Great Read: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian

The first volume in Del Rey’s awesome Fully Illustrated Library of Robert E. Howard.

The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian

• Author:  Robert E. Howard
• Published:  2003
• Contents Originally Published:  mostly 1932-1934 in Weird Tales
• Publisher:  Del Rey
• Pages:  463
• First Line  (sort-of):  ”Over shadowy spires and gleaming towers lay the ghostly darkness and silence that runs into dawn.”
• Film Version:  Conan the Barbarian  (1982  -  *** – dir. John Milius), Conan the Destroyer  (1984  -  **  -  dir. Richard Fleischer), Conan the Barbarian  (2011  -  *.5  -  dir. Marcus Nispel)
• First Read:  Fall, 2006

 

The Nighthawk Awards: 1928-29

You can read more about this year in film here.  The Best Picture race is discussed here, with reviews of all the nominees.  There are the categories, followed by all the films with their nominations, then the Globes, where I split the major awards by Drama and Comedy, followed by a few lists at the very end.  If there’s a film you expected to see and didn’t, check the very bottom.  Films in red won the Oscar in that category.  Films in blue were nominated.  But remember, there were only a handful of Oscar categories in this, the second year of the Oscars (and, in fact, several fewer than the year before).

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture

1. Nosferatu
2. The Wind
3. Steamboat Bill Jr
4. L’Argent
5. Lonesome

 

Best Adapted Screenplay: 1928-29

One of the brilliant scenes in Murnau’s Nosferatu that’s not in the original source.

My Top 5:

1. Nosferatu
2. L’Argent
3. The Wind
4. The Docks of New York
5. Street Angel

Note:  There is only a top 5 for this year.  There were more than enough adapted screenplays to have a Top 10 if the quality of the scripts had merited it.  They do not.  And there wouldn’t even have been 5 if I hadn’t seen L’Argent last week.

 

The Nighthawk Awards: 1927-28

You can read more about this year in film here.  The Best Picture race is discussed here, with reviews of all the nominees.  There are the categories, followed by all the films with their nominations, then the Globes, where I split the major awards by Drama and Comedy, followed by a few lists at the very end.  If there’s a film you expected to see and didn’t, check the very bottom.  Films in red won the Oscar in that category.  Films in blue were nominated.  But remember, there were only a handful of Oscar categories in this, the first year of the Oscars.

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture

1. Sunrise
2. Metropolis
3. The Man Who Laughs
4. The Circus
5. 7th Heaven

 

Best Adapted Screenplay: 1927-28

One of the beautiful and haunting images from Sunrise. Nothing to do with the script, but great to look at.

My Top 10:

1. Sunrise
2. 7th Heaven
3. The Man Who Laughs
4. The Love of Jeanne Ney
5. The Cat and the Canary
6. Tartuffe
7. Sadie Thompson
8. The Lodger
9. Laugh Clown Laugh
10. The Scarlet Letter

 

Revisiting Childhood Movies: a new series

Look forward to a review. It won’t be as complimentary as one from Seth MacFarlane would be.

Why, you ask, are you starting a new series when you just started two new ones and have barely done any?

Well, for two reasons.

The first is that I had this idea before I even started the two current series (Adapted Screenplay and the Nighthawk Awards) and I want to be able to parse it in at certain points.

The second is that those two series are taking an agonizingly long time to write.  So, along with the Great Reads, I want something to be appearing other than long stretches without posts.  Plus, these are easier to write, and so they can be popped out quicker than the other posts.

