by Peter Truax

Akira Kurosawa’s 1948 film, Drunken Angel, is the eighth film by the Japanese director, and features two long-time Kurosawa collaborators: Takashi Shimura and Toshirô Mifune, the latter at the beginning of his work with the director. Set in post-war Japan, the film explores the relationship between wrongdoing and redemption from the point of view of its two main characters. A classic noir, Drunken Angel is a film about gangsters, dames, and mortality.

by Peter Truax

As Virginia Madsen delivers in her monologue at the start of Dune, “a beginning is a very delicate time.” This is certainly true of transforming Frank Herbert’s novel Dune into a film. In fact, its first iteration, planned by the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, failed completely. The film never left pre-production, leaving one crew member in a mental institution from duress, and no doubt disheartening a multitude of fans of the book, who had been eager to see Herbert’s opus put to film. What the straw was that broke the camel’s back is uncertain. Was it the run-time rivaling Wagner’s operatic Ring Cycle in length? Was it the choice to cast Salvador Dalí as the Emperor, to the tune of $100,000 an hour? Was it that the source work was simply too complex to translate off the written page? Run-time, cost, and the monumentality of Herbert’s novel combined to end a brilliant dream that now only exists as exactly that: a dream.