Bernard Herrmann - Twisted Nerve Theme (originally composed for the 1968 psychological thriller Twisted Nerve, reused in Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1)
Bernard Herrmann - Twisted Nerve Theme (originally composed for the 1968 psychological thriller Twisted Nerve, re-used in Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1)
Henry Fonda in The Long Night (1947, dir. Anatole Litvak) (photo by Alexander Kahle/RKO)
“There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
The Stranger (1946, dir. Orson Welles)
Q. The Stranger was the first commercial film to use footage of Nazi concentration camp atrocities.
Welles: Was it? I’m against that sort of thing in principle - exploiting real misery, agony, and death for purposes of entertainment. But in that case, I do think that every time you can get the public to look at any footage of a concentration camp, under any excuse at all, it’s a step forward. People just don’t want to know those things ever happened.
Q. Where did the idea come for your death scene at the end - being impaled on the clock tower and all that? Was it yours?
Welles: I’m afraid so. Pure Dick Tracy. I had to fight for it. Everybody felt, “Well, it’s in bad taste and Orson’s going too far,” but I wanted a straight comic-strip finish.
-excerpted from This is Orson Welles (photo via)
The Stranger can be seen online here.
The Stranger (1946, dir. Orson Welles) (online here)
Q. The Stranger was the first commercial film to use footage of Nazi concentration-camp atrocities.
Welles: Was it? I’m against that sort of thing in principle - exploiting real misery, agony, and death for purposes of entertainment. But in that case, I do think that every time you can get the public to look at any footage of a concentration camp, under any excuse at all, it’s a step forward. People just don’t want to know those things ever happened.
Q. Where did the idea come for your death scene at the end - being impaled on the clock tower and all that? Was it yours?
Welles: I’m afraid so. Pure Dick Tracy. I had to fight for it. Everybody felt, “Well, it’s in bad taste and Orson’s going too far,” but I wanted a straight comic-strip finish.
-excerpted from This is Orson Welles (photo via)
“We must ‘keep up with things,’ of course…We must find out what we can about this place we’re living in - this place in time - but we’ve got to be awfully careful, it seems to me, never to make ourselves too perfectly a part of it.
Modishness is the sure sign of the second-rate. We’re finally to be judged not by the degree of our involvement in the mainstream, but by our individual response to it.”
-Orson Welles, quoted in This is Orson Welles (photo by Ernest Bachrach, 1941)
“We must ‘keep up with things,’ of course, but with the whole wide world - not just the movies. We must find out what we can about this place we’re living in - this place in time - but we’ve got to be awfully careful, it seems to me, never to make ourselves too perfectly a part of it.
Modishness is the sure sign of the second-rate. We’re finally to be judged not by the degree of our involvement in the mainstream, but by our individual response to it.”
-Orson Welles, quoted in This is Orson Welles (photo by Ernest Bachrach for Citizen Kane, 1941)
Chet Baker - The Thrill is Gone
Chet Baker - The Thrill is Gone
Charles Laughton as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939, dir. William Dieterle)
“Why was I not made of stone, like thee?”
Greta Garbo on the set of Flesh and the Devil (1926, dir. Clarence Brown)
“I am always nervous and restless when I am making a picture. I cannot help it. That is why I never want people to see me while I am acting. I do not let people on the set. And I stay by myself all I can while I am making a picture. I sit in one corner alone, or go to my dressing room, or I walk outside by myself while the others are working.
I cannot stand it for someone to come up and say, ‘What did you think of the football game?’ as they do here in America. I cannot get back on the track. I cannot do my best work then. It is the same with every picture – I tremble always, all over.”
-Greta Garbo, quoted in 1928 Photoplay interview (reprinted in Photoplay: the aristocrat of motion picture magazines, Vol. 34) (photo via)
Charles Laughton as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939, dir. William Dieterle)
“Why was I not made of stone, like thee?”
(via)
Julie London -‘Round Midnight
The Lost Weekend (1945, dir. Billy Wilder)
“Don’t wipe it away, Nat. Let me have my little vicious circle. You know, the circle is the perfect geometric figure. No end, no beginning.”
Miklos Rozsa - The Nightmare (The Lost Weekend: Original Motion Picture Score)
Rozsa’s score for The Lost Weekend featured the first use of a theremin in a Hollywood film. He chose the instrument because he thought its eerie, other-worldly sound captured the distorted perceptions of reality experienced by an alcoholic on a bender.
