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Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars" is not the greatest Spaghetti Western ever made, but it is widely considered to be the first. As the film that made Clint Eastwood an global movie star, it is inarguably the most significant. Most importantly in today's movie marketplace, people who've never seen a Spaghetti Western likely know the title, which makes it a viable candidate for a remake.

And this is fitting because "A Fistful of Dollars" is itself a remake. In fact, it was such a brazenly beat-for-beat copy of Akira Kurosawa's 1961 samurai classic "Yojimbo" that U.S. distributors wouldn't release Leone's film until the filmmaker settled up with the Japanese master and his backers at Toho (Kurosawa wound up making more money off this deal than he did with "Yojimbo").

Of course, "Yojimbo" wasn't an original either. Kurosawa openly acknowledged that his film was inspired by Stuart Heisler...

April Ferry, the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning costume designer known for her work on Big Trouble in Little China, Maverick, Rome and Game of Thrones, died Thursday, the Costume Designers Guild announced. She was 91.

Ferry, who graduated to costume designer on Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (1983), collaborated with John Hughes on Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), She’s Having a Baby (1988) and Flubber (1997) and with Jonathan Mostow on U-571 (2000), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) and Surrogates (2009).

She received her Academy Award nom for Richard Donner’s reimagining of Maverick (1994) — she lost out to Lizzy Gardiner and Tim Chappel of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert on Oscar night — and won her Emmy in 2006 for HBO’s Rome.

Her résumé also included Made in Heaven (1987), Child’s Play (1988), The Babe (1992), Donner’s Radio Flyer (1992), Unlawful Entry (1992), Free Willy (1993), Beethoven’s 2nd (1993), Little Giants (1994), Donnie Darko (2001), Elysium (2013), RoboCop (2014) and Jurassic World (2015).

In 2014, she...

Close to 40 years after Wim Wenders won the Cannes Palme d’Or for Paris, Texas, its enigmatic ending continues to spark debate in cinephile circles.

Talking about his career in a Lumière Film Festival masterclass over the weekend, the German director stood by his decision to have Harry Dean Stanton’s reclusive character Travis drive off into night, leaving behind his reunited estranged wife and young son.

“I was very, very convinced that the ending of Paris, Texas was right. For me, it was an heroic act by Travis to leave the mother and son together,” said Wenders.

“He knew he had done so much harm that they were never going to make it as a family, while the son and the mother had a good chance of making a life together if he left.”

Wenders revealed he received pushback around the final scene, including from the U.S. distributor 20th Century Fox,...

Wim Wenders and Thierry Frémaux signalled their support on Saturday for the Hollywood actors strike as the industrial action hits its 100th day.

“I understand the actors who all want to profit a little more… rather than there being just a dozen big names who have high salaries… while all the others earn nothing or very little,” Wenders told a press conference at the Lumière Film Festival.

The German director is guest of honor at the 15th edition of the festival, spearheaded by double-hatted Cannes Delegate General Frémaux in his role of director of the Institut Lumière in Lyon, preserving the legacy of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière.

Frémaux seconded Wenders’s words.

“The universal dimension of this strike is perhaps a bit underestimated… France, which has a reputation for struggle and putting up a fight, can also look with admiration at what is happening in Hollywood for something that touches us all,...

Frederic Forrest, who earned critical acclaim opposite Bette Midler in The Rose and collaborated with Francis Ford Coppola, has died. He was 86.

Other than earning both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for playing Huston Dwyer — the opposite end of a doomed relationship — in 1979’s The Rose, Frederic Forrest is perhaps best known for playing Jay “Chef” Hicks, who loses his head both mentally and literally, in Apocalypse Now the same year. For both performances Forrest was recognized by the National Society of Film Critics as that year’s Best Supporting Actor.

Bette Midler took to Twitter to pay tribute to her co-star, saying Frederic Forrest was a “remarkable actor” and “brilliant human being.”

The great and beloved Frederic Forrest has died. Thank you to all of his fans and friends for all their support these last few months. He was a remarkable actor, and a brilliant human being, and...

Frederic Forrest, a character actor who had a memorable role in 1979’s “Apocalypse Now” and earned an Oscar nomination for “The Rose” in the same year, died Friday in Santa Monica. He was 86.

