The Big Picture Magazine
Gloves are an intensely intimate item of clothing, used to protect one of the most expressive and personal body parts – from cold, from hurt and from unwanted attention. A Nightmare On Elm Street – the seminal 1980’s horror film from schlockmeister Wes Craven which changed the teenager-in-peril franchise forever – transmogrified the glove into an […]
Anything Peter Lorre and Humphrey Bogart have to hide from the Nazis, and Sydney Greenstreet and Ingrid Bergman would give their eyes to own, is certain to be an important onscreen object – but Casablanca‘s letters of transit exceed any normal measure of cinematic significance. They are perhaps the most evocative items in film. And […]
A word in your shell-like: when you take a walk around Lumberton USA keep your eyes peeled and your nose to the ground. You never know what you might find lying around. In David Lynch’s Blue Velvet young Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle Maclachlan) stumbled upon an opening to a strange world in the form of a […]
When Daniel Craig strode out of the surf wearing those blue swimming trunks and announced himself to the world as the new James Bond, Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale (2006) became an instant hit. With Gary Oldman’s first appearance in his heavy, horn-rimmed spectacles in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the visual appeal is more muted but, […]
Once upon a time, there was a plaid overnight case… It may not have the heft of a dinosaur bone or the bite of a trained leopard, but the plaid (that’s tartan, to UK readers) overnight case in What’s Up Doc? is a far more effective spur to action than anything in Howard Hawks’s Bringing […]
As The Lavender Hill Mob – one of the most glorious gems in the Ealing crown – enjoys a 60th anniversary re-release, Scott Jordan Harris takes a look at the odd little object at the center of this hilarious heist spoof – the gold Eiffel Towers. When a calculating bank clerk and an opportunistic artist […]
In the French film industry satire Irma Vep, the Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung plays herself, an Asian movie star who has arrived in Paris to star in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic silent film serial Les Vampires (1915) as eccentric director Rene Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud) believes that no France actress can match the […]
There is surely something of the War on Terror in the Coen brothers’ big screen version of the 1968 Charles Portis novel, True Grit. This enduring Western tale – already filmed, with John Wayne as US Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn, in 1969 – follows a manhunt in late 19th Century Arkansas and Oklahoma, a quest […]
Many of the movies’ most memorable murderers wear masks. Those murderers, though, are generally the one-dimensional stalkers of slasher movies and those masks are usually worn for their benefit, not ours. Hannibal Lecter’s mask is forced upon him – for our protection. Transferred from one maximum security cell to another, Lecter is trussed inside a […]