Detective John Wayne!
Reviews of John Wayne’s pair of detective thrillers – Brannigan (1975), new on Blu from Twilight Time, and McQ (1974) from Warner Bros.
Author Archive: Mark R. Hasan
BR: Brannigan (1975)
John Wayne had already experimented with an image makeover in McQ (1972), playing a detective in a fairly dour story involving murder, police corruption, and outright betrayal, but for his second and final poke at the popular cop genre, the Duke opted for a story which embraced some of the elements from his westerns yet delivered the main ingredients of a cop thriller: subterfuge, a hot chick, and more than one car chase…
DVD: McQ (1974)
John Wayne’s decision to tackle the popular detective thriller seems like a natural move to extend his tough American hero persona to a related genre, but stepping away from war and western films was also a necessary change as both aging genres had become more cynical under the directorial baton of younger directors, and yet one can argue the cop thriller was a genre steeped in even greater cynicism…
MacGillivray Freeman Films, Part 1
Mini-portrait of IMAX documentary firm MacGillivray Freeman Films, covering To Fly! (1976), the Oscar-winning Sentinels of Silence (1971), and the Oscar-nominated IMAX shorts The Living Sea (1995) + Dolphins! (2000).
Beta: To Fly! (1976)
This 27 minute IMAX film (funded by Du Pont’s Conoco) was commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution to play at their National Air and Space Museum to celebrate America’s Bicentennial. Premiering July 1, 1976, “the longest-running and most universally popular film of its kind ever produced” has been reportedly seen by 150 million people…
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