Forrest’s death was first reported by his “Rose” co-star Bette Midler, who paid tribute to the actor on Twitter.

“The great and beloved Frederic Forrest has died,” Midler wrote. “Thank you to all of his fans and friends for all their support these last few months. He was a remarkable actor, and a brilliant human being, and I was lucky to have him in my life. He was at peace.”

Frederic Forrest in “Apocalypse Now”

As Jay “Chef” Hicks in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” Forrestt played the tightly-wound former New Orleans chef on the river patrol boat who raves “I didn’t come here for this, I don’t fucking need this, all I...

Actor Frederic Forrest, known for his roles in “Apocalypse Now” and “The Rose”, has died at age 86.

The news of Forrest’s passing was announced by Bette Midler, his co-star in “The Rose”, who took to Twitter to pay tribute.

“He was a remarkable actor, and a brilliant human being, and I was lucky to have him in my life,” she wrote. “He was at peace.”

The great and beloved Frederic Forrest has died. Thank you to all of his fans and friends for all their support these last few months. He was a remarkable actor, and a brilliant human being, and I was lucky to have him in my life. He was at peace.”

— bettemidler (@BetteMidler) June 24, 2023

Actor Barry Primus, a longtime friend, told The Hollywood Reporter that Forrest died Friday at his Santa Monica home after a lengthy illness.

Forrest played the love interest of Midler’s character in the 1979 musical drama,...

Eugene Lee, the award-winning production designer for “Wicked” and “Saturday Night Live,” has died. He was 83 years old.

His death was shared by the official Twitter page for “Wicked.”

Lee had been with “Saturday Night Live” since its debut in 1975, and worked on sets including the “Saturday Night Live: 15th Anniversary” and “SNL Presents: Halloween.”

Prior to joining the show, Lee was the in-house set designer for Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., and remained in that position at Trinity Rep throughout his life.

Lee, a six-time Emmy winner, won consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Art Direction For Variety or Nonfiction Programming from 2017-2021. He earned a total of 18 Emmy nominations.

In addition to his TV work, Lee worked on Broadway designing sets for “Sweeney Todd,” “Wicked” and “Candide” — all of which earned him Tony Awards. He also served as scenic designer for the original productions of “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Seussical.

Eugene Lee, the six-time Emmy-winning production designer for Saturday Night Live since 1975 and a multiple Tony winner for such Broadway hits as Wicked, Sweeney Todd and Candide, died Tuesday in Providence, Ri. He was 83.

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As the production designer of SNL since the year of its debut, Lee was the longest-serving member of the NBC show’s production staff. He also served as production designer for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon from 2014-2018 and numerous SNL specials.

He also led the production design for Late Night with Seth Meyers and the 2000 television movie On Golden Pond, among others. For his work in television production design,...

After all the excitement and explosion of new talent in the 1960s and 1970s, the cinema in general and Hollywood in particular hit a dry spell in the 1980s, without question the dullest decade for movies on record. Hollywood studio fare became more standardized, most movies were too long, bloated and unambitious, and let’s not even get started on the dreadful fashions and women’s frizzed hairstyles.

The 1980s also played host to the battles amongst home entertainment formats to determine the future of how we would experience what came to be called “content.” Home recording on VHS was widespread by the late 1970s, LaserDiscs had their moment shortly thereafter, the CD tidal wave occurred in the early ‘80s, video rentals shops soon followed and DVDs hit it big in 1996-97, surpassing VHS use by 2003. Now you can find virtually anything you want on your TV or online.

Taking...

When a big, prestigious, internationally celebrated arthouse filmmaker, hoisted by his acclaim, gets the chance to make a “crossover” movie somewhere other than his native country, it tends to seem like a great idea on paper, yet often doesn’t work out so well. Examples of this time-honored phenomenon range from Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” to Ingmar Bergman’s “The Touch” to Wim Wenders’ “Hammett” to Asghar Farhadi’s recent “Everybody Knows” — movies in which you can hear the voice of the filmmaker, though not nearly as vividly as you did in the films that made his crossover possible. But “The Truth,” the first movie written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda (“Shoplifters”) outside his native Japan, doesn’t fall into that more-mainstream-yet-lesser trap.

