Sherlock Holmes seems like a pretty interesting guy, what with the opium addiction, the violin playing, the crime solving, and that long-simmering erotic tension with Dr. John Watson. But Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, despite being a bona fide Guinness record holder for the most commonly portrayed human character in film and TV history, is not one-tenth as interesting as the real-life French master criminal who inspired him. That is the message of a highly entertaining cartoon from Cracked entitled “Sherlock Holmes Is Based On A Real Guy (Who Was Even Cooler).” This brisk, brief bit of animation runs through the life and career of one Eugene Francois Vidocq (1775-1857), a prolific criminal and multiple-prison escapee who wound up as the world’s first private detective and basically jump-started modern criminology. He’s the literal embodiment of the adage that it takes a thief to catch a thief. He...
- 8/11/2016
- by Joe Blevins
- avclub.com
Imitations of Life: The Films of Douglas Sirk (December 23 – January 6) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York gathers a substantial number of the German auteur's classic films together with more obscure titles, some of which may deserve elevation into the higher ranks of his oeuvre. Already, in the past few years, There's Always Tomorrow (1956) has crept up the league table of Sirkian melodrama, mainly because it became easier to see and people recognized that it could stand comparison with All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959), or nearly so.Some Sirk movies will, however, never be quite respectable, but in a way I love them for that. His period movies often dive headlong into Hollywood kitsch in a way that his once-despised weepies mainly avoid. There's a trio of movies playing with George Sanders which exemplify this in their different ways. Summer Storm (1944) was Hollywood's...
- 12/10/2015
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
Imitations of Life: The Films of Douglas Sirk (December 23 – January 6) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York gathers a substantial number of the German auteur's classic films together with more obscure titles, some of which may deserve elevation into the higher ranks of his oeuvre. Already, in the past few years, There's Always Tomorrow (1956) has crept up the league table of Sirkian melodrama, mainly because it became easier to see and people recognized that it could stand comparison with All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959), or nearly so.Some Sirk movies will, however, never be quite respectable, but in a way I love them for that. His period movies often dive headlong into Hollywood kitsch in a way that his once-despised weepies mainly avoid. There's a trio of movies playing with George Sanders which exemplify this in their different ways. Summer Storm (1944) was Hollywood's...
- 12/10/2015
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
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