Category: 1943
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Quite surprisingly, The Seventh Victim–in addition to being a disquieting, subtle thriller–is mostly about urban apathy and discontent. Though there aren’t any establishing shots of New York City (or of the small New England town protagonist Kim Hunter comes from), Robson and writers Charles O’Neal and DeWitt Bodeen are quite clear about it. There’s no…
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The Leopard Man has such beauteous production values–one would never think it was a low budget picture, not with Robert De Grasse’s lush blacks and he and director Tourneur’s tracking shots–it’s a shame the acting fails the film. A lot of the problem the script. Co-screenwriters Ardel Wray and Edward Dein try hard to show…
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China has a lot to do. While it’s a propaganda picture meant to rally American support for the Chinese, it’s also propaganda for the future of China. Loretta Young plays a school teacher and her charges, in almost every one of their scenes, extol the virtues of Western democracy. There’s also the redemptive aspect for…
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Although the title suggests otherwise, The Ghost Ship is not a supernatural thriller. It is, however, a very effective suspense picture. Russell Wade (in a sturdy lead performance) is a new officer. On his first ship out, he begins to suspect the captain–Richard Dix, who steadily gets creepier–is a little off his rocker. Of course,…
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About two minutes after I finished watching Mystery of the 13th Guest, I realized no one ever solves the titular mystery. There’s a mysterious thirteenth guest in the first scene; the guest is absent and his or her identity is never revealed. Tim Ryan’s police lieutenant is supposed to be sort of dumb (but smarter…
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Of all the Universal monster movies, The Wolf Man “deserved” a real sequel most. With Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Lon Chaney Jr.’s abilities to essay the Larry Talbot role really shine through. I’ve read (and maybe even repeated here) Chaney never gets credit for playing such a physical role while being a bigger man.…
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Reusing music in b movies isn’t uncommon, but to reuse music from a movie with the same star? It kind of gets distracting. Almost everything about Calling Dr. Death is distracting, actually. The movie opens with a head in a glass sphere ominously describing the film’s setting (Dr. Death is a filmic episode of Inner…
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The seventy-five minutes of The Ox-Bow Incident are some of the finest in cinema. The film is eventually a solemn examination of the human condition, quiet in its observations, with spare lines of dialogue of profound importance. But before this period in the film, which roughly lasts from twenty minutes in until the end, Ox-Bow…
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Son of Dracula doesn’t open well. The first scene’s all right, but once Louise Allbritton shows up–in the second scene–things start to go downhill. Allbritton’s one of the film’s constant problems. She’s a terrible actress and, in a film in desperate need of all the acting help it can get, it’s a significant defect. The…
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They Met in the Dark offers James Mason as a romantic leading man in a thriller. For that one alone, it’s worth a look, but also because it’s an incredibly peculiar film. Not overall, unfortunately, because it descends into a routine wartime propaganda bit about fifth columnists–the details of the sinister plot are very familiar…
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Apparently, the last time I saw The Mysterious Doctor (in 2001), I didn’t think much of it, rating it at one and a half. It’s a little low, since the film transcends propaganda, which many 1940s propaganda films did, but The Mysterious Doctor does it in interesting ways. Its mood isn’t the usual for a…
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Shadow of a Doubt is a strange one–the presence of Teresa Wright and the small town atmosphere and the Gregg Toland-esque (but not Gregg Toland) cinematography make it feel like William Wyler, the presence of Joseph Cotten and the camera angles and intricate sound design make it feel like Welles (or at least an RKO…
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Wow, Watch on the Rhine’s got it all. Not only does it have a nice metaphor for the United States waking up to the horrors of the Nazis and determining to do something about it (which the United States never did), it’s also got a nice ending telling mothers their place is to send their…
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Far from bad propaganda picture about U.S. ambassador Joseph E. Davies (played by Walter Huston) taking his family to the Soviet Union and seeing all the wonderful things they’ve come up with there. Based on the real Davies’s book, which came out when relations between the U.S. and Soviet Union was in its salad days.…
The Stop Button 