“The Truth,” which Kore-eda shot with a French crew, is set in Paris, and it’s one of those dramas in which a beloved, larger-than-life movie-star diva — in this case,...

Ricardo Cortez in 'Mandalay,' making love to Kay Francis – not long before he sells her into the 'white slave trade,' in which Francis reaches the top of her profession as a lavishly garbed Rangoon nightclub hostess known as 'Spot White.' Cortez was featured opposite a whole array of female stars during both the silent and the talkie eras. Earlier on, plots usually revolved around his heroic characters; later on, plots usually revolved around the characters of his victimized-but-heroic leading ladies, with Cortez cast as a heel of varying degrees of egotism. Besides 'Mandalay,' Ricardo Cortez and Kay Francis were featured together in 'Transgression,' 'The House on 56th Street,' and 'Wonder Bar.' (See previous post: “'Latin Lover' Ricardo Cortez: Q&A with Biographer Dan Van Neste.”) I am reminded of a humorous review of the melodramatic film Mandalay (1934), penned by Andre Sennwald in the...

Arriving for the first time on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films is Wim Wenders’ 1997 existentialist take on the definition of violence and its depictions with The End of Violence. A film that was re-cut after its poor reception after playing at the Cannes Film Festival in competition, its underwhelming limited theatrical release did little to spark much interest in the title, though Wenders would receive an Indie Spirit Award nod as Best Director. Feeling very much like the type of philosophically overbaked yarns that we’ve come to see frequent the later period of Atom Egoyan, Wenders’ Hollywood metaphor exploring voyeuristic societal issues at large is trapped by its fascinations with its own ideas. On paper, it sounds intriguing, as we’re dealing with the provocative hypothesis that, at a base level, asserts the mere act of ‘looking’ or ‘seeing’ something will eventually render the necessity of violence to be obsolete.

Imagine getting 15 directors (individually) in the same room — from indie auteurs to Hollywood blockbuster helmers — and asking them each the same question: Cinema, is it a language about to get lost, an art form about to die? In 1982, while at the Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders (who was debuting "Hammett") did just that. “Room 666” (which sounds a lot more terrifying than it is) chronicles the interviews Wenders conducted with 15 directors during the festival. To achieve as frank, genuine, and unadulterated answers as possible, he used the same exact camera and room setup for each session. What follows during his 43-minute film is some of the most honest, informed perspectives on the direction of film from over a dozen people entrenched in the industry. Paul Morrissey (“Forty Deuce”) opens by answering with an unequivocal yes, “it’s obvious [cinema] is on the way out.” He elaborates, “the novel has been dead for...

Above: French poster for Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, West Germany/USA, 1984). 

Best known in the Us for his 1976 poster for Taxi Driver, his controversial cover for Diamond Dogs and his lavish 1974 coffee table book reverie Rocks Dreams, the Belgian artist Guy Peellaert (1934-2008) also had a very fruitful association in the 1980s with German director Wim Wenders. I wrote about Peellert in Film Comment a couple of years ago, but the occasion of the upcoming Wenders retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York seems a good excuse to gather together all the Peellaert-Wenders collaborations.

Between 1980 and 1987 Peellaert painted six posters for the French releases of five of Wenders’ films: from the Nicholas Ray documentary Lightning Over Water to Wenders’ magnum opus Wings of Desire. Wenders, an aficionado of American rock ’n’ roll (one of his first short films was called 3 American LPs), was no doubt a fan...

Alexa here with your curio of the week. Wim Wenders' seminal film Paris, Texas was released 30 years ago, and over time it has become one of my all-time favorite films. So this week I thought I'd dig into my old magazine stash and share this 1984 issue of Film Quarterly that I scored at an estate sale awhile back. It includes a fascinating interview with Wenders, who discusses his "American period" and how its past failures (including Hammett) in may ways resulted in his success with Paris, Texas. Here are some selected quotes from the great philosophical meanderer. 

On casting Harry Dean Stanton:

We chose Harry Dean because he...is one of the few adults I know who...has kept the child that's dead in most adults, and certainly a lot of actors, with him. He has an innocence about him, despite a long career and being 58 years old.

