Dirk Bogarde on TCM
Strangely, Dirk Bogarde never became a major star in the United States. I’m sure he was well known in the US in the ’50s and ’60s, but he wasn’t the superstar he was in Britain or the top star he was internationally. Perhaps Bogarde just didn’t care for Hollywood stardom — certainly not when in Europe he got to work for the likes of Joseph Losey, Luchino Visconti, Alain Resnais, Liliana Cavani, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, John Schlesinger, Anthony Asquith, and the now all-but-forgotten but generally capable Basil Dearden.
Anyhow, today is Dirk Bogarde day as Turner Classic Movies continues with its "Summer Under the Stars" series, which features two TCM premieres later this evening: The Blue Lamp [...]
by Andre Soares | August 10, 2009
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Tags: Basil Dearden, Classic Movies, Darling, Dirk Bogarde, Gay Interest, Harold Pinter, Joseph Losey, Julie Christie, So Long at the Fair, TCM, The Servant, Turner Classic Movies
Joseph Losey at the bfi
Dirk Bogarde, James Fox in The Servant (top); The Damned (bottom)
"Among the greatest things that happened to British cinema were the arrival on our shores of the Korda brothers in the 30s, Losey in the 50s and Kubrick in the 60s," reads the introduction to an upcoming Joseph Losey series, which runs June 1-July 23 at the bfi Southbank in London.
The Wisconsin-born (on Jan. 14, 1909) Ivy Leage-educated Losey became a political refugee following the post-World War II anti-Red hysteria. He fled to Britain where he would remain for the next three decades until his death in 1984.
The most curious thing about the bfi series is an omission: The Go-Between (1971), a scathing attack on social mores [...]
by Andre Soares | May 29, 2009
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Tags: bfi, British Film Institute, Classic Movies, Dirk Bogarde, Joseph Losey, London Screenings, The Damned, The Servant
Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize Speech
"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them," said British playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter, 75, during his Literature Nobel Prize acceptance speech on Wed., Dec. 7.
"You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
Additionally, Pinter described the war in Iraq as "a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law," asserting that "at least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. [...]
by Andre Soares | December 8, 2005
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Tags: George W. Bush, Harold Pinter, Julie Christie, Politics, The Caretaker, The Comfort of Strangers, The Go-Between, The Servant, Theater, Tony Blair
