Franklin J Schaffner's Papillon is quite possibly the definitive prison escape drama. Not as thrilling as The Great Escape, nor as emotionally cathartic as The Shawshank Redemption, its unflinching emphasis on the barbarism of "civilised" societies is nevertheless unparalleled. Significantly, the only characters to display any real kindness in this film are the social ...
Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft had been playing their respective roles as Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan, on Broadway for some time before director Arthur Penn (The Left-Handed Gun) built a mesmerisingly beautiful film around their layers-deep performances. Duke is astonishing as the deaf, blind, mute Keller, who awakens to an awareness of language under Sullivan's determined ...
Gone with the Wind is a sprawling mosaic of a picture, one of the best-loved and most successful in movie history, but also one of the most frustrating. Wonderfully epic in scope, the decline and fall of the antebellum South as seen through the eyes of feisty, independent and wilful heroine Scarlett O'Hara makes the first half of the picture an absolutely riveting spectacle. From the ...
Papillon Franklin J Schaffner's Papillon is quite possibly the definitive prison escape drama. Not as thrilling as The Great Escape, nor as emotionally cathartic as The Shawshank Redemption, its unflinching emphasis on the barbarism of "civilised" societies is nevertheless unparalleled. Significantly, the only characters to display any real kindness in this ...