Into the Red River: Adolphe Menjou Turns on John Cromwell

John Cromwell's Caged (1950) will play as part of Red & Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist at 79th Locarno Film Festival, August 2026. — EK

Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry

Tuesday, October 21, 1947

House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities, Washington D.C.

Humphrey Bogart: "I'm No Communist!"

Transcribed from Photoplay, March 1948, Vol. 32, No. 4. A segment of this I have used in my upcoming, six-episode podcast about Hollywood Blacklist, to be released in June 2026. — EK

As the guy said to the warden, just before he was hanged: “This will teach me a lesson I’ll never forget.”

No, sir, I'll never forget the lesson that was taught to me in the year 1947, at Washington, D. C. When I got back to Hollywood, some friends sent me a mounted fish and underneath it was written: "If I hadn't opened my big mouth, I wouldn't be here."

The New York Times, the Herald Tribune and other reputable publications editorially had questioned the House Committee on Un-American Activities, warning that it was infringing on free speech. When a group of us Hollywood actors and actresses said the same thing, the roof fell in on us. In some fashion, I took the brunt of the attack. Suddenly, the plane that had flown us East became "Bogart's plane," carrying "Bogart's group." For once, top billing became embarrassing.

British Postwar Cinema: Great Expectations at BFI Southbank

Turn the Key Softly

Notes written for the monthly programme of BFI Southbank, May 2026. In May and June some of these films are also playing at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in LA, Filmhaus Nürnberg in Nuremberg, and Filmoteca Española in Madrid. – EK

Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema

Handpicked highlights from a recent retrospective at Locarno, revealing the humanism, exuberance, and existentialist edge of British classics.

From its very first edition, the 79-year-old Locarno Film Festival showed a genuine interest in British films, culminating in Hunted (1952) winning the festival’s top prize. Last year at the Swiss festival, we revisited that tradition with a retrospective structured around the question of life in Britain as reflected in postwar films set in contemporary times. This handpicked selection from that larger programme showcases precious 35mm prints from the collection of BFI National Archive and traces different shades of popular cinema from a golden period – films grounded in reality yet shaped by distinct generic, authorial, and formal convictions. Be it a comedy or a crime film, the shadow of the war continues to loom over characters’ motives and scars the urban landscapes they inhabit, where life and its meagre joys remain rationed. Including several rare gems, these works chart a nation’s rise from the ashes of conflict and follow its faltering steps toward reconstruction.

British Postwar Cinema: Great Expectations at Filmoteca Española

It Always Rains on Sunday

Notes written for the monthly catalogue of Filmoteca Española on Great Expectations, currently screening in Madrid as part of the May–June 2026 programme. — Ehsan Khoshbakht

1945 was a watershed moment for Britain. To this day, it is debated whether it marked the beginning of greatness or the start of decline. A 45-film retrospective at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival explored that postwar landscape. As Ian Christie, a prominent historian of British cinema, told me, postwar Britain was a place you would rather not be: grim, desolate, broken, grey, and somehow lost, after the wartime spirit of unity had become an old, undesired rag, quickly discarded.

At the same time, Britain—or rather British cinema—was brimming with greatness on screen, a greatness that, beyond a few household names, has remained criminally marginal. The films of this era reflect the victor’s landscape of loss and displacement. They chart a nation’s rise from the ashes of conflict and follow its faltering steps toward reconstruction against the backdrop of the British Empire’s decline.

A conversation with Henry K Miller about the British postwar cinema season at BFI Southbank

The Great Expectations season is underway at BFI Southbank. The Financial Times’ Henry K Miller has penned a fine piece about this smaller selection from a British postwar cinema retrospective of the same name, originally curated for the Locarno Film Festival (August 2025), where the full 45-film programme premiered. He asked me several questions before publishing his piece, and I reproduce my responses here to provide further clarity about the nature of the season and its origins. This was an email exchange.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2026: Easy Living with Mitchell Leisen

Mitchell Leisen showing Ray Milland how to kiss Jean Arthur. Publicity set photo from Easy Living (1937)

Easy Living with Mitchell Leisen

Il Cinema Ritrovao XL retrospective

In a light, sophisticated no-man’s-land (yes, largely inhabited by women) between romantic comedy, screwball, and pure Paramount aestheticism, the cinema of Mitchell Leisen comes to life. A former silent-era costume and set designer, Leisen became renowned for classics such as Easy Living, Hold Back the Dawn, and Midnight, and was the only Hollywood director to sign his name in his films’ credits. No auteur theory was needed to recognise his unmistakable qualities: an effortless narrative flow, impeccable design, and sparkling, innuendo-laced dialogue – sometimes written by Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, or Charles Brackett – alongside heroines as charming as they were uncompromising. In his films, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, and Jean Arthur radiated wit, grace, and razor-sharp comic timing. They twisted conventions as their encounters with men – often played by Ray Milland or Fred MacMurray – spiralled from mishap to romantic resolution. This Il Cinema Ritrovato tribute presents a selection of Leisen’s classics in restored versions (courtesy of Universal), alongside rarely screened archival prints.

