Tag: Peter Lorre

You’ll have to excuse me if I go into weekend blogging mode a little early – I don’t mean to turn the site into some fourteen-year-olds tumblr full of animated Glee images, but check out this fantastic publicity still of Vincent Price and Peter Lorre’s wax head, from Tales Of Terror.

Last night Mac of BIOnighT was mentioning John Wayne’s dislike of Gene Hackman, which seemed, to me, to come out of that odd clash between classical and method actors that reached its peak in the ’60s and ’70s.

I have a lot of love for the personalities that arose out of the earlier style, and the realism that came with the later, but I have a theory that we’ve moved into a third phase – neo-classical.

Green screens, casting looks over talent, the tween market, and an aging Hollywood pantheon, have brought us back to where we began. At the risk of receiving a beating in my own home, let’s use Robert Pattinson as an example. He’s not a bad new-school actor, he’s a bad old-school actor: handsome, wooden, and without the charismatic personality to sell his roles.

(Yes, by this logic Vin Diesel is the new Errol Flynn. Dandy swashbucklers, sure, but let’s keep their dialogue to a minimum.)

Don’t fear, however, as this also means the new Orson Welles is somewhere in the wings, busily producing some under-appreciated bit of work we can all claim we discovered before anyone else.

[youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NMGsRmZTFQ]

Warning: NSFW language, if you can stand to watch the clip to its conclusion.