Category: Classics
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Forty Guns occupies that rare position of simultaneously playing like a parody of itself without being any campy fun. It’s a perfect storm of budget, cast, story, era, technology, earnestness, and director Fuller. Oh, and it’s a singing cowboy Western. Well, singing bathhouse owner. Men’s only, which leads to a couple weird scenes where Fuller…
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Pickup on South Street is not based on a novel; the opening titles have a story by credit for Dwight Taylor, with director Fuller getting the screenplay one. The film’s got a peculiar plotting and roving protagonist, plus some terrific monologues, and I was wondering if they were Fuller or someone else. They’re Fuller. Fuller…
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I don’t think I’ve ever referred to a performance as delicious before. I haven’t on The Stop Button (if Google is to be believed), but I’m also pretty sure I’ve never said that phrase before. Delicious performance. Dennis Price gives a delicious performance in Kind Hearts and Coronets. He narrates almost the entire film; there’s…
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Writer, director, and producer Fuller is very committed to the bit with Park Row. He almost pulls the film out of its spiraling third act with an audacious epilogue, which ties back into the opening, with its (uncredited) narration setting the scene. The year is 1886, the place is New York City, and there live…
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I spent the first fifteen minutes of The Mad Doctor of Market Street wondering why the movie didn’t have a better reputation. Yes, the title’s bad even before it was marginally ableist, but director Lewis has been rediscovered; why not Market Street. It starts as a traditional, albeit modern Universal horror picture with “pseudo” scientist…
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Transatlantic is a pre-code Modern Marvels Melodrama. Set in some fascinating technological, man-made invention or creation, a varied group of characters get together and have some drama. Sometimes there’s a murder, sometimes there’s not. Transatlantic has a murder. Unfortunately, it takes its sweet time getting there too, which gets frustrating; the film doesn’t even run…
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The Steel Helmet is an admirable effort from writer, director, and producer Fuller. However, from the start, it’s clear some of the film’s successes will come with qualifications. Fuller, for example, has a great shot a quarter of the time, a terrible shot a quarter of the time, and okay shots half the time. Lousy…
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The Hoodlum Saint is a surprisingly long ninety-four minutes, though since it takes place over eleven years (at least), I suppose some plodding is to be expected. There’s plenty not to be expected about Hoodlum Saint, starting with the time period. It begins in 1919, with a fifty-four-year-old William Powell returning from the Great War…
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Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein makes a surprising number of Universal monster movie gaffes. Most obvious is director Barton’s fault—Dracula (a very fun Bela Lugosi) casts a reflection. After shooting the “vampire seduces lady” scene half in reflection, careful not to show Lugosi, the finish just has a visible Dracula in the mirror. So it…
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Given its micro-budget and absurdity, The Brain from Planet Arous is often surprisingly okay. Director Juran was so embarrassed he took his name off the final product (using his middle name, Hertz, as his surname on the credits), and the movie does get goofy, but its biggest problem isn’t the budget in the end. Instead,…
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The Last Days of Pompeii opens with a disclaimer. Despite sharing a title, it is not based on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1834 novel. That disclaimer should be read as a warning. The film runs ninety-six minutes. The last days of Pompeii are the third act; the first two acts… wait, no. The timeline doesn’t even work…
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No Highway in the Sky has a peculiar structure. It starts with Jack Hawkins; he’s just starting at a British aircraft manufacturer and, during his tour, meets scientist James Stewart, who’s hypothesized a catastrophic, inevitable failure for the latest, greatest plane. Stewart’s convinced the tails will rattle off the planes, which are made with a…
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Them! combines Atomic Age giant monster sci-fi and “by the book” police procedural, with a little (too little) war action thrown in. Nine years after the atomic bomb tests in New Mexico, residual radiation has caused common desert ants to grow to enormous sizes. In their hunt for sugar, these ants quickly have become carnivores,…
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Doctor X has pretty much the wrong prescription for everything. After a genuinely creepy first act, which has police autopsy consultant Lionel Atwill telling the cops the only place a monthly serial killer could get a particular scalpel is at Atwill’s school and then giving them a tour and everyone there being in some way…
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Ball of Fire is a rare delight. It’s got an enormous cast of scene-stealers who all work in unison, thanks to Hawks’s direction but also Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder’s screenplay being so well-balanced. For most of the picture. The third act has two choices, and it chooses poorly but still successfully; I’ll get to…
