The Big Picture Magazine
“The living room was still stuffy from last night’s cigars. The windows were closed and the sunshine coming in through the Venetian blinds showed up the dust in the air.” The only time when Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff is shown in broad daylight in Double Indemnity (1944) is when the flashback begins, right before he meets Barbara […]
She rips the sleeve off of a denim shirt and makes herself two bandanas to wear around her neck. She’s dressed in washed-up blue jeans, white cowboy boots and white tank top. She then sits next to an old man with a beat-up white cowboy hat on. She takes off all her jewellery, her earrings, […]
Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), set in 1881, is a complex film about violence in American history and, by extension, in present-day America. It also presents multifaceted reflections on human nature and the construction of legends. William Munny (Eastwood), a former gunfighter and notorious killer, is now a pig farmer in Kansas. In the opening credits […]
In Happiness (1998), the ever-smiling Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), in her neat kitchen, is strongly reminiscent of the female ideal as propagated in American films and commercials of the 1950s and 1960s. However, her affected demeanour und put-on optimism cannot hide the illusion behind the image of the idyllic home that is associated with the American […]