Tag: Noble Johnson
-
Murders in the Rue Morgue buries the ledes a little too often. First, it hides it’s Expressionist until we get to Bela Lugosi’s mad scientist lair and then the production design is absurdly Expressionist. There’s eventually a scene with Noble Johnson (who I thought was in white face, but I guess not based on his…
-
The Mummy is a strange horror movie. While there’s a definite villain–a monster–in Boris Karloff’s resurrected mummy, he poses a danger specifically to only one cast member–Zita Johann. She’s the reincarnation of his lost love and her exact importance to him isn’t clear until the last act. There’s a somewhat goofy moment where Edward Van…
-
Running about an hour, The Most Dangerous Game shouldn’t be boring. But it somehow manages. Worse, the boring stuff comes at the end; directors Schoedsack and Pichel drag out the conclusion with a false ending or two. The film doesn’t have much to recommend it. That laborious ending wipes short runtime off the board, leaving…
-
King Kong is a perfect film. I don’t think I’d realized before. It’s always hard to talk about films like Kong, influential standards of American cinema. I want to talk about how its structure still sets the tone for modern films–the gradual lead-in (it’s forty-some minutes before Kong shows up), the non-stop action of the…
The Stop Button 