The Film Noir Festival currently underway at the Castro Theater in San Francisco concludes Sunday with a tribute to Dashiell Hammett. The author of The Maltese Falcon and other classic works of detective and crime fiction will be celebrated with the screening of six films based on his work. It...

What does a seminal gangster film like Scarface (1932) have in common with such screwball comedies as Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and His Girl Friday (1940)? And what do they have in common with an Oscar-nominated biopic like Sergeant York (1941), the Bogart and Bacall classic The...

It's now a holiday tradition.

For more than a few years, Grace Cathedral in San Francisco has screened a silent film on New Year's Eve. The tradition continues in 2011 when the landmark Episcopal church offers two screenings of the 1923 classic, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

With...

Charming and a little different, Caroline Preston's new novel, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt (Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers), is a hybrid work where the pictures do the talking.

One might describe it as something F. Scott Fitzgerald might have come up with for the Saturday Evening Post had he been a...

Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp character returns to both the big screen and the Bay Area with a 35mm print of the actor and director's recently restored masterpiece, The Gold Rush. The 1925 comedy screens for seven days beginning December 23 at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

Set in...

Looking over some of the film books released in 2011, it's striking how many of the best of them -- or at least the most compelling and interesting of them -- are biographies, memoirs, or biographical career studies. If you have an interest in film or film history, there is...

This month, as they have every December for more than a few years, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont has put together a schedule of films which both celebrate the holidays and early cinema. This month's movies -- both silent and talkies -- include a holiday classic, a...

In the history of film, Kevin Brownlow is unique. The British documentary filmmaker, preservationist and author is the first and only film historian to have won an Academy Award.

Last year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Brownlow for his lifetime achievement alongside Jean-Luc...

There were naked men, and penises a plenty, men without their clothes -- plain and simple, and strapping young bucks ready to go. The occasion was not a gathering in the Castro, but a feminist-themed exhibit, "Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze," which is currently on display at...

Long before hard-hitting, news-making political talk shows cluttered television, and long before Occupy Wall Street challenged corporate greed, there was Lou Gordon. I remember watching his show on television as a teenager. Today, I wish he were still around.

For Detroiters who might not remember, Gordon (1917 -...

Despite the march of time, there still seems to be a good deal of interest in early Hollywood. Older films continue to be restored and screened and eventually released on DVD. Festivals devoted to classic cinema are popping up just about everywhere. And biographies of key figures in the history...

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we are lucky to have so many fine venues at which to take in classic cinema. There's the Castro Theater in San Francisco, of course, as well as the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, Stanford theater in Palo Alto, the San Rafael in...

A few months back, when Philip Levine was named Poet Laureate of the United States, I got to thinking about the couple of times I saw Levine read his work. Once was at a bookstore in Berkeley, and another time I saw him read in San Francisco.

Stirring memory,...

In the 1920s and 1930s, Jim Tully was something of a household name.

His writing -- his singular brand of rough and tumble realism -- was both popular and critically acclaimed. In his heyday, Tully's books appeared on bestseller lists, were adapted for the stage, made into movies, and got...

It's been a good year for silent film.

In June, the National Film Preservation Foundation announced that some 75 once-thought-lost American silent films found in New Zealand will be returned to the United States. And in October, Russia presented digitally preserved copies of 10 previously "lost" American silent films to...

What gets a film book recommended? What makes them "best"? Some are well done. And some are interesting. Others are groundbreaking, or perhaps the first book on the subject. Some are comprehensive, or authoritative. In the case of coffee table books, some are beautifully printed and simply a pleasure to...

Charlie Chaplin was one of the great artists of the 20th century.

The scope of his achievement -- and his influence on the movies as an art form -- are unmatched. He ranks alongside Picasso in painting, and Stravinsky in music. George Bernard Shaw called Chaplin "the only genius...

The day before he is to receive an Honorary Oscar, British film historian Kevin Brownlow will be in Los Angeles doing what he loves best -- watching, and talking about the movies.

However, in this instance, those movies will be his own.

On Friday, November 12th, Brownlow...

The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York announced last week that they have unsealed the journals of actress Louise Brooks. The actress kept journals from 1956 until her death in 1985. According to an Eastman House archivist, there are 29 journals with approximately 2000 pages of hand-written...

John Updike once told me that Louise Brooks was the finest writer to have ever come out of Hollywood. That was his long-held opinion when I met him in 2006. Updike had reviewed the silent film star's book of autobiographical essays, Lulu in Hollywood, for the New Yorker in 1982.