Category: Directed by Richard Brooks
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Elmer Gantry is all about possibilities. Possibilities for the plot, for the performances, for the film. Director (and screenwriter) Brooks watches the film along with the audience, specifically the performances. Everyone’s just waiting to see what Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons, and Shirley Jones are going to do next. Sometimes, Brooks emphasizes the performance with quick…
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Jean Simmons doesn’t smile until over halfway through The Happy Ending. The movie runs almost two hours and has a present action of like eighteen years. The first eight minutes are a mostly wordless summary of John Forsythe courting Jean Simmons in the early fifties. The time period’s not important–even though the film taking place…
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Crusading newspaperman Humphrey Bogart has to contend with his paper going out of business, the mob, and his ex-wife getting remarried. Writer-director Brooks’s ambitious are beyond what he can realize. Great performances from Bogart, Ethel Barrymore (as the paper’s owner), and Kim Hunter (as his ex). Almost entirely superb supporting cast. Great black and white…
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Here’s a strange one. I just had to look to see where it fell in careers, Richard Brooks’s and Robert Taylor’s, because it’s… well, it’s something else. It’s sort of early in Brooks’s directing career, before he took off, and it’s at the very end of Taylor’s MGM contract. Taylor plays a villain in it.…
The Stop Button 