Bertrand Tavernier

Over the decades, certain famous titles by director William “Wild Bill” Wellman have thrown a veil over another part of his work. Praised were the very real qualities of Wings (1927), Battleground (1949) and Public Enemy (1931), as was the audacity of The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), the extraordinary force of......

He was a friend, a brother, a father. I owe everything to him. And now, overcome with sorrow, I don’t know how to speak about him. I must cry out my remembrance. It was his fidelity to his word, his sense of honor, that allowed me to make The Clockmaker......

In his excellent memoir, Fragments, André De Toth says too little about his Los Angeles–set film noir, Pitfall(1948), about a married insurance adjuster (Dick Powell) who betrays his wife (Jane Wyatt) with a seductive department-store model (Lizabeth Scott) and gets pulled deep into the L.A. underworld by a corrupt private......