King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen

KING COHEN is a picture of a driven, maverick artist who will do anything to get his shot (typically without permission), who prefers on-set improvisation to meticulous prep, and whose sense of film history has guided him to collaborate with Hollywood’s older, overlooked talents. For where Hollywood had long since abandoned the likes of Bernard Herrmann, Sam Fuller, Bette Davis and Red Buttons, Cohen offered them work, even writing roles for them. Perhaps this willingness to respect cinema’s past, even as Cohen himself slowly becomes part of it, is what gives this documentary its elegiac feel. In a sense all films are ghost stories, preserving the dead beyond the grave – but Mitchell’s film serves equally as an invitation to honour living legends like Cohen. (Anton Bitel)