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Apartment for Peggy has a protagonist problem. It’s also got what seems to be a Production Code problem, but more on that one later (especially since it gets tangled with the protagonist problem). The film opens with retired university philosophy professor Edmund Gwenn dispassionately deciding he’s going to kill himself. He’s been working on his…
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Young Man with a Horn has a third act problem. It’s got too many of them as it tries to find a way not to end on a down note. As a result, each third act gets more depressing, more dire, and correspondingly adjusts the expected bounce-back. But Horn’s got a bookending device with co-star…
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Monster from Green Hell is impressively boring. Despite running a theoretically spry seventy minutes, the film Hell’s a slog from minute five. The film opens with unlikely scientist Jim Davis and sidekick Robert Griffin sending rockets into space to test cosmic rays on animals. Their launch site? A very recognizable, very wanting composite still of…
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Dancing Pirate has multiple awkward points: the omnipresent brownface, the astounding action conclusion (not astounding in a good way), or just the charmless lead performances. The film tells the tale of Bostonian Charles Collins, who—on his way to visit a relation—gets kidnapped and taken aboard a pirate ship. Hence the title. Collins is a superb…
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Given its problems, The Capture’s better than it should be. It’s also never quite as good as it could be—director Sturges starts doing a fantastic chase scene in the third act, but then it quickly peters out, which is too bad because the third act needs something. But the film manages to overcome its weird…
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Woman in the Dark is literally a movie from before they knew how to make movies like Woman in the Dark. The film’s also fairly obviously done on the cheap, and director Rosen doesn’t bring anything to it. But it’s a film noir story trapped in a Pre-Code romantic drama. For a while, it’s a…
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The best scene in The Fabulous Dorseys is the jam session with Art Tatum. It’s the only time in the movie about jazz there are Black people, and it’s the only time the movie really lets The Fabulous Dorseys be fabulous. The film’s a biopic about band leaders brothers Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, who play…
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Around the halfway mark, The Amazing Mr. X gets a whole lot more interesting without ever being able to get much better. The film starts as a supernatural thriller, with widow Lynn Bari convinced her dead husband is calling to her, pissed off she’s getting close to accepting suitor Richard Carlson’s marriage proposal. Bari’s little…
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Strangers on a Train is many things, but it’s principally an action thriller. Director Hitchcock never quite ignores any of its other aspects; he’s just most enthusiastic about the action he and editor William H. Ziegler execute. For example, the third act is entirely action set pieces, one to another, with an occasional bit of…
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Victor Sjöström directs, stars, and adapts The Phantom Carriage. He gives himself a great showcase. Most of the film is a breathtaking character study of an abject bastard. The film throws reason after reason for Sjöström being an irredeemable, abject bastard, and none of them stick. He’s always ready to deliver more bastard. It’s his…
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Second-billed Myrna Loy shows up in The Great Ziegfeld at around the two-hour mark. The film runs three hours. The about a half-hour of it is musical numbers; they’re presumably recreations of the actual Ziegfeld stage productions, but even without having read the Wikipedia article first, it’s obvious Ziegfeld’s a glorifying tribute. Loy’s most significant…
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There are two classes of performance in Macbeth, those who can only handle a double r-rolling and those who go for a triple r-rolling. Director, star and screenwriter Welles gets to do the triple. As does Jeannette Nolan as Lady Macbeth. Everyone else is only doing the double r-roll for their Scottish accent. Like much…
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A Life at Stake is a peculiar noir. It’s low budget, it’s got an actor-turned-director in Guilfoyle, it’s got Angela Lansbury as the femme fatale, it’s got a great, lushly romantic score from Les Baxter, and it’s got a jam-packed script from Russ Bender. The film only runs eighty minutes, and there are a couple…
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The first act of Flight to Mars is quirky enough and soapy enough I had hopes for the finish. The film’s about the first crewed expedition to Mars, and I knew it had them landing there and meeting Martians, so I figured there’d be time for more quirkiness and soapiness at the end. It seemed…
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All About Eve is incredibly ambitious work from writer and director Mankiewicz. From the first scene, from the epic Alfred Newman score over the opening titles (which are just the standard late forties, early fifties Fox title cards), it’s clear All About Eve is going for something. But it takes over an hour to even…
The Stop Button 