Welcome to The Hidden Movie Palace.
Today more movies are available to more people than every before. Unfortunately, they are often dumped on one of various streaming sites with no curation and little fanfare.
Here I want to cut through the noise and prevent great movies from getting lost in the deluge.
This is not to say I will never write about more popular films or those securely in the canon, but my emphasis will be on helping all of us to make new discoveries.
Herb Jeffries Double Bill: Two-Gun Man From Harlem (1938) and The Bronze Buckaroo (1939)
Both Directed by: Richard C. Kahn I watched this as Part 7 of my 2021 Film Challenge: A Western With a BIPOC Protagonist. Herb Jeffries (who later in life went by Herbert Jeffrey Ball) was most likely the first, and one of the only, Black cowboys on film in the sound era (this despite the fact thatContinue reading “Herb Jeffries Double Bill: Two-Gun Man From Harlem (1938) and The Bronze Buckaroo (1939)”
8. A Western With a BIPOC Protagonist.
The western is probably the genre most tied to white supremacy. Frequently (if not almost exclusively) about white settlers “taming” the frontier, it is not surprising that many consider racism to be the western’s sine qua non. Representations of Native Americans have ranged from faceless hordes that threaten the white family, to unknowable and unpredictableContinue reading “8. A Western With a BIPOC Protagonist.”
Anne of the Indies (1951)
Directed by: Jacques Tourneur I have an interesting relationship with swashbucklers. If you asked me to name my five (well, maybe ten) favorite subgenres, the Swashbuckler would probably be one of them, but if you then asked me to name some unqualified masterpieces in the genre, I would struggle. I could give you The AdventuresContinue reading “Anne of the Indies (1951)”