Humphrey Bogart movies: ‘The Maltese Falcon,’ ‘High Sierra’ (Image: Most famous Humphrey Bogart quote: ‘The stuff that dreams are made of’ from ‘The Maltese Falcon’) (See previous post: “Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall Movies.”) Besides 1948, 1941 was another great year for Humphrey Bogart — one also featuring a movie with the word “Sierra” in the title. Indeed, that was when Bogart became a major star thanks to Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra and John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon. In the former, Bogart plays an ex-con who falls in love with top-billed Ida Lupino — though both are outacted by ingénue-with-a-heart-of-tin Joan Leslie. In the latter, Bogart plays Dashiel Hammett’s private detective Sam Spade, trying to discover the fate of the titular object; along the way, he is outacted by just about every other cast member, from Mary Astor’s is-she-for-real dame-in-distress to Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nominee Sydney Greenstreet. John Huston...

How many filmmakers can you think of that have their own verb? “Lynchian” is a part of even the most casual cinephile, though it’s often used erroneously. All too often, anything a little out of the ordinary, with a vague sense of the uncanny, earns the term. Looking back at the man’s filmography, however, it’s clear that there’s much more to Lynch’s work than mere eccentricity, especially given that he’s made films that don’t easily fit into common ideas about what it is for a film or a work of art to even be “Lynchian.” Beyond that, Lynch himself is such a singular presence beyond his films – as a thinker, a writer, and even as a musician – that attempts to Xerox his work are doubly pointless. As it’s David Lynch month here at the site, we decided to poll our writers on their favorite Lynch movies,...

Chicago – Wim Wenders has entertained audiences for over 40 years with his wide range of film subjects, both in narrative and documentary form. His latest film is the delicate and emotionally charged ‘Pina,’ an overview and exposition of his friend, the famous German choreographer Pina Bausch.

Born in Düsselforf, Wenders came upon film after dropping out of university in the mid-1960s. After moving in Paris to try his hand as a painter and engraver, he became fascinated with film, seeing up to five a day at the local cinemas. He returned to Germany and enrolled in the University of Television and Film Munich, and became a film critic for several publications. He became part of the New German Cinema movement at the end of the 1960s, and made his feature directorial debut with “Summer in the City” (1970).

Dancers in a Modern Setting in ‘Pina’

Photo credit: Donata Wenders for IFC Films...

Wim Wenders during production of “Hammett” (1983)

If Wim Wenders would have succeeded as a painter, he never would have stumbled into the United Artists Dusseldorf office, the place where he first began his journey to become a film director. At 19, Wenders moved from France back to his native Germany.

Although he sought out a studio and continued to paint, he needed to pay the bills. “And so I became the emergency deliverer of film prints. I had a crummy little...

(Wim Wenders, 1982, Studiocanal, 12)

Modelling his career on Dashiell Hammett's, Joe Gores first worked as a private detective in San Francisco before turning to crime fiction. In 1975 he wrote Hammett, an ingenious, well-researched thriller set in 1928, when his hero was beginning to make his way as an innovative novelist. Francis Ford Coppola announced a film version by Nicolas Roeg, a task taken over by Wim Wenders, who worked on it for four years with four writers, two designers and two cinematographers.

Wenders virtually disowned what became Coppola's picture rather than his. But it's a stylish, entertaining movie, starring Frederic Forrest (a dead ringer for Hammett, bar the height) as a drinking, smoking, coughing and typewriter-bashing writer lured back into detection by an old Pinkerton associate (Peter Boyle) and stumbling into the plot of The Maltese Falcon.

A neo-noir classic, it looks like a series of Black Mask covers drawn by Edward Hopper,...

If there had been no Zoetrope, the film studio founded by Francis Coppola and George Lucas in San Francisco in 1969, there would be no Star Wars, argues John Patterson

In April 1979, Francis Ford Coppola threw a characteristically grandiose bash to celebrate the completion of Apocalypse Now, the picture that had threatened to become his Waterloo. It was at the apogee of the 1970s Hollywood renaissance, whose directors were suspended in that delightfully rarified moment after their biggest blockbusters and before their flops – and they all had at least one gargantuan flop ahead of them.

Coppola, as usual, was ahead of the game, or so it seemed. Apocalypse Now's chequered production history had produced wild press rumours of directorial overindulgence, perhaps even of a full swandive into film-making insanity, and the film's subsequent lofty place in the cinematic firmament was then far from secure. The film historian Peter Biskind, in his book Easy Riders,...

