Film Nitrate

By 1954 Alfred Hitchcock's reputation was still growing. He was accustomed to receiving generally positive reviews and was one of the most successful directors working in Hollywood at the time. However his next film, Dial M for Murder , would ignite what was to be the golden age of the veteran filmmaker's career, and over the next decade he would create films like Vertigo , North by Northwest and Psycho and influence cinema like no other director before or since. But in 1954 Hitchcock was short on ideas. He'd intended for his follow-up to the previous year's I Confess to be based on a 1948  novel, The Bramble Bush , by David Duncan. The story, which Hitchcock had been working on adapting since before starting production on I Confess , was the same basic thread he'd used before, a 'wrong-man' tale in which a fugitive is forced to assume the identity of a murder suspect. After Warner Bros. had taken exception to the left-wing politics of the story and...

By 1937 French filmmaker Jean Renoir was 43 years old and had made 21 films (a number of which were short films), going right back to the halcyon silent days of 1924. Despite moderate success in his homeland with films such as La Chienne (1931) and Toni (1935), his name was still virtually unknown outside of France. In 1937 all that changed with the release of La Grande Illusion , winning the director numerous accolades, including the distinction of being the first foreign film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. As the years have gone on its reputation has only grown and it is now widely considered one of the greatest films ever made, and has been the subject of countless articles, reviews and books. The film is set during the First World War (then still known as the Great War), and begins when two French aviators, Captain de Boieldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin) are shot down and captured by the respected German aviator Captain v...

The best "children's films" should be accessible to both children and adults, and certainly in recent cinema the Pixar films have been a great example of this cross-generational appeal. Children love them because they can relate to the characters in the film and they tell a good story, but the best children's films are equally adored by adults because it takes them back to a more innocent time, and they can often relate on a different level to the story. When I was a kid I loved Don Bluth's animation An American Tail (1986) because it told a great adventure story, and also looked amazing. I didn't watch it again for years, but now I can appreciate that it's basically telling a story about Russian-Jewish immigrants starting a new life in the USA, only to discover that it's not quite the land of opportunity that they were expecting. Obviously when I was seven years old, this went right over my head: I was far too busy singing the catchy songs to con...

Carl Laemmle's 1925 silent horror film The Phantom of the Opera was one of the early high points for Universal Studios. As a silent film, it is still very accessible today, with a fast-paced 77 minute running time. It stars one of the best actors of silent cinema, Lon Chaney. And it benefits from a high level of production with, as the original advertising proudly boats: "a cast of 5000 others", a well as a number of memorable sequences. If I was to show a silent film to someone for the first time, I'd probably choose this as one of the most accessible introductions to the period. After the success of Laemmle's 1923 horror film The Hunchback of Notre Dame , which had gone on to become the studios' most commercially successful silent film, it was only a matter of time before a followup was produced. The Hunchback had starred Lon Chaney in the title role, and so successful was the film that he was instantly elevated from being a reliable character acto...

"Among us, the greatest attribute... is loyalty." There aren't too many films which can claim to have started an entire sub-genre of cinema. Dr. Arnold Fanck's The Holy Mountain , made in 1926, started a unique and wholly German type of film - the Bergfilm  (or ' Mountain Film '). Essentially, Bergfilme were films that were made in the stunning alpine scenery of Bavaria, aiming to capture on nitrate the grand nature of these epic, snowy landscapes. Fanck, who held a PhD in geology, had a background in making documentary films in mountainous areas, beginning with The Wonders of Skiing (1919), a film which tapped into Germany's affinity with the sport which was then still in its early days, and the film became an instant success in the country. Fanck continued to make similar documentary films through the 1920s, including the first film to be shot at altitude in the mountains, but it was The Holy Mountain ( Der heilige Berg ) that was to be his firs...

Because of the revolution in sound films that started with the first synchronised sound recording on T he Jazz Singer (1927), silent films over the next couple of years quickly became an endangered species. By 1930 virtually every film in the Western world was embracing sound, and silent films had soon gone from being a medium developed after three decades of experimentation culminating in some of the best cinema ever made, to being almost extinct. Due to the insistence of film studios that every picture was now to be made using sound (though some could later have intertitles added and turned into silents for foreign distribution), for the first and only time in its history cinema took a large step backwards. Suddenly filmmakers who had great confidence in their ability were finding themselves in an alien environment. All of the crew now had to be quiet on set or the background noise would be picked up by the primitive microphones. Sound also meant that clunky camera rigs of the ti...

Adventure films were big business in Hollywood in the 1950s. With all the trouble coming from the Cold War and the ubiquitous unsettling threat of a nuclear holocaust, people were only too willing to hand their money over at the box office to sit down for a couple of hours and watch a good old slice of escapist fun. There are few better examples of a adventure film than  The African Queen . The story, as with any good adventure film, is minimal. Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) lives on the African Queen, an old tramp steamer, working in East Africa during World War I. He makes his living by transporting supplies for the locals, as well as occasionally delivering mail to two missionaries, Samuel Sayer (Robert Morley) and his sister Rosie (Katharine Hepburn). Charlie is in the missionaries' village when the Germans appear, burning the village to the ground and fatally injuring Samuel. With nothing left in the ruins of the village for her, Rosie agrees to let Charlie take her...