The Stop Button
blogging by Andrew Wickliffe
Category: Directed by Edmund Goulding
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Bette Davis and George Brent never kiss in Dark Victory. He’s a brilliant neurosurgeon, she’s a mysteriously ill young socialite. He saves her, they fall in love. But does he really save her…. Victory gives Davis an excellent part, right up until the end of the film. It’s a somewhat bumpy ride–in the first act,…
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Grand Hotel opens with an expository sequence–director Goulding cuts between each of the film’s major players as they talk in the hotel’s telephone booths. It’s a brief, fantastic sequence, thanks to Goulding’s direction and William H. Daniels’s photography, but most importantly, Blanche Sewell’s editing. The editing of this sequence brings the viewer into the hotel,…
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Nightmare Alley is–or should be–a cautionary tale about the dangers of foreshadowing and being really cute about it. The end of the movie is forecast in the opening scene, then again in the third or fourth scene–hammered in for those who weren’t paying enough attention the first time. The second time key phrases are dropped…
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Spectacular adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham novel about WWI vet Tyrone Power trying to fit into the world after the War, whether it’s with too rich for him (but still madly in love with him) girlfriend Gene Tierney, good friend Anne Baxter, or erudite author Herbert Marshall (playing Maugham). Power travels the globe trying to…
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Slow-moving (but nothing compared to the W. Somerset Maugham source novel) and quite good adaptation about existentially miserable Paul Henreid, who–despite becoming a medical doctor–can’t get over his club foot, which sets him on a course of self-destruction involving a common waitress, played by Eleanor Parker. Phenomenal performance from Parker, good one from Henreid, great…
The Stop Button 