★★☆☆☆ Nominated for the 1982 Palme d'Or at Cannes, Hammett (1982) was Wim Wenders' American debut feature and an homage to the B-movies and film noir that influenced him from a young age. His later film, The State of Things, was inspired by his experiences directing Hammett and working inside the American studio system, the film having been almost entirely re-shot by Francis Ford Coppola (who is credited as producer). The inconsistent rehash of the original footage is sadly evident throughout what could otherwise have been an interesting revisit to the noir genre.

Read more »...

If, over the last 10 months, you’ve sometimes felt that sitting through 2011’s movies has been somewhat akin to sitting through TV’s summer reruns, that’s because you have been sitting through reruns. Well, reruns Hollywood style.

According to a Box Office Mojo story earlier this year, 2011 will end as a record year for sequels, prequels, and spin-offs. I don’t know if Mojo included remakes in that calculation, but whether they did or didn’t, remakes have certainly added to that oppressive déjà vu feeling which seems to roll into the multiplex every couple of weeks.

And we’re not even considering the familiar-feeling clones and knock-offs. “Oh, yippee, another superhero flick! Another The Hangover wannabe!” It’s like that Twilight Zone where Dennis Weaver is damned to relive the same bad dream over and over; the people take different parts in each cycle, but it’s still the same nightmare.

When Humphrey Bogart was struggling to make his name on Broadway in the 1920’s, scalpel-wielding theater critic Alexander Woollcott sized him up thusly: he “is what is usually and mercifully described as inadequate.” Harsh. Then, in 1930, the young wannabe with the scarred lip, snarling lisp, and looks that might charitably be called “unconventional” finally landed a contract with Fox. The studio cut him loose after two years. Most actors might have thrown in the towel and started selling encyclopedias at that point. But Bogart’s best years were ahead of him.

In 1936, the not-so-young-anymore tough guy caught a break when...

Lawrence Kasdan, whose neo-noir Body Heat starring William Hurt and Kathleen Turner has become a 1980s classic, introduced a screening of John Huston directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills on Monday, May 10, 2010. Shown as part of the Academy’s "Oscar Noir," The Maltese Falcon was one of the first — perhaps the first — "official" film noir to come out of Hollywood. Based on Dashiel Hammett’s novel, the 1941 mystery-crime drama also features, Peter Lorre, Gladys George, Barton MacLane, Lee Patrick, and Elisha Cook Jr. Among the film’s cast members, only Greenstreet managed an Oscar nomination, in the best supporting [...]...

Long Wharf Theatre, under the leadership of Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein and Managing Director Ray Cullom, will present the beloved musical The Fantasticks, directed by Amanda Dehnert, from October 7 through November 1, 2009, on the Mainstage.

Press night is Wednesday, October 14 at 7:30 p.m. Curtain times are Tuesdays at 7 p.m., Wednesdays at 2 and 7 p.m., Thursdays and Fridays at 8pm, Saturdays at 3p.m. and 8p.m., and Sundays at 2p.m. and 7p.m. Tickets are $30-$70.

"I have loved The Fantasticks since I was a little kid," said Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein. "This will be so much fun for the entire family."

This hit musical with book and lyrics by Tom Jones and music by Harvey Schmidt, the longest running Off-Broadway musical in history, tells the story of Luisa and Matt, a pair entering the bloom of their youth. Their fathers, scheming to encourage their budding love, hire...

"What did you do out in Hollywood?" Such is the question posed at the very end of this film, by some kind of auteur/mogul/god who has heretofore been inaccessible to director/potential auteur Frederich Munro, who has been making some sort of sci-fi film...where? At an abandoned resort in Portugal?

And that his science-fiction film is some sort of remake either of Allan Dwan's 1961 D-budget picture Most Dangerous Man Alive or of Roger Corman's The Day The World Ended. It really scarcely matters what the source material for the sepia-toned apocalyptic whirlwind being shot by a somewhat older but nevertheless Wenders-esque director (played by Patrick Bauchau) is supposed to be. The point is that the behind-the-scenes story of the unmaking of this fictional film is just as much a bit of science-fiction as any of the sepia-toned rushes are.

If only all filmmakers could be...