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The Grapes of Wrath (1940) More at IMDbPro »
2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007
1-20 of 25 items from 2011 « Prev | Next »
Orson Welles Citizen Kane Oscar Auction: Statuette Has Long, Convoluted History
14 December 2011 4:15 AM, PST | Alt Film Guide | See recent Alt Film Guide news »
Elizabeth Taylor's jewels have just fetched a record-setting $115 million. Chances are Orson Welles' Oscar for his 1941 classic Citizen Kane won't be sold for even one hundredth of that amount next December 20. Still, Welles' golden statuette is bound to its anonymous seller much more than the $1 price tag stipulated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to all post-1950 golden statuettes.
Considered one of the masterworks of world cinema, Citizen Kane lost the Best Picture Oscar of 1941 to John Ford's family/labor relations drama How Green Was My Valley. Welles the director also lost the Oscar in that category to Ford — who by then already had two Best Director statuettes at home (for The Informer, 1935, and The Grapes of Wrath, 1940). Welles and co-screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (brother of All About Eve writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz) did, however, take home the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. »
- Andre Soares
The Bravura Sequence
12 December 2011 5:30 AM, PST | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »
I’ve finally made it to the grand master of the bravura sequence, or, more specifically, of the ending bravura sequence, King Vidor.
It isn’t surprising that a producer as knowledgeable as Selznick often ran to the services of the two major champions of “slice of cake” cinema and strong sequences, Hitchcock (Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious, The Paradine Case) and Vidor (Bird of Paradise, Duel in the Sun, Light’s Diamond Jubilee, even Ruby Gentry), who, without a doubt, made the best films for Selznick.
Love Never Dies, Wild Oranges, Hallelujah, Our Daily Bread, Comrade X, Duel in the Sun, The Fountainhead, Ruby Gentry and their terrific denouements once made me write that Vidor was a director of film endings. No doubt I was exaggerating, but it isn’t for nothing that he hesitated for a long time between several different endings for The Crowd. I was also exaggerating because »
John Steinbeck's bitter fruit
21 November 2011 4:05 PM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Seventy years after The Grapes of Wrath was published, its themes – corporate greed, joblessness – are back with a vengeance. Melvyn Bragg on John Steinbeck's remarkable legacy
I read The Grapes of Wrath in that fierce span of adolescence when reading was a frenzy. I was all but drowned in the pity and anger John Steinbeck evoked for these people, fleeing Oklahoma to seek work but finding nothing save cruelty, violence, the enmity of immoral banks and businesses, and the neglect by the state of its own people in the Land of the Free. The novel was published in 1939 and delivered a shock to the English reading world.
But for years I did not read him. Earlier this year, when asked to make a film about Steinbeck for the BBC, I went back with apprehension. The peaks of one's adolescent reading can prove troughs in late middle age. Life moves on; not all books do. »
- Melvyn Bragg
Us searches for a cultural response to economic hardship
14 November 2011 12:37 AM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Some shows and films evoke the 1960s while others reflect anxiety, with artists choosing between escapism and grim reality
By any standards, watching Jeff Nichols's much lauded film Take Shelter is a haunting experience. Its central character, Curtis Laforche, a working-class Midwesterner trying to hold on to his family, job and sanity in rural Ohio, is increasingly plagued by apocalyptic dreams that seem to be leaching into the real world.
The audience watches Laforche's life and world fall apart in a film that is soaked with both supernatural imagery and the everyday American problems of losing a job and being unable to afford healthcare for your family.
The film vibrates with uncertainty and foreboding for the end of the American way of life. Critics have hailed it as as a masterpiece of the great recession and the economic crisis.
Nor is the film alone in revealing the impact of »
- Paul Harris
Us searches for a cultural response to economic hardship
14 November 2011 12:37 AM, PST | The Guardian - TV News | See recent The Guardian - TV News news »
Some shows and films evoke the 1960s while others reflect anxiety, with artists choosing between escapism and grim reality
By any standards, watching Jeff Nichols's much lauded film Take Shelter is a haunting experience. Its central character, Curtis Laforche, a working-class Midwesterner trying to hold on to his family, job and sanity in rural Ohio, is increasingly plagued by apocalyptic dreams that seem to be leaching into the real world.
