Husband and wife square off in the courtroom as District Attorney and defense advocate. The emphasis in this juridical battle of the sexes is on "cute" comedy (he summons a tear to his eye at will, he paddles her derriere, etc.). With Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Judy Holliday; directed …
Vittorio De Sica's heart-wrenching and arm-twisting argument on behalf of the Little Man. The people's faces and the slum locales look coldly authentic and untampered-with. But the woeful plotline -- a menial laborer's frantic search for his stolen bicycle -- dumps truckloads of irony and pathos all along the way.
From charm school to Prince Charming, or at least Prince Moneybags: a career girl's fairy tale turned nightmare. (Tipoff to the Prince's dark side: the personal pinball machine in his rec room for working out stress. Earlier tipoff: he's portrayed by Robert Ryan.) Aside from the didactic value, this is …
Miscast (Gary Cooper) and harmlessly blunted rendition of Ayn Rand's novel about a heaven-striving architect: it will never be admitted by Randians into their sacred canon. But director King Vidor, a visual stylist of some degree of flourish, gives it occasional jolts of Good Old American (or Good Old Hollywood) …
An early effort by Jean-Pierre Melville, famous later for gangster films, adapted from an immoral tale by Jean Cocteau having to do with the destructive relationship of a bratty brother and sister, too close to one another, and too closed off from everyone else. It's more Cocteau than Melville (notably …
Jean Cocteau revives and rearranges an ancient myth in a setting of modern-day France, and maintains throughout a serious, reverential, poetic feeling for fantasy (Death rides in a Rolls Royce under the escort of two black-leather motorcyclists, mirrors are gateways to the Underworld), even if, at times, his style indulges …
One of the products of Max Ophuls's Hollywood sojourn in the second half of the 1940s; probably the least of them; clearly not as good as its close counterpart from the same year, Caught, nor as idiosyncratic as the two earlier; but smooth and atmospheric nonetheless, with James Mason a …
The fact that the actors are all in wigs, braids, skin-tight pants, buckle shoes, and are pretending to be schemers in Robespierre's France, in frantic pursuit of a little black book of names scheduled for the guillotine, does not force any modifications upon the lurid pulp-fiction idiom of Anthony Mann. …
Part of John Ford's post-war cavalry trilogy, and probably the most magisterial of them in its command of the landscape, the historical perspective, the manly sentiments. Disguised in premature white hair and handlebar mustache, John Wayne fills his final days in the military with a worthwhile sortie into Indian territory, …
Kurosawa's postwar policier unites elements of Italian neo-realism and the American semi-documentary vogue of the time, making it a valuable historical record (the delightful baseball footage goes on longer than strictly necessary to set the scene) as well as a compelling thriller. The young Toshiro Mifune plays a rookie cop …
Nicholas Ray's first film, a Bonnie and Clyde precursor (not to mention its literal remake, Thieves Like Us), with a lyrical emphasis on Young Love, First Love, True Love. Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell are awfully soft and dewy as the star-crossed couple, but fortunately there's also Howard da Silva …
A Graham Greene thriller set in postwar Vienna, with Orson Welles smarmily hammy as the evil and elusive Harry Lime (splendid name), and directed by Carol Reed in a style almost fawningly worshipful of the directing style of his villain. The zither on the soundtrack quickly steps into the void …
Early Bergman, though at the same time highly developed: a troubled married couple ride a train to a destination of "Hell together is better than hell alone." Highly compact, at under ninety minutes; and highly complicated, with parallel action, flashbacks, a dream scene. Broodingly well photographed, too -- and don't …
In Australia, to be more precise, and during the 1800s. A Gothic costume drama from Hitchcock's dull, late-Forties period, just after The Paradine Case and Rope and just before Stage Fright, with long takes and long talks and an interesting Ingrid Bergman.
One of the last good gasps for the Warner Brothers 1930s-style chronicle of a gangster's career. It has been updated somewhat with an apocalyptic ending suitable for the Nuclear Age and with some quirks of character to bring the thing into line with the Freudian psychoanalytic standards of its contemporaries, …