Since Bill Duke the Sundance Special Jury-prize winning film “The Killing Floor” (1984), the multi-hyphenate talent has rarely been out of sight on screens big and small.
In the ’90s, Duke directed acclaimed crime films focused on black themes and characters, including the Cannes Fest competitor “A Rage in Harlem”; “Hoodlum,” with an enviable cast that included Laurence Fishburne, Queen Latifah and Cicely Tyson; and the Spirit Award-nommed “Deep Cover.”
Duke, one of TV’s most-in-demand character actors, has racked up dozens of credits in shows ranging from “Battlestar Galactica” to “Lost.” His big-screen directors include Steven Soderbergh, Paul Schrader, Jim Sheridan and the legendary Sam Fuller, who once assessed Duke as “the best film director in America today.”
Duke’s autobiography, “Bill Duke: My 40-Year Career on Screen and Behind the Camera,” was published last month, but Duke was first noted in Variety for his role in the 1972 ABC Afterschool Special,...
In the ’90s, Duke directed acclaimed crime films focused on black themes and characters, including the Cannes Fest competitor “A Rage in Harlem”; “Hoodlum,” with an enviable cast that included Laurence Fishburne, Queen Latifah and Cicely Tyson; and the Spirit Award-nommed “Deep Cover.”
Duke, one of TV’s most-in-demand character actors, has racked up dozens of credits in shows ranging from “Battlestar Galactica” to “Lost.” His big-screen directors include Steven Soderbergh, Paul Schrader, Jim Sheridan and the legendary Sam Fuller, who once assessed Duke as “the best film director in America today.”
Duke’s autobiography, “Bill Duke: My 40-Year Career on Screen and Behind the Camera,” was published last month, but Duke was first noted in Variety for his role in the 1972 ABC Afterschool Special,...
- 12/6/2018
- by Steven Gaydos
- Variety Film + TV
TV stalwart Paul Wendkos' biggest success in movies was as the director of the Gidget series. I'm Scottish so I don't know what that was. But it turns out he had a real gift for expressionistic noir, as demonstrated in his debut film The Burglar, which was scripted by pulp noir icon David Goodis, whose novels provided source material for Delmer Daves' Dark Passage, Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall, Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, René Clément's And Hope to Die, Beineix's Moon in the Gutter (the author was big in France) and Sam Fuller's Street of No Return.The movie, a low-budget affair, substitutes flair and vigor for production values, and stars lifelong noir patsy/creep Dan Duryea and up-and-coming sex bomb Jayne Mansfield, with the result that it always seems to be in the wrong aspect ratio. Duryea's cranium seems to have an extra story built...
- 11/8/2016
- MUBI
The irrepressible Sam Fuller fashions a crime thriller for German TV with his expected eccentricity: old-fashioned hardboiled scripting, freeform direction and bits of graffiti from the French New Wave. Christa Lang is the femme fatale and Glenn Corbett is the twofisted American hero, whose name is Not Griff. And yes, a pigeon does bite the pavement on Beethoven Street, and I tell you, that's one dead pigeon. Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street Blu-ray Olive Films 1974 / Color / 1:33 flat full frame (for German TV / 127 min. / Tote Taube in der Beethovenstraße / Street Date April 19, 2016 / / available through the Olive Films website / 29.95 Starring Glenn Corbett, Christa Lang, Sieghardt Rupp, Anton Diffring, Stéphane Audran, Alexander D'Arcy, Anthony Chinn. Cinematography Jerzy Lipman Film Editor Liesgret Schmitt-Klink Original Music The Can German dialogue by Manfred R. Köhler Produced by Joachim von Mengershausen Written and Directed by Samuel Fuller
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Not that it helped Sam Fuller's career much,...
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Not that it helped Sam Fuller's career much,...
- 4/26/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
La course du lièvre à travers les champs (The Race of the Hare Across the Fields a.k.a. ...and Hope to Die, 1972) is an interesting late entry in the career of French crime specialist René Clément, a kind of smorgasbord of his favorite stuff: hardboiled crime, knotty sexual triangles, a hero on the run, convoluted crime schemes, with a harkening back to childhood sins that suggests his classic Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games, 1952). This might suggest desperation to recapture past glories, but the film is also stuffed with experimentation and up-to-the-minute influences (a train station confrontation early on suggests Leone) which confirm the filmmaker as alert to new possibilities.
But the film could just as easily be approached through the sensibility of its writer, Sébastien Japrisot, a key figure in French cinema and crime cinema, or even through that of the author of the source novel, David Goodis.
But the film could just as easily be approached through the sensibility of its writer, Sébastien Japrisot, a key figure in French cinema and crime cinema, or even through that of the author of the source novel, David Goodis.
- 2/21/2013
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
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