The audience watches Laforche's life and world fall apart in a film that is soaked with both supernatural imagery and the everyday American problems of losing a job and being unable to afford healthcare for your family.
The film vibrates with uncertainty and foreboding for the end of the American way of life. Critics have hailed it as as a masterpiece of the great recession and the economic crisis.
Nor is the film alone in revealing the impact of »
- Paul Harris
Supernatural: Friends Never Say Goodbye
6 November 2011 9:49 AM, PST | The Backlot | See recent The Backlot news »
Last week, on the run from the Leviathans, Sam found out that Dean killed his “first kiss” Amy and broke up with him. The brothers went their separate ways.
The action picks up a week and half later with a couple enlisting the help of a psychic medium named OdaMae. They are trying to call upon the spirit of their miserly Uncle Danny to ask him about a stash of money he hid before his death.
Uncle Danny apparently did not like people asking about his fortune, because the planchette thingy flies and jams into the medium’s throat, killing her. Hasn’t he heard of the phrase “Don’t kill the messenger?”
In another part of the country, poor Dean is decidedly lost without his Impala and his baby brother. He steals a pathetic looking Dodge and listens to a radio report about weird deaths in Lily Dale, NY, »
- VB
XBox 360 Review: Forza 4
14 October 2011 4:37 PM, PDT | Obsessed with Film | See recent Obsessed with Film news »
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Forget the Battlefield/Call of Duty debate, or the question over which football franchise should come out on top, the longest burning debate in the gaming universe – and the one that as of yet remains to be sorted out – concerns driving games, and which property for petrol heads deserves to take pole position. Gran Turismo has long been considered the pinnacle of design achievement, F1 is as realistic as possible without having to invest several million pounds and learn to deal with G-forces, while more off-the-rails games like Burnout and Dirt taking up the other end of the experience scale.
But it is Forza that wins for me, because it is the franchise that has that something extra, and now with Forza 4 skidding onto shelves this weekend, it’s time to jump back into the high-octane thrills and eye-popping beauty of Turn 10′s fully amped series. »
- Simon Gallagher
Top 10: Hillbilly Films – by Kim Newman
23 September 2011 4:06 AM, PDT | Blogomatic3000 | See recent Blogomatic3000 news »
After his first, and very popular, top ten for Blogomatic3000 on virus outbreaks in the movies, author and critic Kim Newman is back once again with and all-new Top 10 inspired by the eminent release of the awesome comedy horror Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, which hits stores next week…
The clever joke at the heart of the witty horror comedy Tucker and Dale vs Evil is that college kids who go camping in the backwoods have seen so many movies about degenerate, inbred killer hillbillies they’re terrified even of basically sweet-natured, if ill-groomed folks like the eponymous duo played by Tyler Lebine and Alan Tudyk. In truth, the American cinema hasn’t been especially enlightened in its depiction of the rural poor of the Appalachians and other mountainous backwoods regions, but it hasn’t presented quite as overwhelmingly negative a vision as you might think.
