Filmically Perfect

What do you get when you combine Doc Savage, Thomas Pynchon, Orson Welles, H.G. Wells, Saturday Matinee Serials, Rock ‘N’ Roll, “B” Westerns, brain surgery, and Red & Black Lectroids? One of the best, most enduring and most neglected perfect movies of all time. The loyal following for this movie surely rivals The Rocky Horror Picture Show, albeit with less costuming and no toast being thrown at th...

Near the very end of the SIlent Era, just a month before Warner Bros. turned the film world upside down with The Jazz Singer, F. W. Murnau’s lyrical cinematic tone-poem Sunrise was released. It is appropriate that this film ushered out the era of purely visual film language, for they just couldn’t get much better or purer than this. For the uninitiated, we also discuss the world of the Silent Cine...

“Have you ever had Deja Vu?” “I’ll check with the kitchen...” answers Bill Murray’s befuddled host as Bill wanders through one of his many February Second go-arounds in Harold Ramis’s wonderful fantasy comedy. A film that has not only demonstrated an enviable lasting power, but has altered the very meaning of the words “groundhog day” in our popular lexicon!

On this “very special” episode of Filmically Perfect, the Film Guys sit down with Niki Dakota to discuss some of those terminologies seen in the credits of films that make you scratch your head and go “Hmmm...” Also, the shocking truth about beloved color films like Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz--that they were actually shot in Black and White!!

Who would’ve cast light comic, later to be known as “everyone’s favorite dad,” Fred MacMurray as the lustful, loathsome insurance man Walter Neff? It was Billy Wilder, who also cast Barbara Stanwyck as the amoral Phyllis Dietrichson, in this adaptation of pulp favorite James M. Cain’s novel, a book that he originally could not get sold! Listen in as we discuss this film that opened the floodgates...

This little bend in the road allows us to relax and prove that even though these films aren’t “perfect” we still love them! Strangler of the Swamp shows that a talented director (Frank Wisbar) can still make a fascinating film even though he has no money. The Girl Can’t Help It, Frank Tashlin’s mad live-action, rock and roll cartoon, may actually end up on our Perfect Movie List--the jury is still...

What can one say about The Wizard of Oz that hasn’t already been said? A Technicolor fantasy from the high-point of “The Golden Age of Hollywood” whose disaster-laden production would itself make a great movie! A film so ingrained in our psyche that the slightest reference to it in books, in other films and even on t-shirts and bumper stickers brings back a flood of memories. The witch may be dead...

Starring John Wayne in his eighth (or so) cinematic outing with “a guy who just makes westerns”--Ford’s own self-deprecating assessment. The Searchers is a beautiful and brutal film, running the gamut from familial love to the darkest racism. And John Ford, at a time in his career when many are resting on their laurels, pushed into new territory, reinventing the western and giving us one of the mo...

In 1951, director Robert Wise and Producer Julian Blaustein created one of the ultimate science-fiction classics, whose powerful message has not been diminished by the passing years or the onslaught of computer technology. The film’s message of the need for peace in the face of nuclear annihilation rings eerily true in our post-modern ears in these supposedly more enlightened times. Plus, it’s jus...