Category Archives: Retro Cinema

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The Swimmer (1968)

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It’s a shame that “The Twilight Zone” ended its television run just before John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” appeared in The New Yorker – Rod Serling’s half-hour anthology drama would have been a perfect environment for adapting Cheever’s surreal and disturbing 12-page tale. Instead, the husband-and-wife team of Frank and Eleanor Perry opted to greatly expand the Cheever story into a feature-length film. The result was the cinematic equivalent of building a three-story home on a one-story foundation.
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The Passion of the Christ (2004)

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In 2004, the faith-based film genre received a jolt from an unlikely source. Mel Gibson, who secured his international movie stardom in the “Mad Max” and “Lethal Weapon” franchises, had proven his worth as a filmmaker with the 1995 “Braveheart,” winning Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Gibson was no stranger to Jesus-centric films – his Icon Productions was one of the companies that backed the animated feature “The Miracle Maker” – and the financial success he secured from his movies enabled him to independently finance his own feature on Jesus.

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The King of Kings (1927)

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The last major Jesus-focused film of the silent cinema era was Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 release “The King of Kings.” The production offered heaping servings of DeMille’s vices and virtues as a filmmaker: an astonishing sense of visual spectacle and the uncanny ability to make an epic move at a swift pace, coupled with a bizarre sense of dramatic puerility laced with the obsessive need to improve upon holy source material with old-fashioned vulgarity.
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The Rogue Song (1930)

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MGM’s 1930 film “The Rogue Song,” an adaptation of the Robert Bodansky-A. M. Willner operetta “Gypsy Love,” was the only sound-era production included on the American Film Institute’s 1980 list of the ten most wanted lost films. The inclusion of this title on the list was peculiar at many levels. For starters, its presence as the sole post-silent era entry, it inadvertently gave the wrong impression that few sound-era films were lost.
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Boom! (1968)

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If any film deserves a remake, it is “Boom!” Not a scene-for-scene remake of the infamously ghastly 1968 Joseph Losey film, but in a production that is aligned with the source material, Tennessee Williams’ short story “Man Bring This Up Road” that was later adapted as the Broadway drama “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.”
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Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got (1985)

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When Brigitte Berman’s “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got” won the Academy Award as Best Documentary Feature Film for 1986, the Canadian production had yet to secure a theatrical release. Unfortunately for Berman, the film’s subject – clarinetist and band leader Artie Shaw – sued her to secure a greater share of potential box office profits. Due to the litigation, the film never played theatrically after its Oscar win – Shaw died in December 2024 and Berman’s production didn’t have its theatrical premiere until January 2024.
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Rockshow (1980)

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In the realm of concert films, “Rockshow” never seemed to get much love. The 1980 theatrical release – the first for the start-up Miramax – was relatively brief and not celebrated by either film or music critics. The initial home entertainment releases cut out several numbers, and then the film was out of circulation until a full restored re-release in 2013 that electrified Paul McCartney’s most die-hard fans but left everyone else mostly unmoved.
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