Here’s a run-down »
- Phil
The Grapes of Wrath
31 August 2011 8:25 AM, PDT | Blogdanovich | See recent Blogdanovich news »
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… »
The Grapes of Wrath
31 August 2011 12:25 AM, PDT | Blogdanovich | See recent Blogdanovich news »
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. »
Great Film Directors John Ford & Frank Capra Get Stamps, Featuring Searchers, It Happened One Night
11 August 2011 1:35 PM, PDT | Thompson on Hollywood | See recent Thompson on Hollywood news »
In its ongoing series of tributes to Hollywood figures (including James Dean, Katharine Hepburn and Gregory Peck), the U.S. Post Office is adding iconic directors John Ford and Frank Capra to the list. Both will be honored with Great Film Directors postage stamps in 2012. John Ford dukes it out in my personal pantheon of best directors of all time with Akira Kurosawa. The stamp features John Wayne in The Searchers, which Peter Bogdanovich considers one of the four Westerns that "must be seen by any civilized person". While Ford's Best Director Oscar-winners---The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man--are all must-sees, I prefer the great westerns Rio Grande, My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and »
Fincher Producing Dorothea Lange Biopic
29 July 2011 6:04 AM, PDT | Dark Horizons | See recent Dark Horizons news »
David Fincher is set to executive produce a biopic about famed photographer Dorothea Lange says Variety.
Despite contracting polio at age seven and being left with a permanent limp, Lange went on to become an acclaimed American photojournalist best known for her work in the 30's. Her poignant images humanised the tragic consequences of the Great Depression.
Her work had a major influence on documentary photography and inspired John Steinbeck to pen the seminal American novel "The Grapes of Wrath".
Angela Workman ("The Zookeeper's Wife") is developing the script, Leslie Dektor will direct and David B. Ginsberg will produce. »
- Garth Franklin
David Fincher Producing a Biopic About Great Depression Photographer Dorothea Lange
28 July 2011 8:39 PM, PDT | Collider.com | See recent Collider.com news »
Angela Workman is currently working on a script for executive producer David Fincher that centers on the life of American photographer Dorothea Lange. According to Variety, the biopic will chronicle "[Lange's triumph] over physical disability to capture iconic images of unemployed workers and dispossessed farmers during the Great Depression." As legend has it, the photographs inspired John Steinbeck as he wrote The Grapes of Wrath. Leslie Dektor is on board to direct the indie. David B. Ginsberg (Get Low) is also producing. Hit the jump for more on Lange. Here's the Wikipedia rundown: With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (Ra), later called the Farm Security Administration (Fsa)... From 1935 to 1939, Lange's work for the Ra and Fsa brought »
- Brendan Bettinger
What’s All The Hulu-baloo About? This Week In Criterion’s Hulu Channel
3 July 2011 9:55 PM, PDT | CriterionCast | See recent CriterionCast news »
Didn’t I just write one of these a week ago? Of course I did, because this is your destination for the best coverage of all the new titles Criterion puts up on their Hulu Plus page, and this week is no different. There’s fewer films (unless they decide to throw up another 30 when I least expect it) but in this case, less is more. And the lucky number is 13 this time. With worries of what the future for Hulu is, there are supposed talks that Google is definitely interested, which is interesting. Especially with their roll out of Google+ these past few days. If you like what you see, please sign up via this link. It does wonders for this article. But enough about that, you want to know about the movies. So let’s not make the good people wait.
The one that made my head explode was Godzilla, »
- James McCormick
The Greatest Year?
25 May 2011 8:24 AM, PDT | Blogdanovich | See recent Blogdanovich news »
Back in the early 1970s, I had a monthly column in Esquire called “Hollywood”, and one piece I did concerned the low state of movie quality at the time (things have only gotten worse), especially in light of the glorious past. To make my point, I arbitrarily picked 1939, the year I was born---along with a number of my illustrious colleagues (like Coppola and Friedkin)---and ran through the amazingly prolific array of movie classics released in that last year of the 1930s, including such seeming evergreens as Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. A few months later, in a huge spread in Life magazine, Richard Schickel wrote a similar lengthy rundown of pictures from 1939, but he declared it unequivocally The Greatest Year of American Movies. This worked its way into the culture and is now the establishment viewpoint. I often wonder what would have happened if I »
Melvyn Bragg films John Steinbeck documentary
18 May 2011 8:43 AM, PDT | The Guardian - TV News | See recent The Guardian - TV News news »
Broadcaster will explore the continuing relevance of The Grapes of Wrath to America
Novelist and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg is set to explore the work of the Nobel prize-winning American author John Steinbeck in a BBC documentary out later this year.
