Joseph Mankiewicz accepts all the Broadway Backstage stereotypes and hones them into a like-new sharpness, a little dulled again before movie's end. Bette Davis is the insecure star and Anne Baxter the ambitious ingénue climbing up her back. Gary Merrill, Davis's real-life husband, plays her husband, and George Sanders and …
Prototypical caper film, rather hurried into the heist itself, and plodding through the calamitous aftermath. John Huston's direction is mildly overemphatic and strongly oversentimentalized. But the bare bones (W.R. Burnett novel) are solid enough. Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen, Louis Calhern, Marilyn Monroe.
The Disney version (of the Charles Perrault fairy tale), with too many teaspoons of sugar — too many chittering mice, to be more specific, and no respectable villain (the wicked stepmother with the Bride-of-Frankenstein hairstyle won't quite do, much less the literal fat cat with the green-and-yellow eyes). The shredding …
Robert Bresson's truly, not falsely, pious treatment of the Georges Bernanos novel about a dying village priest (the sad-faced yet childish Claude Laydu) whose parishioners don't understand him. It occupies the most advantageous position in Bresson's output, the spot where his minimalist style has already been fully refined but not …
Proud father Stanley Banks remembers the day his daughter, Kay, got married. Starting when she announces her engagement through to the wedding itself, we learn of all the surprises and disasters along the way. Directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, Elizabeth Taylor, Don Taylor, Billie Burke.
Story of a a Robin Hood-like figure.
Roberto Rossellini goes back in history, with most of his neo-realist precepts packed for the trip: Francis and his followers are played by actual monks (and very amateurishly, it must be said), and there are no miracles, no heavenly visitations, no encouraging signs from above. The movie's strongest quality, for …
A veiled re-enactment of the tempestuous relationship of Gloria Grahame and director Nicholas Ray, with Bogart standing in for Ray, and Grahame staying on as Grahame, and Ray directing. The Bogart character a hard-drinking, violent-tempered Hollywood screenwriter who is faintly amused to find himself becoming a suspect in the murder …
Released in America as The Young and the Damned -- close enough, and perfectly in the spirit of this lurid vision of Mexico City street life. Buñuel is much tougher and meaner in his treatment of bitter, drunken, and depraved old men than in his treatment of stereotypical Dead End …
A pregnant parable on truth and the eye of the beholder. The construction is neat, tight, and schematic (four conflicting points of view on a mysterious forest killing), whereas Kurosawa's treatment is full-blown (torrential rains, hysterical performances) and long-drawn-out. Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo, Takashi Shimura.
Typically trashy Hollywood "exposé" about a gullible, corruptible writer who is snared by a movie queen, a quarter-century past her prime, hidden away with her delusions and her loyal butler in a Gothic mausoleum. As irresistible as gossip. With Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich Von Stroheim; directed by Billy Wilder.