In Praise of Morris Schaffer

Clint is 80, and I must rhapsodize. That’s right, Clint Eastwood, probably unrivaled as the cinema’s greatest living icon, turns 80 today—a mere thirty-four days before the senior Mrs. Bradley—and I can’t think of another filmmaker who, as both an actor and a director, has been involved in so many excellent films, including a disproportionate [...]

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Man and Saruman, Part I

Yeah, I know, I just missed his 88th birthday, which was Thursday, but is there ever a bad time to talk about Christopher Lee? “Not from where I’m standing,” to quote a certain British agent in Lee’s The Man with the Golden Gun. Focusing on the films he made with Hammer and Mario Bava, as [...]

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Bradley’s Hundred #81-90

Continuing the explication of my hundred favorite films, listed on the B100 page accessible above. The Shining (1980): Never mind what Stephen King says, this is perhaps the best adaptation of his work. Jack Nicholson is terrifying as the alcoholic novelist serving as the winter caretaker in a remote hotel, Shelley Duvall is vulnerable as [...]

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Far Away, So Close

The next time your tear ducts need a good workout, treat or subject yourself—depending on your point of view—to Away from Her (2006), the amazingly assured feature-film writing and directing debut of actress Sarah Polley, whose film Go (1999) I loved. At first, I had it confused with Iris (2001), which also concerns a husband [...]

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Interlude 5/23/10

It’s occurred to me that as of this year (wish I had the actual date on a plaque somewhere, or the date I started Richard Matheson on Screen), I have been writing professionally in one form or another for a quarter of a century. First as a book publicist, then a freelancer, then a film [...]

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In the Family Way

I never thought I’d be caught dead watching, let alone writing about, an entire episode of Seth MacFarlane’s animated Fox series Family Guy, because the snippets I’d seen before had totally turned me off. But now that they’ve joined The Simpsons, Futurama, and countless other shows by jumping on the Richard Matheson bandwagon with the [...]

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Hel Is Other People

On Saturday, the wife and I made the obligatory trip to Manhattan’s Film Forum to see the latest restoration of Fritz Lang’s silent SF classic Metropolis, now held over through May 27. For those of you who tuned in late, the film was cut substantially after its 1927 premiere in Berlin, and much of the [...]

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Masters of Adventure

I’ve been trying to decide what, if anything, to write about Frank Frazetta, the legendary fantasy artist who died a week ago at 82.  You see, I’m only really familiar with one aspect of his long and multifaceted career, and I hate to blather on about things I don’t know much about (a fact that [...]

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Court of Much Appeal

During the renaissance of Gothic horror, British beauty Hazel Court worked for both Hammer Films and American International Pictures (AIP), directed by Terence Fisher in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959) and by Roger Corman in The Premature Burial (1962), The Raven (1963), and The Masque of the [...]

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If I Had a Hammer, Part IV

Continuing our idiosyncratic survey of some noteworthy Hammer films and related items. Scars of Dracula (1970): By now, Hammer was clearly wondering what to do with its two main franchises, and provided one of the worst answers in the form of The Horror of Frankenstein (1970). Jimmy Sangster directed a remake of his own script [...]

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