I think this might be my favorite Anthony Hopkins performance, and Anne Bancroft is equally incredible. A well-cast movie is a joy forever, and these two stars couldn't be better suited to their roles. I also can't think of another movie that better conveys the joy of books. It's a lovable film.

An Italian version, too? Amazing. Wikipedia offers some more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Trail A fairly common practice in the early sound era was to produce at least one foreign language version of a film for release in non-English speaking countries. There were at least four fore...

feaito wrote:Thanks for the information Mark. Sounds amazing! I wonder if the versions in foreign languages still exist.

That I am not sure of, and the IMDB doesn't say.

And all five were filmed in location???? :shock: Wow!! The budget must have been immense! The way it worked is, the long shots and the big location shots were done twice (or with two cameras simultaneously), in 35 mm and 70 mm. The 35 mm long shots were used in all the foreign language versions. Di...

The Big Trail was shot in five different versions at once -- 70 mm, 35 mm, French language, Spanish language, German language. It must have been madness out there on location!

The only book of this sort that I treasure is Danny Peary's OOP Guide for the Film Fanatic , which I always recommend because of Peary's refusal to incorporate any kind of silly star rating system. He simply writes a response to the film in question and lets it be. As a result, this author of books...

I recently screened Act of Violence for a sophomore high school English class I was teaching, both as an introduction to film noir and as part of a unit on "mainstream" American life in the post-war period (we had already covered the beats and the hippies as the non-mainstream). The "...