As a freestanding essay, the following is pretty half-assed. It was written as one among a series of program notes for a quarter's worth of Orson Welles movies at the University of Washington in Autumn 1971. To make matters worse, the print initially supplied for the third week of the series proved to be defective, and a replacement could be had only several weeks later, when The Stranger was finally shown as an unintended second feature (to Othello). I wish I'd got round to a proper rewrite, less hasty and not couched in such a way that only someone who'd been watching along week by week could fully follow it. Still, the film remains a fond memory of the first days—that is, nights—when I embarked on a cinematic education via the late show. And it's on TCM at 6:45 p.m. PT tonight!

Christmastime always brings certain movies back to the home screen, and John Ford's first Technicolor Western is one of them. (Of course, Ford's first Technicolor movie, Drums along the Mohawk, is a Western in spirit, shot in Utah—but the setting is upstate New York in Revolutionary days.) Turner Classic Movies will show 3 Godfathers a few hours from now (1 p.m. PT). Not by coincidence, an earlier version of the same story will be on TCM twelve hours later (1 a.m. Monday, Dec. 24)—William Wyler's early-talkie Hell's Heroes. Both are recommended. Further words on the Ford, originally written for Amazon, follow.

There was a period in the late Seventies when the peculiarities of tax law and international financing led some American filmmakers, including a number of interesting mavericks, to make movies in Europe on European money for sometimes evanescent production entities. The end result of one of these deals is about to reappear on DVD and Blu-ray after decades of obscurity. I wrote about it at the time of its release, mostly admiringly. And I recall a rainy night during its first-run engagement when I whiled away a pleasant hour rewatching part of it in the late, lamented UA70 Cinema on Sixth Avenue—killing time before slipping through the manager's office into the UA150, to join my wife and a crowd throbbingly anticipating the prerelease screening of (insert the phrase "a little picture called") Star Wars.

What is probably director Fritz Lang's final masterpiece, The Big Heat, has been given a Blu-ray release by Twilight Time. Click "Read More" to see a program note I wrote exactly forty years ago. But if you've never seen the film, be warned that there are spoilers.

Late last year—late afternoon on 2011's final day, in fact—I emailed the editors of the forthcoming book Film Noir: The Directors my essay on Fritz Lang. The book is now out. Details, plus a taste of my chapter, follow.

Two happy memories for Northwest film folk. Two success stories.
      The first was that of Rob Thompson, an Eastside resident laid up for a few weeks in the early Seventies (accident? illness? don't recall). He whiled away his convalescence watching old cowboy movies on television (obviously, that was a more enlightened era in local TV programming!) and eventually started thinking about building a screenplay around the grinding-out of such product. He wrote it and, miraculously, sold it. Made a nice little picture, though the picture—Hearts of the West—didn't make a dime. Thompson, however, went on to make a good living as a script doctor.
      Hearts of the West came out in 1975. Five years later, in autumn 1980, it was selected as one of the films to look at in an epic screenwriting symposium initially proposed by Jeff "The Dude" Dowd, subsequent inspiration for the Jeff Bridges character in The Big Lebowski. The University of Washington in its infinite wisdom had just cut Cinema Studies out of the biennial budget, but the course went through as a class for nonmatriculated students. One hundred eighty-four of them signed up, and came for three three-hour sessions a week that included screenings, workshops, and visits from such Dowd-invited luminaries as John Sayles, Irvin Kershner, Joan Micklin Silver, Jonathan Demme, the Airplane! triumvirate, and producer Tony Bill, who'd bought Rob Thompson's screenplay. As the NPR ladies say in the "Schweddy Balls" sketch, good times.
     Hearts of the West will be shown on Turner Classic Movies this coming Friday, Nov. 4, at 9 a.m. West Coast time, 12 noon Eastern. Here's the program note from the "Marvelous Modern Scripts" screening. —RTJ

Curtis Hanson's 1997 film of James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential will be shown twice during the ongoing Uptown-reopening celebration, at 9 p.m. Monday, Oct. 24 and again at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 26. Here's what I said about it at the time of its release. The venue was the better-than-the-name-suggests website Mr. Showbiz. —RTJ

I was having a postprandial Hearts game with friends one Saturday evening in spring 1977 when the Arts & Entertainment editor of what was then called The Weekly phoned: would I please scurry over to the Cinerama for the sneak preview of the new Woody Allen picture? I was not a member of the Woodman's fan club as far as his filmmaking career to date was concerned, but that view was about to be adjusted. With Annie Hall set to play twice during the current reopening-of-the-Uptown festivities—at 8 p.m. Monday, Oct. 24 and 5 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 25—I'm posting the result of that 1977 expedition. —RTJ