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About


About
At Cinema Essentials I explore film history, discovering great films, classic films, forgotten films and overlooked gems, with a little bit of classic TV thrown in. The articles on this site usually avoid major spoilers and I will give advanced warning if I think they are unavoidable. 


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Copyright
This blog uses images from film and TV productions and publicity materials for the purposes of commentary and criticism on a fair use basis. All written material on this website is copyright J. Watts and Cinema Essentials, unless otherwise stated, and may not be reproduced without my permission. Brief excerpts and quotes may be used, provided full credit is given to Cinema Essentials together with a link back to the original post or article.


Contact
If you are offering a highly paid film, television or book reviewing gig, or if you are looking for someone to write a history of the James Bond films, or if you want to contact me for any other reason, then you can email me at cinemaessentials @gmail.com


Jay


Comments

  1. Nuwan Sen14 October

    Hi Jay, Glad to come across your website.
    Do check out my Blog too (link:- https://nononsensewithnuwansen.wordpress.com)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jay14 October

      Hey, Nuwan. Thanks for stopping by. I will give your blog a look. Cheers.

      Delete

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The 39 Steps (1959)

Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 classic The 39 Steps is one of his best films of the 1930s. It's also been a highly influential one, influencing not only Hitchcock's later films, but also those of just about anyone else who has made a thriller in this vein since.

British film, theatre and television have found it almost impossible to leave the story alone, so enamoured are they with the Hitchcock film. There have been an additional two film versions, one in 1959 and one in 1978, a TV film in 2008, and a popular tongue-in-cheek stage version in the 2000s. Although The Thirty-Nine Steps was originally a popular novel by John Buchan, most of the subsequent versions have patterned themselves more on Hitchcock's film than on the original book.
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Death on the Nile (1978)

Following the success of the all-star murder mystery Murder on the Orient Express (1974), that film's producers, John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin, followed up with another lavish Agatha Christie adaptation, 1978's Death on the Nile.

As with Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile assembles a group of mostly wealthy travellers taking part in an exotic journey, in this case a steam boat trip along the River Nile in Egypt in the 1930s. Among the passengers on board are a honeymooning couple, wealthy American heiress Linnet Ridgeway (Lois Chiles) and her new English husband Simon Doyle (Simon MacCorkindale), as well as the latter's jealous ex-fiancée Jacqueline (Mia Farrow), who appears to be stalking them wherever they go.



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Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

If I asked you to name the biggest film at the US box office in 1977, you might well guess (correctly) that it was Star Wars. But if I asked you to name the second biggest, you might struggle a little. Was it Close Encounters of the Third Kind ... or maybe the James Bond epic The Spy Who Loved Me? Nope. It was a cross-country car chase comedy called Smokey and the Bandit, a film as divorced from the era of modern blockbuster cinema as its box office rival Star Wars is inextricably linked to it.

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