Author Archives: Terry McAteer

American Hot Wax, discussed in previous postings, will be screened on TCM on Sept. 27 at 1:30 AM ET. It will also be streamed on Watch TCM Sept. 28 through Sept. 30. As it is not easy to come across, it would be worth your while to check it out if you are interested .

The end of summer is, like February, a desolate time in film exhibition; how much worse, then, the prospects of writing about film.  Granted, I don’t limit myself to current releases, but then how much can one say about a film whose title includes some aggregation of X-V-Is; fortunately not yet in four digit combinations. Continue reading “Adventures in the World of Film Production and Exhibition”

ROCK N’ ROLL ON FILM Part II: Streets of Fire At any given moment, a film has a pulse; over the course of its running time, it has more than one.  They can be dramatic, sonic, visual, cinematic.  They can interact synchronously; they can also work contrapuntally.  Rock n’ roll also has a pulse; inContinue reading “Streets of Fire”

Part 1: Elvis, The Beatles, and Grease, et al. Since Bill Haley and the Comets electrified Hollywood during the opening credits of Richard Brooks’ Blackboard Jungle with their Rock Around the Clock in the early 1950s, the film industry in the US has tried to use rock n’ roll to sell tickets.  The 1950s sawContinue reading “ROCK N’ ROLL ON FILM”

Richard Widmark, a supremely brave and accomplished American actor, now long removed to TCM and the mists of memory, and Sidney Poitier, an equally brave and accomplished American actor, now justifiably enshrined in the imagined pantheon of American cultural history, joined forces in 1950 to create under the guidance of Daryl F. Zanuck and JosephContinue reading “Sidney Poitier: Actor”

“White. A blank page or canvas. His favorite. So many possibilities…” [1] In my childhood, for economic reasons we were not a family that habituated Broadway musicals; we did see all the movie adaptations and such original musical films as were still being created in the Hollywood of the 1950s.  I certainly knew the namesContinue reading “Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021)”

By the time you read this, I will have added another birthday to my list of attributes.  Which birthday?  Let’s just say I was born into Harry Truman’s presidency.  OK, I hate coyness about age.  73rd. In my early years in Brooklyn, we did not have a television or a telephone.  Evenings were spent talking,Continue reading “An Old Fashioned Double Bill”

American performing artists do not generally go gentle into that good night.  As Dylan Thomas eloquently exhorted his father to do, they rage against the dying of the light so long that one sometimes uncharitably wishes they would give it up and at least retire. Some, however, exhibit the humility that only true greatness andContinue reading “Clint Eastwood and “Cry Macho””

I retired recently from a comfortable post as Associate Professor of Communications at a small university in New Jersey.  I imagine this blog as a way of keeping the edge in my thinking that I had honed in a near-lifetime of teaching film, video, and English itinerantly in the New York-New Jersey area.  There hadContinue reading “What the Hell is This?”