silver nitrate notes

welcome

19 oct 2026

Eighteen years in. One hundred and eighteen posts. The newest is on Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951) and the carnival that grows around a man trapped in a mountain. Just below it, the recent run: Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945), Alfred E. Green's Baby Face (1933) and Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy (1950). More pre-Code to come.

If you are new here, the site's focus is the classic cinema of the monochrome era, silent films through the late 1950s, with occasional forays into the early New Wave. There is more about the project on the about page. The full archive is there, and so is the rolling watch log for anyone curious about what I am actually putting on the projector.

recent posts

• Ace in the Hole Built a Fairground Around One Trapped Man
  19 oct 2026
  Wilder lets a rescue turn into a carnival one shot at a time, and Charles Lang's desert glare gives the crowd nowhere to hide.
• Detour and the Six Days That Were Fourteen
  6 oct 2026
  Ulmer said he shot it in six days, and everyone repeated it. The shooting script's title page says fourteen camera days, and the better story is the one the paperwork tells.
• Baby Face and the Five Minutes the Censors Took
  5 oct 2026
  A Library of Congress curator compared two running times in 2004 and found the version of Barbara Stanwyck's climb that Warner Bros. made before the censors did.
• Gun Crazy and the Bank Job Shot From the Back Seat
  12 sep 2026
  Joseph H. Lewis put the camera in the back of a stretched Cadillac and shot a bank robbery in one unbroken take, and the audience rides along without being asked.
• Eugen Schüfftan Faked Metropolis and Then Filmed a Lake
  15 aug 2026
  The man who built the mirror trick behind Metropolis put the camera down in a Berlin park and shot four young people at a lake, and half of American film noir walked out of it.
• Alexandre Trauner Built the Room That Kills Jean Gabin
  22 jul 2026
  Trauner built all four walls of the room so the camera had nowhere to stand outside it, and the set became the argument of the film.
• Rossellini's Stromboli and the Tuna Hunt That Stops the Film
  12 jun 2026
  Rossellini stops an Ingrid Bergman melodrama to film a real tuna hunt at length, and the interruption turns out to be the whole point of the picture.
• Mizoguchi's The Crucified Lovers and the Smile on the Boat
  03 jun 2026
  A society condemns two people for an adultery they have not committed, and the sentence drives them into the very love it punishes.

» full archive (117 posts since 2008)

[ « prev · random · next » ] · b&w cinema webring