Red and Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist

Red and Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist is the title and the theme of the upcoming retrospective I have curated for the 79th edition of Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland.

The retrospective presents not only the key titles of the blacklist period but also traces the wartime origins of concern over communist infiltration in Hollywood and its international aftermath. The programme features nearly 50 titles, including feature films, shorts, documentaries, newsreels, and animation.

This retrospective differs from previous surveys of the same subject in three ways:

‘The most culturally Iranian of all Iranians died so far from Iran’: the towering legacy of Bahram Beyzaie

 

My Guardian obituary on the late, great Bahram Beyzaie can be read here.

RIP Bahram Beyzaie (1938-2025)

Bahram Beyzaie

One of the guiding lights of Iranian modernist cinema since 1969, and an equally invaluable force in theater, literature, and history, Bahram Beyzaie passed away yesterday in California, where he had been based for the past 15 years.

For public screenings of his films, I have previously reviewed at least five of his works, which I share again here in memory of one of Iranian cinema’s most brilliant figures.

• Ragbar [Downpour] (1972)

• Safar [Journey] (1972)

• Gharibeh va Meh [The Stranger and the Fog] (1974)

• Kalagh [Crow aka Raven] (1977)

• Cherike-ye Tara [The Ballad of Tara] (1979)

Ragbar [Downpour] (Bahram Beyzaie, 1972)

In this, one of the most accessible and beloved Iranian New Wave films, a young teacher is sent to a school in the impoverished south end of Tehran, where he falls in love with his student’s elder sister, and directs all his energy into helping the students put on a stage show. Moving, witty, and brilliantly directed in an energetic and unusual combination of neorealism and political symbolism, Bahram Beyzaie’s first feature was realized with a shoestring budget but managed with astounding success to blend its director’s roots in theater, literature, and film history with a story that, even to this day, resonates powerfully with Iranians. — EK

Ladies in Retirement (Charles Vidor, 1941)

Based on the Broadway play, Ladies in Retirement is one of Columbia Pictures’ very few Gothic films, and one of the finest of the genre in the 1940s. Ida Lupino plays a spinster housekeeper and live-in companion who brings her “crazy” sisters (Elsa Lanchester and Edith Barrett) to the secluded mansion, later joined by their shady nephew (Louis Hayward) whose main interest is in the wealth of the gullible lady of the house. 

Masterpieces of the Iranian New Wave, Part II at the Barbican, London

Secrets of the Jinn Valley Treasure

Following the Barbican Centre’s sell-out programme Masterpieces of the Iranian New Wave in February 2025, the second part will present an even richer array of rare cinematic gems, many of them never before seen in the UK.

Featuring numerous new restorations, this expanded foray into the classics of Iranian cinema that first brought worldwide admiration to the nation’s film culture will include the world premiere of the newly restored director’s-cut version of Ebrahim Golestan’s satirical film Secrets of the Jinn Valley Treasure. Starring Parviz Sayyad, Mary Apick, and Shahnaz Tehrani, this long-unseen version has been restored by Cineteca di Bologna in partnership with the Iran Heritage Foundation.

Interview with Shadi Abdel Salam

Conducted by Tehran International Film Festival and published in their daily journal, November 28, 1974. Originally in Persian. Abdel Salam’s words are glamorous, barren, and true—like his film Al-Mummia. The translation is mine. — EK

Al-Mummia, your first feature film, made in 1969 and received great critical attention, has not yet been screened in Egypt. Can you explain this?

Shadi Abdel Salam: I don't really know why the film wasn't shown. Maybe the authorities are afraid that people won't understand it. Anyway, my job is to make a film, not to navigate the labyrinths of bureaucracy. Currently, there isn't even a copy of this film in Egypt to participate in festivals.

Sight & Sound | The best films of 2025

The Voice of Hind Rajab

The annual “Top 10,” published on Sight & Sound, with some additional titles I have seen since the submission of the initial list. These have been marked with [x].

Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival | Restored section's introduction and notes

Introduction to and programme notes for the "restored and beautiful" section at the 14th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, December 2025. — EK

The films in this section, spanning six formative decades of cinema history, start and end in the Middle East, offering a sense of the resilience of its people. The canonical documentary masterpiece Grass (1925) follows three Americans traveling among the nomadic tribes of Iran, while Ghazl El-Banat (1985) adopts an insider’s point of view in which the great Arab filmmaker Jocelyne Saab gently removes the shrapnel from the wounded body of her hometown, Beirut.

