New York's last best strike at Hollywood:
If there was ever a moment that New York might—just might—have reclaimed the film industry from Hollywood, it was with the coming of sound.
Bio: David Propson is deputy editor at THE WEEK magazine. He was previously cultural editor for the New York Sun.
If there was ever a moment that New York might—just might—have reclaimed the film industry from Hollywood, it was with the coming of sound. In 1930, after all, New York was still the biggest center of trained dramatic actors and actresses—people who could properly speak the increasingly sophisticated dialogue that was being produced by talented playwrights-turned-screenwriters. More
Posted on July 13th, 2010 9:53am
Though made in 1929, The Docks of New York takes place decades earlier—that is, in a waterfront of the imagination, home (as the titles put it) to “strange cargo and stranger men.” As characters pick their way across fog-covered piers or clamber up rickety ladders to sleeping quarters, you can almost feel the tide giving every scene a gentle sway.
Here, in a single raucous night, a sailor (George Bancroft) fishes an attempted suicide out of the river, discovers that she has a questionable past, marries her anyway, and takes her to bed intending to desert her the next morning. More
Posted on June 25th, 2010 4:51pm
A genuinely evocative gloss on a gritty, edgy Brooklyn that’s not long gone yet already irretrievable, Vicente Rodriguez Ortega’s Freddy's also a casually amusing introduction to the complicated power struggles between hipsters, oldsters, bankers, and developers that define a lot of the northwestern chunk of the borough today. More
Posted on June 11th, 2010 1:21pm
