Black and White
Films which are either partially or fully black and white
His Girl Friday
The Grant/Russell pair could have made a hundred movies if this one didn’t count as all of them.
The Bishop’s Wife
There isn’t a moment of romantic energy behind the interaction of Niven and Young in The Bishop’s Wife, and not one time that Cary Grant makes us happy to be on his side. Capra used to invite us to wonderful sleepy towns. Henry Koster takes us to one we’d rather sleep off.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Amirpour relishes in not giving us the whole story. The Girl talks about The Beatles like she remembers them but she never mentions how. In cross-examining the image of the chador with this new wave rebel feminist, Amirpour crafts a startling image of repressed terror.
Gojira (1954)
Gojira is all performance. Yes, the monster film’s propensity for overacting is here to some extent, but its images still reflect the power that must be innate in the language we cannot hear, which cannot be ignored any more than Serizawa can ignore the child’s prayer over the radio, calling him to fight destruction with destruction.
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
In Spade we find the perennial dark hero, the guy with toughness stitching up all the broken promises and empty bottles. Here’s the lusty dame with her own agenda. Here’s the story-less plot of dialogic violence. A villain like a plaster figure of deadly sins. A night capped by the hardest goodbye of the movies.