Category: 1952
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The Quiet Man starts as a loving postcard tour of the Irish countryside. It’s pastoral, romantic, funny, human. Son of Ireland-gone American John Wayne returns home and immediately falls in love with neighbor Maureen O’Hara. Unfortunately, despite O’Hara having similar inklings, her big brother is Wayne’s new nemesis, Victor McLaglen. It’s this exceptionally lush, tender,…
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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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Secret People is a very peculiar propaganda picture. It’s mostly set in 1937, almost entirely involving Italian immigrants, and it’s very pro-British. The film downplays the idea fascist regimes are dangerous (fascist regimes in 1937, remember) while getting behind the idea of doing whatever the British government says, even if what they say is appease.…
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Somehow Bend of the River manages to be too cluttered while running too short at ninety-one minutes. The film starts great; James Stewart is a former bad man of the West who’s trying to be a good guy and become a farmer (or rancher if he can get himself some cattle). He’s guiding a wagon…
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High Noon is a film all about courage and cowardice, so it’s appropriate the film starts with the most courageous thing it’s ever going to do and it does a few. It commits to its theme song. Not a piece of music from Dimitri Tiomkin, but a country song (written by Tiomkin, lyrics by Ned…
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There’s a lot to The Sound Barrier. Outside the truly magnificent aerial photography, not much of it has to do with the film itself. Other than director Lean and writer Terence Rattigan rewriting actual history to make it so a private British aircraft company “broke” the sound barrier some five years after Chuck Yeager did…
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Olivia de Havilland is top-billed on My Cousin Rachel, but Richard Burton’s the star. For better or worse. Burton’s a young English gentleman, de Havilland is his cousin. And his cousin–and guardian’s–widow. She doesn’t appear for the first twenty-five minutes of the film, which instead have Burton becoming more and more concerned for his missing…
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Scaramouche is a deliberately constructed film. I’m curious if screenwriters Ronald Millar and George Froeschel followed the source novel’s plot structure, because it’s a very peculiar series of events. It doesn’t open with the leading man, instead starting out with villain Mel Ferrer. Janet Leigh, as his love interest, gets introduced long before Eleanor Parker–who’s…
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For a twenty minute and change live performance, Frankenstein could be a lot worse. Director Medford occasionally will find a good shot. Mary Alice Moore (as Elizabeth) is real good at the beginning and competent, if not quite good, at the end. Medford showcases her during her best parts. As the mad doctor John Newland…
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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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Bill Peet, who came up with the story for Susie the Little Blue Coupe and co-wrote the final script, must have thought American kids didn’t have enough depressing classic Russian literature in their lives. It’s a seriously disturbed, if fantastic, cartoon. Susie tells the story of a happy little car named, you guessed it, Susie.…
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Pluto’s Christmas Tree gets off to a somewhat rocky start; it turns out, the animators spend more time on one nut than they do on Mickey Mouse. Besides looking perpetually hung over, Mickey’s also very loosely drawn. However, Tree soon picks up because Hannah’s direction is inspired and the animators excel on everything (except Mickey).…
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Two Chips and a Miss is a weak seven minutes. While some of the fault is Hannah’s direction, it’s mostly just his animators. They’re incredibly lazy when it comes to their figures. Hannah’s even lazier when it comes to filling out the cartoon. Chip and Dale are both romancing a night club singer (a female…
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Diplomatic Courier starts a lot stronger than it finishes. For the first half or so, it’s a post-war variation of a thirties Hitchcock–a lot of unexplained, strange incidents and a protagonist trying to unravel them. Then it changes gear, becoming a Hollywood attempt at The Third Man. It’s successful during the first part and it…
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A tough bulldog adopts an adorable kitten in Feed the Kitty; a story Jones liked so much he remade it. This one, the original, manages to be charming without saccharine, maybe because of the really strange objectification of the dog’s lady owner. She kicks up her skirt at one point, revealing her legs, and it…
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I had read Magical Maestro was controversial and it took me quite a while, watching it, to release why it had that reputation. There’s a montage of an irate magician turning an opera singing bulldog into various singing stereotypes. There’s a cowboy, there’s a redneck, there’s a baby… then an angry audience member squirts ink…
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I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a horror film not interested in being scary before Ghost Ship. It seems like a strange concept, but certainly one with a lot of possibilities. Unfortunately, I’m not sure Sewell knew he was making a scary movie without a single scare. I don’t really know what he was doing.…
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The most peculiar thing–so far–about Jetta is how Dan DeCarlo comes up with these wonderful futuristic references, whether it’s Venusian swamps or something else. It doesn’t fit the rest of the book in some way… as otherwise, Jetta is just a romantic comedy comic. The way DeCarlo gets those references in is just fantastic, really…
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Above and Beyond breaks one of my severest rules–don’t start with narration and then drop it. Above and Beyond starts with Eleanor Parker narrating the film, mostly because otherwise she wouldn’t be in it for the first hour. Once she is in the film full-time, the narration quickly disappears. I can’t remember the last time…
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Beyond tedious story of traveling actress Anna Magnani getting into romance and intrigue in colonial Central America. Boring direction, poorly drawn characters. Plus Renoir’s got the international cast speaking English (for unity?), which brings in a bunch of other problems, particularly with Magnani’s performance and what Renoir does with it. DVD, Streaming.Continue reading →
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