Philippe Garnier

James Ellroy once called Joseph Losey’s 1951 The Prowler his favorite film. Of course, he’s never shied from such rash statements, or from changing them either. But rogue cop Webb Garwood’s black heart must have struck a chord with the author, with lines like “Of course I did it for......

This year the UCLA Film & Television Archive has moved its Festival of Preservation (the 14th edition) from summer to early spring, in the hope of luring a few students from the school’s newly created department of Archive Studies. More than ever, it offers a wide range of genres, periods......

I first interviewed Matteo Garrone at the 1998 Venice Film Festival. His second feature, Ospiti, was showing there, and he was given one night at the Excelsior hotel as a guest but spent the rest of the week on the Lido, watching films while living in his car — which......

Back Door to Heaven (1939), which concludes UCLA’s Hollywood on the Hudson series on Saturday, is the strangest artifact by a Hollywood director you’re ever likely to find. The hard-luck story of one Frankie Rogers, whose only crime is to have been born on the wrong side of the tracks,......

“People can’t live in New York, take part in the night life and still make pictures; it can’t be done!” opined Fox West Coast production head Sol Wurtzel in 1922, two years after his boss, William Fox, had opened a new, state-of-the-art studio in Hell’s Kitchen. This, even more than......

I once sat with director Richard Quine in the same gloomy house in Beverly Hills where he killed himself on June 10, 1989. Two years prior, I was interviewing him for a documentary about John Fante produced by French television. Quine had gotten to know the writer when he filmed......