Let Us Live (John Brahm, 1939)

Playing at Harvard Film Archive on November 7. – EK

This extraordinarily grim tale of an innocent cab driver called Brick (Henry Fonda) who, on the eve of his marriage to Mary (Maureen O'Sullivan), is mistakenly identified by eyewitnesses as a robber and murderer, prefigures Fonda’s similar role in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, made two decades later. Yet in its pessimism and poignancy, it surpasses that later take on the themes of mistaken identity, fate and the threats lurking behind civilized facades.

Abbas Kiarostami's Early Shorts and Features on Criterion Blu-ray

I have written a long essay to accompany a Criterion three-disc set featuring the early work of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, produced between 1970 and 1989. This release relaunches the Eclipse series for the home video label, with Imogen Sara Smith serving as the series new editor. 

All of the titles have been restored in 2K by the renowned Bologna-based film restoration laboratory, L’Immagine Ritrovata. 

* * *

Three Wise Girls (William Beaudine, 1932)

Playing at Harvard Film Archive on November 14, 2025. This note written for that occasion. – EK

Three Wise Girls (1932)

Director: William Beaudine

A luminous Jean Harlow received her first top billing in this pleasurable pre-Code film, made in the popular subgenre of the country-blonde-making-it-big-in-New-York—only to be exposed to the emptiness of success. The film is directed by old Hollywood’s most indefatigable workhorse, William Beaudine, who is credited with somewhere between 400 and 500 films—including masterpieces like Sparrows and cult oddities such as Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. François Truffaut had a soft spot for this imaginative craftsman’s B movies, praising their “charm” and “modesty”—qualities that also apply to the comedy/drama Three Wise Girls. This is one of Beaudine’s classiest and wittiest works from the 1930s, a time when he still had access to stronger material—this script written by Agnes Christine Johnston, who explores the question of virtue versus career, with sharp dialogue penned by Frank Capra’s regular collaborator, Robert Riskin. Among other things, the film includes a memorable lesson on how to “forget about your hips when you walk,” since “they know how to take care of themselves.”

Kalagh [The Crow] (Bahram Beyzaie, 1977)

From the new issue of Sight and Sound (September 2025), dedicated to "More Hidden Gems", here's my pick for a hidden gem that deserves to be restored and revived. – EK

The story of The Movie Orgy as told by Joe Dante to Alex Fitch

The story of making The Movie Orgy as told to I'm Ready for My Close-Up FM radio show host Alex Fitch. This is my transcription of the radio program. TMO plays today (July 27, 2025) in resorted version in London. – EK

The Movie Orgy [was] the first film that I ever did. It used to run seven hours. It is made entirely of found footage. It came about because in the late 60s, there was a lot of interest in "camp" movies. Susan Sontag's essay had come out and people were discussing the issue. The 1943 Batman serial was released as an entire package. You would go and you would sit in the theatre and you'd watch five hours of chapter plays and you would see all the cheating that went on from the end of chapter two to the beginning of chapter three. "Wait a minute, he got hit by a truck at the end of chapter two but in the beginning of chapter three he rolls away from the truck because they figured after the week went by the kids wouldn't remember." Anyway, it was very funny and it was also interestingly very racist because it was World War II production.

Great Expectations at the Cinémathèque suisse [in French]

Pool of London

Sélection de films britanniques d'après-guerre (1945-1960), en partenariat avec le Festival du film de Locarno à la Cinémathèque suisse.

Avec une rétrospective titrée Great Expectations, le Locarno Film Festival présente, cette année, 45 films britanniques réalisés entre la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et 1960. Dès sa première édition, le festival avait manifesté un réel intérêt pour le cinéma britannique et avait décerné son prix principal à Hunted (1952) de Charles Crichton. La sélection de Locarno – dont plusieurs titres soigneusement choisis seront projetés à Lausanne – célèbre les années marquantes et l’âge d'or du cinéma britannique.

Four Sided Triangle (Terence Fisher, 1953)

Programme note on Terence Fisher's 1953 film, Four Sided Triangle, whose restoration premiered at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2025.

One of the most distinctive British directors to emerge in the 1950s, Terence Fisher built a cinematic world around the Frankenstein syndrome—duplication through irresponsible science. In this key manifestation of that theme, Freud, the Holy Scriptures, and pulp literature form an unholy alliance. Based on a 1949 novel by William F. Temple, the film is delivered directly to the camera and told in flashback, the latter being a favourite device of Fisher’s in the 1950s. It follows two Cambridge graduates who build a replication machine. When the woman they both love—American blonde Barbara Payton—chooses one of them, the other scientist clones her. Of course, the experiment goes horribly wrong. Early Fisher is a melodrama of extremes, with a perverse depiction of the violence inherent in loving too much, loving unknowingly, loving in the dark.

Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema Book

 Great Expectations

British Postwar Cinema, 1945-1960

Published to coincide with the retrospective at the 

78th Locarno Film Festival (2025)

order the book here

It is not an inflated statement to say that among Western European national cinemas, British cinema of the studio era remains one of the least explored internationally. A cinema that was once critically celebrated, consistently presented at international film festivals, and widely distributed – from the best cinemas in Paris to Tehran – epitomised a “golden age” that weakened and fell out of fashion with the arrival of later movements, such as the British New Wave. While recent academic studies of the period in question have been astonishingly rich, the actual act of screening these films has been rare and far between.

The director who wasn’t there: Mohammad Rasoulof on The Seed of the Sacred Fig

 “I am very close to nature. I spend a great deal of time in the mountains. If Iran becomes a free country one day, I’d love to make wildlife documentaries,” says Mohammad Rasoulof, who fled the country last year, crossing the mountainous terrain of western Iran on foot with nothing, not even a passport (which had been confiscated). He sought refuge in Germany and added the final touches there to The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which premiered in Cannes last May. The man who could have been the David Attenborough of Iran is, until further notice, one of the foremost clandestine filmmakers from that country. “For now, the freedom and dignity of man are my top priorities,” he says. “I keep asking myself why a system allows itself to do this to us.”

Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945-1960

Retrospective at Locarno Film Festival 2025

Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema

1945-1960

Though not quite the “lost continent” it was once called, British cinema still remains under-explored by international audiences. Featuring 45 titles, this retrospective celebrates some of the defining years of British cinema—a “golden age” of sorts— structured around the question of Britishness and life in the British Isles as reflected through its postwar cinema.

Presenting both major classics and some lesser-known, if equally worthy, titles, across a wide range of genres – comedies, melodramas, crime films, and literary adaptations – this selection focuses solely on contemporary films (no period pieces, WWII narratives, or fantastical premises) and pointedly excludes the New Wave and Kitchen Sink movements whose early years overlapped with the period covered here. Although the retrospective includes a handful of documentaries for context, the primary focus remains on narrative films.