Greta Garbo reminds you of a swan (she's all throat), and Robert Taylor reminds you of a clothes dummy (stiffly uncomplaining), in this enervated version of the Dumas fils play about a Parisian courtesan who sensuously savors every morsel of life on her way (cough) to an early demise. The …
The inspirations for Jean Renoir's thirty-some-minute featurette sit in high places: first, the bleak and cold naturalism of Maupassant, and second, the dappled lighting effects of the Impressionist painters. In Renoir's hands, however, a Maupassant gem, whose outstanding trait is hardness, turns into Silly Putty. Renoir likes softness, and he …
Charlie Chaplin's stubbornly delayed adjustment to sound moviemaking (solely for some stomach-growling sound effects and for a little ditty sung in gibberish) offers a slapstick treatment of the Expressionists' man-versus-machine anxieties. Doing this in 1936 is characteristic of Chaplin's foot-dragging throughout his career. A few of the "bits," such as …
Part of the credit must go to the Conrad novel, The Secret Agent, from which this Hitchcock thriller was adapted. (Not to be confused with the previous Hitchcock thriller, The Secret Agent, which was adapted from Maugham's Ashendon.) Little else in Hitchcock's product line, after all, can quite compare with …
The one entry in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers cycle that gives the party-line auteurist something to grab at namely, George Stevens. All the same, this one is put together in the prescribed doses of elegant dance steps, breezy patter, and rowdy burlesque; and these ingredients, when mixed, continue to rattle …