Bragg will travel to America for the BBC4 show, which will focus on Steinbeck's most famous novel, the Pulitzer prize-winning Grapes of Wrath, looking to establish it "within a modern context". Tracing the desperate pilgrimage of the destitute Joad family in Steinbeck's classic story of the American Depression, Bragg will journey from the Oklahoma dust bowl to the California coast, exploring the impact the novel had on America when it was first published in 1939.
Bragg will also look at the parallels that can be drawn with America today, "as it struggles with a new economic downturn and wrestles with the excesses of the banks", said the BBC. Steinbeck was moved »
- Alison Flood
The Paramount In Austin Announces Their Summer Classics Film Series
12 May 2011 8:23 PM, PDT | CriterionCast | See recent CriterionCast news »
One more reason to be super jealous of our friends in Austin, the announcement of the Paramount’s Summer Classic Film Series 2011 would make any classic film lover think they had died and gone to heaven. Celebrating 36 years and going strong, the place to be during the summer is Austin (as usual). And of course, when there’s classic films being announced at a repertory theater, there’s always a few Criterion connections.
Peter Bogdanovich, who recently entered the Criterion collection himself with his magnificent film The Last Picture Show (which will be screening July 27th – 28th, hosted by Sam Beam of Iron & Wine), will be there at the kick off, on May 20th, where he will be discussing Hollywood history which then is followed by a screening of Casablanca and a film of his choosing. That alone is worth your anticipation, because if anyone has great stories about film, »
- James McCormick
Mothers and Movies
9 May 2011 6:15 AM, PDT | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »
"Mothers of America, let your kids go to the movies! ...It's true that fresh air is good for the body but what about the soul that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images?"—Frank O'Hara, "Ave Maria" (from Lunch Poems, 1964)
During one of my conversations with San Franciscan film historian Matthew Kennedy, I realized that both of us had acquired our love for movies through our mothers, which led me to wonder how many other cinephiles—filmmakers and audience alike—shared a similar experience? In the past year, I have asked several individuals: "Did your mother have any influence on your cinephilia? Did she influence the movies you watched or—in the case of filmmakers—the movies you've made?" Here are some of the generous responses. And I would be delighted to hear any responses from the Mubi community.
Chris Fujiwara, Critic
My mother was a normal moviegoer of her generation, »
The Fallen: Oscar-nominated filmmaker Tim Hetherington and photojournalist Chris Hondros brought war home to us
27 April 2011 6:05 PM, PDT | EW.com - PopWatch | See recent EW.com - PopWatch news »
Back in the fall of 1941, John Ford, who had, in just three years, directed Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, and How Green Was My Valley, walked away from Hollywood and, at 47, gave himself to the Navy. For the next few years he filmed nothing but the Second World War. He was in North Africa when the Allies moved in. He boarded the U.S. aircraft carrier Hornet to film the Doolittle raid on Japan. He was on the beaches of Normandy for D-Day. And in the opening moments of Midway, he stood on the roof of a power station, filming »
- Mark Harris
Minority View: The Organizer by Mario Monicelli
7 April 2011 7:15 AM, PDT | DearCinema.com | See recent DearCinema.com news »
The portrayal of the working class in cinema has usually gone along with good intention rather than ‘entertainment’. There seems to be compulsion for films portraying its plight to be grim, this being particularly true of the cinema which wears its political inclinations on its sleeve – like the early Soviet films (Eisenstein’s Strike – 1924), the films of Italian Neo-realism (De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves – 1948, Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers – 1960) or American humanism such as John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Barring a few exceptions like the films of Aki Kaurismaki (Ariel, 1988) the general purport is that the lives of the working class, not being exciting in themselves, must be examined out of a sense of duty because art cannot shun its social obligations. A filmmaker to consistently get ‘entertainment’ out of working class situations was Chaplin but the humor in the films tend to depend more on his »
- MK Raghvendra
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