Soap opera at near to its best, and certainly at Douglas Sirk's best. A middle-aged, middle-class widow falls in love with the much younger gardener. What will the children think? The neighbors? The moviegoers? R.W. Fassbinder drew heavily on this, along with bits of Imitation Of Life, for his Ali: …
Well-turned genre piece, lean, tight, minimalist, photographed by John Alton with such an eye for black-and-white abstraction as to provide the perfect specimen in the Evolution of Expressionism circa the mid-1950s. Jean Wallace contributes some smoldering sexuality as the gun moll, and Cornel Wilde (Wallace's long-time husband in real life) …
The most deglamorized portrait of Hollywood by Hollywood, not only for its vision of power, manipulation, enslavement, but for its stagy confinement to a single beach house. (Also for its casting of Jack Palance as a representative box-office idol.) Clifford Odets wrote the original play, so the fist falls heavily …
Luis Buñuel's black comedy about a would-be ladykiller (a literal killer of ladies, that is). The sum of the parts, as they say, is greater than the whole -- for that matter greater than most other wholes as well. Memorable preludial scene, planted squarely on that common ground occupied by …
Hitchcock knockoff, manufactured with palpable intensity by H-G Clouzot. That very intensity, together with the movie's status as an art-house classic, is turned foolish by the unprincipled penny-dreadful plotting. Simone Signoret appeared also in the American remake, Games, twelve years after. With Vera Clouzot, Paul Meurisse, Charles Vanel.
Elia Kazan's variation on the Cain-and-Abel theme: an accursed ne'er-do-well and his blessed goody-goody brother compete with one another under the stern, critical eye of their Bible-thumping father. The color and the locales (in John Steinbeck's California, circa World War I) are perceived with the same wide-eyed wonder as the …
Mastectomies as subject matter are, not surprisingly, a hard sell. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the first time Hollywood breached the subject was the small screen 1978 biopic, First, You Cry starring Mary Tyler Moore as news correspondent Betty Rollin. Some 22 years earlier, Kinuyo Tanaka’s The Eternal Breasts …
WARNING: Colorization has been shown to cause blindness and violent insanity among lab rats. Coming soon: the desaturated version of The Long, Long Trailer.
Robert Aldrich's low-budget overhaul of a Mickey Spillane avenger tale became one of the very few essential private-eye films. (The dreaded Mafia of the novel became a bigger dread: the Bomb. And the tough-guy hero became, in Ralph Meeker's toughly unsympathetic portrait, a total anti-hero if not non-hero.) Starting with …
John Ford's misty-eyed salute to the boys of West Point. Tyrone Power starts out embarrassingly too old for the lead role, and the director's Irish chauvinism often crosses the threshold of pain, but there are some graceful troop movements on the wide screen to provide temporary relief. With Maureen O'Hara, …
Otto Preminger's fevered adaptation of Nelson Algren's heroin horror tale. One oasis of aching pathos: the junkie and his peroxided helpmate improvise some hypothetical Happy Couple dialogue outside a Dream Kitchen display window. Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, Darren McGavin.
In spite of the forced, bully-boy shipboard comedy and mismatched attempts to stitch sumptuous location shots with obvious studio replicas, countless childhood viewings of a center-scan print of Mister Roberts on The Best of CBS render this title beyond criticism. It was far from Hollywood’s first service comedy, but Mister …
Orson Welles spearheads another investigation into the past of an enigmatic tycoon, played again by Welles himself, in one of the worst makeup jobs of his career (and that's saying something!). It's a kind of comic-book edition of Citizen Kane, on an even skimpier budget, with crazily off-kilter camera set-ups …
The premise, as stated at the outset, is that to be able to understand what goes on in a painter's mind, you need only follow his hand. What you are allowed to follow here, however, is not exactly his hand, or even his utensils, but rather the strokes themselves. Henri-Georges …
Robert Mitchum's silky, sleepy evangelist, L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E tattooed on his knuckles, is a monster under the skin, perceptible only to innocent children (in the horror-movie tradition that allows dumb animals to sense the presence of ghosts, vampires, demons), while the gullible grownups fall for his façade. At night, the …