In Sister of the Road, published in 1937, Box-Car Bertha Thompson recounted her life: early years in her mother’s South Dakota boarding house; childhood stays in anarchist communes near Little Rock and Tacoma; hoboing alone, with one of her sisters or one of her lovers; working for a Chicago abortionist; running with a gang of midwest shoplifters; bedding 1500 men — one of whom fathered her daughter — during a two month prostitution stint; hitchhiking around the country collecting data on transient women; working for a pathology clinic in Chicago, running a women’s service bureau in Alabama and becoming secretary of New York City’s Unemployed Women’s Education Association. Continue reading →

Kinky Boots, the 2005 British-American comedy-drama written by Geoff Deane and Tim Firth and directed by Julian Jarrold, was the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical of the same name that just won 6 Tony awards.

The film tells the story of a 5th generation men’s shoe-maker, Charlie Price (played by Joel Edgerton), who inherits the failing family business and struggles to rescue the factory which is at the economic  heart of the little village of Northampton, England. Continue reading →

Nothing  But a Man is the most acclaimed movie you’ve never seen. Released in 1964, it won the San Giorgio Prize at the Venice Film Festival, awarded to films considered especially important for the progress of civilization. It was re-released nearly thirty years later, at which time the Washington Post said of it, “It may be that the best film to come out so far in 1993 was actually made in 1964. [It] is one of the most sensitive films about black life ever made in this country.” One year later it was listed in the National Film Registry. And on its fortieth anniversary it was released on DVD, at which time a critic for DVD Talk said of it, “Brilliant is not a word to be taken lightly, but in the case of 1964’s Nothing But a Man, brilliant barely begins to scratch the surface.” Yet, it was a commercial failure during the three decades after being made. While planned to be shown to integrated audiences, the film would mainly be presented in schools and churches in black communities in sixteen millimeter format. Continue reading →

Several months after Reds was released, American Film magazine usefully published the identities of 32 ‘witnesses’ to the events depicted, whose recollections supplement and are meant to authenticate the film’s narrative. (See below. Biographic links can be found at the Wikipedia entry for Reds) . Though listed in the film’s credits, the witnesses’ names do not accompany their onscreen testimony, as they would in a documentary, leaving the viewer confused. Still, these inconclusive reminiscences, only a fraction of the interviews conducted by Beatty with John Reed’s contemporaries, hint at the film’s rich and complex context while masking the omission of Reed’s life prior to meeting Louise Bryant. Continue reading →

Jerry Lewis is not a filmmaker who has received his due in my opinion. He is an artist and a personality that I must confess to feeling equally fascinated and repelled by and I fear that a sense of balance doesn’t exist in most viewers who are mostly just repelled by him. But I believe my own reaction to that is in keeping with what’s always been Jerry’s own personality, especially around the time when he made the film you’ll see tonight, which is this curious mix of self-love and self-loathing. Continue reading →