So what is this series?  Well, I want to go back and look at a certain group of films.  These are all films which I watched a lot and had opinions regarding before I ever started thinking critically about film, before I had a rating system, before I started writing down all the movies I had seen.  So, to qualify, these have to be films that I first saw before February of 1989, and preferably saw a lot before then.  So, for the most part, films from the early to mid 80′s; I can’t imagine anything released after 1987 will qualify.  They will also be films I haven’t already written about with a critical eye.  So, there won’t be new reviews of Star Wars and Raiders, because what’s the point of that.  Some of them will be films I loved as a kid (Battlestar Gallactica, say), some will be ones I didn’t love so much as a kid (Superman III, perhaps) and some will be ones I enjoyed when I was younger, but dropped my opinion considerably when looking at them from a more critical eye (see that poster up above, for example).  Some of them will be movies I haven’t seen in a really long time that I’ll be going back to (The Secret of Nimh comes to mind).  But I’ll be trying to look at them anew and I’ll be writing about them both in terms of what I thought as a kid and what I think now.  They’re not Oscar nominees and not **** films (probably – I don’t know for certain what I will write about, we’ll have to see how it goes).  They’re fun films from when I was a kid.

So, while I try to get back to finishing reading The Man Who Laughs and getting my post on 1927-28 done, next up will be the first RCM film: Clash of the Titans.

 

The Nighthawk Awards: 1912-26

You can read more about this year in film here.  Since this is the pre-Oscar era, clearly there are no Best Picture reviews to link to.  So, without further ado, here are the initial Nighthawk Awards, covering the entire pre-Oscar era.  There are the categories, followed by all the films with their nominations, then the Globes, where I split the major awards by Drama and Comedy, followed by a few lists at the very end.  If there’s a film you expected to see and didn’t, check the very bottom.

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture:

1. Greed
2. The Battleship Potemkin
3. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
4. The Gold Rush
5. The Phantom of the Opera

note:  A good year for films because there are so many.  The next five, in order, are The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Birth of a Nation, Faust, The Last Laugh and Foolish Wives and the **** films go all the way down to #16.

 

Best Adapted Screenplay: the pre-Oscar years (1912-1926)

I grabbed this banner from altscreen.com. They deserve credit, because it’s awesome.

My Top 10 Adapted Screenplays:

1. Greed  (1925)
2. The Phantom of the Opera  (1925)
3. The Hunchback of Notre Dame  (1923)
4. Faust  (1926)
5. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse  (1921)
6. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  (1920)
7. Ingeborg Holm  (1913)
8. Oliver Twist  (1922)
9. The Birth of a Nation  (1915)
10. The Avenging Conscience  (1914)

 

Best Adapted Screenplay and the Nighthawk Awards (a new series)

So, having completed the Year in Film and The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture series, this is what is coming up now.  I will be doing two different things.  Like with those two series, both will cover the same year, in back-to-back posts.

The first, in each year, will be Best Adapted Screenplay.  I had considered doing another history of the Academy Awards, focusing on the Best Adapted Screenplay category.  But I want to expand on that – dealing with films that were nominated by other groups (WGA, BAFTA, Globes, etc) as well as scripts that I feel were among the best and weren’t nominated by any groups.  But I won’t just talking about the films – but also the original source material and the adaptations.  So, I won’t be doing one on Original Screenplay – this is a combination of literature and film all at once.

This is why there hasn’t been a post yet – because the first one, covering the pre-Oscar years has been taking a long time.

 

For Love of Film: Ealing Comedies

I came into these films backwards, the same way, in a sense, that I came to Hammer Horror.  And I owe my initial dive to the same source: Star Wars.

As I have said before, Star Wars was a film with an absolutely inspired casting.  To balance out the three relatively new faces in the main roles, Lucas brought in two British stalwarts, who happened to be the stars of two of the best series of films to ever come out of the island – The Hammer Horror films star Peter Cushing and the brilliant star of the best of the Ealing Comedies: Alec Guinness.  I would eventually go to the Hammer films because of my love for Dracula films.  But I came to Ealing because, after Star Wars, and all those David Lean films, Alec Guinness would eventually surpass Humphrey Bogart as my favorite actor of all-time.  And so naturally I went looking for his other films.  And was I ever surprised to discover that this brilliant dramatic actor had once been considered the finest comic actor in Britain.  And that opened up a whole new world of films for me: The Ealing Comedies.