Hitchcock's eerie visual gimmicks are not often as catchy as in the early going here: an assassin makes his getaway by slicing a path through a field of umbrellas, and then the hero figures out his hiding place in a windmill conspicuously spinning opposite to its surrounding mills. Mostly polite, …
Chaplin takes two roles — a Jewish ghetto barber and a Hitler caricature — in a bravado attempt, circa 1940, to deflate Naziism with fun-making and speech-making. Even in the most famous scene (Der Fuehrer, or Der Phooey, romping in private with his world globe), there is an underlying discomfort …
Reasonably sophisticated (which is to say, reasonably cynical) view of Tammany Hall politics, with tougher-than-smart-guy Brian Donlevy rising from soup line to Governor's Mansion, under the sponsorship of political boss Akim Tamiroff, and then precipitately falling to that most romantic of occupations: bartending in the tropics. Preston Sturges's first job …
Howard Hawks's mischievously screwed-up version of the MacArthur-Hecht newspaper comedy, The Front Page. The ace reporter, Hildy, has been transformed, or rather transsexualized, into Rosalind Russell (which is not exactly an emasulation of the role), and the result bears a striking resemblance to Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth, with Cary …
Just when Cary Grant, her husband, is about to remarry, Irene Dunne returns from the presumed dead, five years on a desert island with the sun-bronzed and shapely Randolph Scott. Thereafter, everyone -- devious, perverse, sadistic -- behaves as if the single motive is to stretch this predicament to feature …
W.C. Fields matched against Mae West, Super-Heavyweight Division. Two similar performers, buttering every line with suggestive affectation, as if their peculiar repetitive renditions ought to be sufficient to send you into convulsions whether or not the line has a sliver of wit. Between them, they apply more unrelenting pressure than …
Philip Barry's dose of Thirties highlife (it tickles the nose and makes the head light) is brought from stage to screen by George Cukor and Company, with as much reverence and care and deliberateness as if they all thought they were handling a play by Molière. Cary Grant and James …
Some say the best of the Disney cartoon features, though the story is a little piecemeal and the cast of characters a little motley. The endless inventiveness with the cuckoo clocks and music boxes in the old wood carver's workshop; the delectable Blue Fairy, a Redbook Magazine covergirl type who …
A Hitchcock special -- a creamy, thick, sweetish blend of genres, with ingredients from detective stories (what really happened to Rebecca?), Gothic thrillers (the haunted house, the unspoken-of past, the creepy housekeeper), and tearjerkers (Joan Fontaine's fern-like young wife struggling to preserve her marriage to Laurence Olivier, who's still in …
Ernst Lubitsch's gracious and graceful handling of Nikolaus Laszlo's romantic comedy about two lonelyhearts working in a Budapest notions shop. James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, as has been unanimously remarked, do not remind you much of Hungarians, but this is small bother to someone with as large a reality problem …
Colorful (in the most literal sense, that is, filled, stuffed, gorged with color) Arabian Nights tale, a United Kingdom/United States joint venture, produced by Alexander Korda, designed by his brother Vincent, associate-produced by William Cameron Menzies, who designed the Douglas Fairbanks silent version of the tale, and directed by three …