BFI Film Classics
3 total works
F.W. Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu, the first (albeit unofficial) screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, starring Max Schreck as the hollow-eyed, cadaverous vampire, remains a potent and disturbing horror film. Kevin Jackson's study traces Nosferatu's eventful production and reception history, including attempts by Stoker's widow to suppress it.
Lawrence of Arabia is widely considered one of the ten greatest films ever made - though more often by film-goers and film-makers than by critics. This monograph argues that popular wisdom is correct, and that Lean's film is a unique blend of visionary image-making, narrative power, mythopoetic charm and psychological acuteness.
Kevin Jackson recounts that experience in addition to giving a full account of the film's production. But chiefly he analyses the mood and magic of the film, its aesthetics and sensibility, seeking to show, without ever detracting from the film's comic brilliance, just how much more there is to Withnail & I than drunkenness and swearing. 'It is an outstandingly touching yet witheringly unsentimental drama of male friendship,' Jackson writes, 'a bleak up-ending of the English pastoral dream, a piece of ferocious verbal inventiveness' - and, without question, one of the greatest of all British films.