What Makes a Man: Wounded Masculinity in William Lustig’s ‘Maniac’ Cycle
“In its own histrionic way, the ‘Maniac’ cycle presages a wave of reaction that would draw its power from the patriarchal fear of dispossession.”
Hommes Fatales: Fritz Lang’s ‘The Blue Gardenia’
“‘The Blue Gardenia’ occupies a curious space inside noir. In many ways, it acts as an indirect response to many of the films that preceded it, with their icy femmes fatales…”
Portraits of Women in Film Noir
“Film noir is all about questioning assumptions, and several of such films that feature portraits of women do nothing less.”
Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang and German Expressionist Fury
“Lang’s film becomes a committed act of social justice advocacy, raging against its enforced limitation, and striving to break the formal apparatus that could often be employed to constrain Classic Hollywood cinema.”
War and Domestic Violence in Fritz Lang’s ‘Human Desire’
“‘Human Desire’ points a hopeful, if naïve, way forward for men returning home from war.”
Vague Visages Is FilmStruck: Jeremy Carr on Anthony Mann’s ‘T-Men’ and ‘Raw Deal’
“In both ‘T-Men’ and ‘Raw Deal,’ Alton and Mann take what is already a heightened genre and somehow intensify its formal qualities.”
Fantasia Film Festival 2017 Wrap-Up: My Festival vs. Your Festival
“I can’t make any grand pronouncements or bold proclamations, except that I need to either learn to read program descriptions more critically or invest in a plane ticket to Montreal next July.”
Vague Visages Is FilmStruck: Marshall Shaffer’s #FilmStruckFebruary
Marshall Shaffer Reflects on a Full Month of FilmStruck
Of Love and Other Demons: ‘House by the River’ (Fritz Lang, 1950)
“While Lang never fully embraced socialist principles over the course of his career, he always seemed to have a violent distaste for the men who stood on the shoulders of those who were less fortunate, knowing full well that social class does not correlate a strong moral conscious.”
Of Love and Other Demons: ‘The Woman in the Window’ (Fritz Lang, 1944)
“The film has an unusually conservative vibe for a noir, maintaining that the status quo may be boring but criminality has nothing to offer — not even carnal thrills.”