Richard Donner was an American film director of blockbuster movies.
His film The Goonies (1985) featured a Rube Goldberg machine to open a gate. The cage of the chicken in that sequence bore the text: “RUBE G. 83”.
Tag Archives: American cinema
RIP Clare Peploe (1942 – 2021)
Clare Peploe was a British-Italian film director and screenwriter (Zabriskie Point, 1970).
Luck has it that there is a complete version of Zabriskie Point on YouTube.
RIP Ned “squeal like a pig” Beatty (1937 – 2021)
Ned Beatty was an American actor known for his parts in Deliverance (1972) and Network (1976).
Deliverance is known for its “dueling banjos” scene, its degenerate hillbilly trope and its brutal male-on-male rape, in which Ned Beatty is ordered to “squeal like a pig” while being anally raped.
In Network Beatty plays an executive who gives a speech on the nature of capitalism.
This is also a good time to call to mind that in the novel Deliverance on which the film of the same name is based, the dictum “there exists at the basis of human life a principle of insufficiency” by Georges Bataille, is used as epigraph in the original French.
RIP Tawny Kitaen (1961 – 2021)
Tawny Kitaen was an American actress and model.
She first came to my attention as the lead to The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak (1984).
To the world at large she is probably best-known for her parts in the Whitesnake videos, especially in the 1987 clip for the song “Here I Go Again” (1982). In that clip, she is seen cartwheeling across the hoods of two Jaguars XJ dressed in a white negligee.
RIP Monte Hellman (1929 – 2021)
Monte Hellman was an American film director known for his cult films.
I remember seeing Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) on the Moviedrome cult movies programme.
I’m fond of road movies and suddenly I am reminded of C’était un rendez-vous (1976) by Claude Lelouch, the short film that plays in Paris and where the race ends at the Sacré-Cœur.
Another road movie of particular interest is Vanishing Point (1971) with the unforgettable part of DJ Super Soul.
RIP Jessica Walter (1941 – 2021)
Jessica Walter was an American actress best known for Play Misty for Me (1971) in which she was Evelyn Draper, an obsessed female fan of a radio disc jockey played by Clint Eastwood.
RIP George Segal (1934 – 2021)
George Segal was an American actor best-known for his portrayal of Nick in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), the man who admits he aims to charm and sleep his way to the top in this film that celebrates love gone awry.
RIP Cloris Leachman (1926 – 2021)
Cloris Leachman was an American actress with a long an fruitful career.
I give you a fragment from The Last Picture Show (1971) in which she is a wife angry at her husband.
And one set of fragments from the Young Frankenstein (1974), where she famously is Frau Blücher, and everytime her name is pronounced the horses start to whinny, neigh and rear.
Joan Micklin Silver (1935 – 2020)
Joan Micklin Silver was an American filmmaker.
My film bible Cult Movie Stars lists Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) and Between the Lines (1977) as noteworthy.
I feel I have to add Crossing Delancey (1988).
RIP Carol Arthur (1935 – 2020)
Carol Arthur was an American actress and wife of Dom DeLuise (1933-2009). She played bit parts in the films of Mel Brooks. I think I was 12 years old when I insisted on seeing Brooks’s Silent Movie (1976).
Silent Movie. Smart slapstick. A film about film. What’s not to love?
In that film she played an “extremely pregnant woman”. Was it perhaps she who completely tilted Brooks’ sports car nose in the air due to a heavy weight in the back seat? I cannot remember.
Later I saw Brooks Blazing Saddles (1974), the Western parody with the many and loud farts around the campfire. Beans and cowboys, you know how that works out.
In Blazing Saddles, Carol plays a schoolteacher who first speaks very shyly at a city meeting, then is told that she speaks too quietly, and then she announces in a loud and not at all shy voice to the governor that he is the “leading asshole of the state”.