Essay

“At the Eden Hotel, where I lived in Berlin,” recalled Louise Brooks in her memoir Lulu in Hollywood, “the café bar was lined with the higher-priced trollops. The economy girls walked the street outside. On the corner stood the girls in boots, advertising flagellation. Actors’ agents pimped for the … [Read more...] about Diary of a Lost Girl

It’s estimated there were 525,000 war widows in Germany the year before Fritz Lang made Destiny (Der müde Tod) in 1921. In each of those households there was an empty place at the dinner table, just as there were hundreds of thousands of empty places in the homes of parents, siblings, and lovers. … [Read more...] about Destiny

The May 5, 1920, headline in the Los Angeles Times for the recurring “Flash” column about Hollywood read, “Blanche Going Abroad.” In the short item, the correspondent bemoaned, in her slightly purple prose: “We shan’t have a single star left in our American firmament if the emigration of our … [Read more...] about The Deadlier Sex

Director King Vidor (1894–1982) had a long and distinguished career in both silent and sound films, but his masterpiece is unquestionably The Crowd. Within the simple framework of the life of an ordinary man trying to make his way in the big city, Vidor created a landmark American film. Vidor … [Read more...] about The Crowd

British director Anthony Asquith is best remembered today for his elegant film adaptations of plays by George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Terence Rattigan, and also for the star-studded international melodramas he made at the end of his career, such as The VIPS (1963) and The Yellow … [Read more...] about A Cottage on Dartmoor

Cinema, as it ages, does not remain merely art and entertainment but also evolves into a panoply of unique cultural qualities—captured time, shared memory, social evidence, cured history sliced for sandwiches, sociopolitical realities fermented into nostalgic headtrips. The range of organic … [Read more...] about Cosmic Voyage