptation, The Dead Zone is an essential step in Cronenberg's filmography that sheds light on the obsessions and perspectives that propel his work.

Swing Your Lady (1938)

Penny Singleton and Humphrey Bogart.

Oh my, oh my. I knew I would like this one from the first painful twang of the opening credits, which in addition to Bogie include such luminaries as "The Weaver Brothers and Elviry," all displayed against a background of crude line drawings of hillbillies. If this doesn't promise to deliver a ho-down and somebody named Pappy, I thought to myself, then my name's Mud.

Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914)

Mabel Normand, Charlie Chaplin, Marie Dressler, and a Keystone Kop.

As the first feature-length comedy ever made, Tillie's Punctured Romance is of unquestionable historical significance. On top of this, though, it is surprisingly good, with a nicely articulated plot that, while it may not be interesting on its own dramatic merits, provides plenty of terrain for Keystone's finest to dig out the humor in their respective roles. Although Charlie Chaplin is featured prominently in Tillie, it would be a mistake to view this as a Chaplin film. It bears almost no similarity to Chaplin's later features, all of which he wrote and directed himself, and is very much a piece with the Keystone shorts of the mid 1910's.

Mission to Mars (2000)

This NASA landing may have been faked on a California soundstage

In an interview accompanying Criterion's recent release of Brian De Palma's 1981 masterpiece Blow Out, his ex-wife and frequent collaborator Nancy Allen describes the consequences of casting John Travolta in that film.  The three had all greatly enjoyed working together on Carrie, and Travolta was eager to work with Allen and De Palma again.  But between Carrie and Blow Out, he'd gone from being John Travolta, star of TV's Welcome Back Kotter, to John Travolta, one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, thanks to Grease and Saturday Night Fever.  Consequently, what had been written as a small political thriller, was now going to be marketed as a major summer thrill-ride.  This meant the script had to be adjusted to include large-scale chases and set-pieces.  While the end result is thrilling, Allen reports with amusement that the process of filming the "big" scenes bored and frustrated De Palma to no end.  It all detracted from the story he wanted to tell and the stylistic flourishes that had so defined his early career.

I couldn't help thinking about that anecdote as I watched 2000's Mission to Mars, a movie so utterly anonymous it might as well have been scrawled on a bathroom wall.  It certainly seems that De Palma hasn't changed nearly as much as his films have, because his boredom with the film's big set-pieces and special effects bleeds into every frame.

Women We Love: Marie-Pierre and Catherine Castel