If Ghazl El-Banat is its director’s finest work, then Craig’s Wife (1936) is the masterpiece of American director Dorothy Arzner. A tale of a toxic lady of the house, no melodrama has so precisely and exhilaratingly explored the intertwined themes of house, territory, and power.

My Sister Eileen (Alexander Hall, 1942)

Based on a play by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov—which itself was adapted from a series of autobiographical short stories by Ruth McKenney—My Sister Eileen was later remade by Columbia in 1955 as a CinemaScope musical directed by Richard Quine. It follows the misadventures of two Ohio sisters in their search for love, fortune and an apartment to rent in New York. Rosalind Russell plays the older sister, determined to pursue a career in journalism, while also finding herself both chaperoning and competing with her younger sister Eileen (Janet Blair), whose dream of becoming an actress draws all the wrong people to their cramped basement apartment.

None Shall Escape (André De Toth, 1944)

Playing at Harvard Film Archive on December 8 and 14. — EK

A rare exposé of Nazi atrocities made while the crimes were still ongoing, None Shall Escape is boldly framed as a speculative post-war tribunal that revisits the actions of a German schoolteacher (Alexander Knox) turned Nazi and the horrors he inflicted on a Polish village. Impressed by André De Toth’s Hungarian films, Harry Cohn hired the director after his arrival in the US in 1940. Following a routine B-movie assignment, De Toth—who had personally witnessed and even filmed the Nazi occupation of Poland—was given None Shall Escape; its title echoing President Roosevelt’s pledge of postwar justice.

Arbaeen (Nasser Taghvai, 1970)

Arbaeen (Nasser Taghvai, 1970)

During the annual mourning ritual held on the 40th day after the martyrdom of the Shia Imam, Hossein, men in the southern city of Bushehr rhythmically strike their chests in time with the recited elegies. In this short documentary shot in colour (Mehrdad Fakhimi's work), director Nasser Taghvai uses the sounds of environment to create a rhythmic editing, in sync with the movements and solemn strikes of the bare-chested men. There are occasional digressions to symbolic cutaways – common in Iran New Wave – of people outside and even a pair of dead fishes washed ashore.

Cheshmeh [The Spring] (Arby Ovanessian, 1971)

A film of unravelled mysteries and repressed longings, in Cheshmeh the nonlinear narrative, moving freely in time, is set in a Muslim community but is centered around a Christian woman who is the love interest of two men and married to a third. The interwoven fates are destined to end in tragedy, but the film leaves what potentially comprises a tragedy off-frame. Despite its richness in Armenian details (which was the cultural heritage of its director Arby Ovanessian), the film shares a significant number of threads with the Iranian New Wave films, particularly in its sense of isolation and fear of strangers, but also sets the hypnotic, numbing pace that the works of some of Ovanessian's contemporaries were going to be known for. 

The Spat-on Messenger: Youssef Chahine in Conversation with Tom Luddy

Youssef Chahine

Bologna, June 2019. I spotted an Arab name on the badge of the hotel's night porter. When I asked, he turned out to be one—an Egyptian. I mentioned to him that Youssef Chahine's films would be playing in Bologna for the next few days. His face lit up. A floodgate of emotions, about Egypt, his past, and cinema opened, temporarily drowned him in nostalgia, passion and regret. He shared stories of Chahine, of his beloved Alexandria. He even cursed the extra who had forgotten to remove his wristwatch during the battle scene of Salah Eddin (a film about the Crusade, from the Arabs' point of view). According to him, by doing so he had prevented the film from entering the Oscar competition.

Very few directors can make that impact on their people, endowing them with a sense of pride and identity. Chahine's generosity with emotions is contagious. In reaction to a Chahine film, it is as legit to dance or holler as it is to write an essay. In Bologna the scholar and musician Amal Guermazi decided to sing, as her introduction to Al Ard.

Sometimes effortlessly Ophulsian (especially in the '70s, in the fluidity of his carousel-like narratives) and sometimes dialectically Chaplinesque, Chahine brought together the seemingly irreconcilable worlds existing in 20th-century Egypt and gave them a sense of harmony. There was a wise calmness about him. He had every reason to be angry, but instead he gave a sad smile which became the Chahine cinema.

Aligned with Pan-Arabic sentiments, he looked beyond Egypt, too. However, his Algeria-set Djamilah (1958) is nearly impossible to see in a cinema. Telling the story of the Algerian Independence War fighter Djamila Bouhired, it has been absent from recent Chahine retrospectives. It's an anti-French film, in exactly the same manner that hundreds of western films, including some French ones, have been anti-Arab. But it's more than just tit-for-tat—it is a celebration of change in the Arab world, done in the best of Hollywood traditions which Chahine adored. Find the film and show it!  (For the Chahine tribute at Il Cinema Ritrovato, we tracked down a print in Albania but the subtitles were so big, covering almost half the screen, in the process turning them into Godardian onscreen statements.)