Nicholas Ray's Other Western

Run for Cover (1954) Finally Arrives on Blu-ray

by Tony Dayoub

Following on the heels of Nicholas Ray's notable Western Johnny Guitar (1954) and released just before his most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Ray's other Western, Run for Cover, fits rather nicely between the two from a historical perspective, refining some of the tangential themes of Johnny Guitar (including the growing influence of McCarthyism) while also serving as a transition to the "troubled youth" subject matter explored in Rebel.

2012 So Far

by Tony Dayoub

2012 has been hectic for me. Us, I should say. Last month, my wife finally fulfilled a long-time dream to open her own dessert venue, Sweet Dee's Bakeshop, and business is booming. I've been doing my best to keep up with this blog, my Twitter feed, her business's Twitter feed and Facebook account, as well as Sweet Dee's new blog (starting next month). Aside from that, with her time being taken up by all the responsibilities a start-up entails, I've had to step it up in terms of caring for our two young children. Busy.

The cinema stops for no one, though. In theatres, summer arrived with the box office records smashed by The Avengers, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. It's one of only a fraction of the amount of films I usually write about here. It doesn't mean I haven't been keeping up with this year's films. (Well, maybe less so with indie or foreign movies because of how difficult it is to get to the local art houses in my few spare moments.) I've just been choosy with what I decide to write about. But with the two kids going to summer camp full-time next month, and my wife and I settling into a kind of groove with the new shop, I hope to see the pace pick up on this blog for the rest of the year.

Consider this (and maybe one more follow-up) a post in which I catch up and jot down some thoughts on some of these other films I wasn't too moved to write about immediately.

For the Love of Film III: Rear Window (1954)

by Tony Dayoub

This post is a considerable reworking of a piece I posted on 3/20/09. It's also a contribution to For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III being led by Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, the Self-Styled Siren, Farran Smith Nehme, and Roderick Heath of This Island Rod.

For movie-watchers with an analytical bent, Alfred Hitchcock provides a wealth of material to dissect. Rear Window is a great example. Much of the analysis focusing on Rear Window highlights the most immediately apparent of the film's metaphors, that of L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) as audience surrogate while the different dramas playing out in each window of his apartment's courtyard serve as his personal movie theater. Laid up with a broken leg, the convalescing photo-journalist—bored with routine visits by his socialite girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) and home care aide Stella (Thelma Ritter)—turns to his window for entertainment. But the movie's titular rear window isn't just a proscenium allowing Jefferies to play peeping tom. Each of the courtyard's individual apartments are a physical manifestation of Jefferies' fears of seriously committing to Fremont.

Movie Review: Dark Shadows (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

It's ironic that Tim Burton—whose expressionism-by-way-of-acid-tinged Batman was the forerunner of the modern superhero film—has a new film getting trounced in the box office by The Avengers, the ultimate example of the very kind of genre he helped to usher in at the start of his career. And that this film is Dark Shadows, not only a property with a fervent cult audience but probably the most satisfying effort from Burton in quite a long time. Based on the Gothic soap which ran on ABC from 1966-1971, Dark Shadows is the apotheosis of Burton's artistic concerns, perfectly fusing his love of all things dark and creepy with his off-kilter family dynamics in a way only glimpsed at in previous efforts like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and most precisely (but all too briefly) in his 1984 short, Frankenweenie. In films like Sweeney Todd, Burton gets the sense of dark foreboding right, but misses that infectious feeling of benign wonder which his other movies are bursting with. And most of the rest of his oeuvre, though exuberant in its ability to astonish with imaginative production design and fanciful style, doesn't quite get that Hammer horror feel of movies like Sleepy Hollow. Perhaps Dark Shadows succeeds because, by Burton's own admission, it was a formative influence.