Tourneur's most postmodern work - a world where navigating through politics is no different than navigating through an ocean of advertisements. Possibly the single most claustrophobic film ever made - never have I seen the Academy ratio used so effectively in closed spaces. Everything here - the cheesy music, the cheap sets - never has banality been so terrifying. There is no freedom and politics no longer have meaning - every cog and wheel is well in motion. Andrews is suffering from intense PTSD - and he comes off as the most sane person in America!

It's probably the most overtly conceptual and political film JT ever made, but he doesn't take any sides - everyone has a ploy, everyone…

I’ll say this as good as any of Tourneur’s more well-known films. A highly paranoid Cold War noir about psychological operations, data mining (which we now know is the most valuable sector of all), predatory lobbying groups, foreign influence, propaganda campaigns, mind viruses, elections that are bought and paid for by the private sector, para-political organizations, the Deep State, etc. There is no escape; the specter of nuclear annihilation and forever-war wafts through the halls of institutional power, which were once thought to be so neat, tidy, emblematic of Lawful Good and humanitarian ideals, but have since revealed themselves to be corrupted so deeply that their sheer banality becomes a form of horror in itself.

There’s the typical red scare…

Em 1983 David Cronenberg fez Videodrome. Grande feito, grande filme, um de seus melhores. Um filme paradigmático, um filme que cristaliza a imagem de uma época e o faz transfigurando todas as outras hipóteses de imagens, textos e ideias que outros artistas e pensadores intuíram para a época em questão, um filme que deixa perplexo, mas de modo algum um filme profético, um filme à frente do seu tempo - o que, por sinal, não é nenhum defeito, apenas é preciso deixar claro o que cada coisa é em relação ao que todas as coisas são.

Em 1958 Jacques Tourneur fez The Fearmakers, que pode ser visto muito grosseiramente como o filme que Cronenberg quis fazer quando fez Videodrome. Há…

this comes out of the paranoid and incoherent political gumbo that the manchurian candidate is also drawing from, but handled with a very dry neoclassical style that is beloved of auteurists, any academic beauty is drained and what is left is the pure rigor of the form, hard and sharp and deceptively simple. the innate conservatism of the fearmakers, like the hysterical liberalism of the manchurian candidate, ends up being accidentally illustrative of deeper fears beyond the polarized cold war lens: fears of consciousness at the mercy of powerful private interests, of a world too complicated, mechanized and bureaucratized and weaponized to be reigned-in by democratic accountability, where individual choice can only exist in the borders created by this vast…

The rare early Cold War era political thriller which hasn’t lost a single ounce of its timeliness, in fact it only seems to gain more in this day and age where statistical inference and machine learning/processing has become almost an ideology in itself. The Fearmakers really strikes at the heart of modern liberal politics, though, because it identifies how the manipulation of this data is essential to power and its acquisition—one of the first to do so—effecting the basis for all paranoiac notions surrounding our institutions and the people chosen to maintain them. It’s been a while since I’ve seen any of Tourneur’s non-Lewton work and I’m pleasantly surprised to see how he excels here around the edges of the…

January 2025: Theme of the Month - American Red Scare Films of the 1940s and 1950s

As I watch more of these anti-Communist propaganda movies, I'm realizing most of them aren't very good. The scripts are too farfetched and the villains cartoonish. By the 60s, a few were better scripted and more complex (The Manchurian Candidate) But these early ones are fairly ludicrous.

To its credit, this one has an unusual spin that links to the growing field of corporate "public relations". But the theme of Commies trying to take over through manipulating public opinion is firmly in place. Dana Andrews plays Alan Eaton, who comes back to his old DC PR/polling firm after 2 years of being tortured and…

Dana Andrews plays a Korean War POW who returns after years of torture and brainwashing to his marketing research business to find that his partner has been killed in a hit & run accident and the business sold out from under him. He reluctantly joins the staff only to discover a conspiracy of corruption in political polling that has wide-reaching implications in Washington D.C. The story is a fascinating one with parallels to today's ethically-challenged times, though it often seems naive in comparison, which only goes to show how far down we've allowed things to go despite the warnings of films like this one. The conspiracy in this film is like kindergarten stuff in today's politically corrupt climate. But the standards…