THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD directed by Michael Curtiz (USA, 1938)
Lunch!
Bizarrely, James Cagney was slated to play the lead but fortunately they opted for the dash and glamor of Errol Flynn instead. Continue reading
Tag Archive: Scott Higgins
DOCKS OF NEW YORK directed by Josef Von Sternberg (USA, 1928)
This silent movie was chosen as a compare and contrast exercise with Street Angel, which was the first movie in the syllabus for the MOOC in film history run by Scott Higgins of Wesleyan University called ‘The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color’.
The hard-hearted and cynical movie centres on an improbably eventful 24 hours in the lives of a group of sweaty stokers who take a break from the physically demanding work on ship to spend time ashore whoring and drinking.
George Bancroft is the leading man, playing Bill Reynolds, a macho guy who gets his kicks from barroom brawls and is the type to boast of having a girl in every port (his heavily tattooed arm serves as a check list of his conquests). Continue reading
STREET ANGEL directed by Frank Borzage (USA, 1928)
This week I began a 5 week MOOC in film history at Coursera run by Scott Higgins of Wesleyan University called ‘The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color’. Street Angel is the first of ten movies on the syllabus and will be a hard act to follow.
What a great film this is!
It was chosen because it was made at a time when silent movies were about to be replaced by talkies and shows how directors with visual style didn’t really need dialogue to tell a rich and emotionally powerful story.
Prof Higgins says, rightly, that “it contains all that is great and weird about silent films”. Continue reading
