Author: Katherine Hofmeyr
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Not a Feminist Film – His Girl Friday
His Girl Friday began life as a Broadway play called The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (both members of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of early 20th century New York intellectuals, and at least one of them a lover of Dorothy Parker’s). In the stage version, journalist Hildy Johnson makes one…
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Do the Right Thing – the Cinema of Heat, Passion and Excess
Do the Right Thing is a perfect companion piece to our upcoming feature, Twelve Angry Men. Sidney Lumet’s not-quite-a-courtroom-drama is set in a single afternoon on the hottest day of the year in a jury room in Chicago in the 1950s. Spike Lee’s urban opera is set over 24 hours on the hottest day of…
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Kind Hearts and Coronets
Ealing Studios and postwar British cinema Plot summary: Louis Mazzini is the son of a penniless Italian opera singer and a young noblewoman whose family, disapproving of her choice of husband, had disowned her. When they refuse her dying wish – to be buried in the family cemetery – Louis determines to do away with…
Not Lost For Words 