Category: 1956
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Obvious short about unfaithful wife Virginie Vitry’s attempts to con husband Jacques Doniol-Valcroze into unknowingly giving her the fur coat her lover (Jean-Claude Brialy) bought her. Middling writing and directing leads to middling acting. DVD, Blu-ray.Continue reading →
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The longest continuous stretch of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is about fifteen minutes (the film runs eighty). Small California city doctor Kevin McCarthy and his long-lost lady friend Dana Wynter have just spent the night holed up in his office, hiding from their neighbors, who have all been replaced by “pod people.” The pods…
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While Yul Brynner easily gives the best performance in Ten Commandments, until the second half of the movie Anne Baxter gives the most amusing one. She's an Egyptian princess and she's going to marry the next pharaoh. The next pharaoh is either Brynner or Charlton Heston. Cedric Hardwicke is the current pharaoh and Brynner’s dad.…
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Despite producing the film himself, top-billed James Mason doesn’t have the best part in Bigger Than Life. Instead, Barbara Rush–as his suffering wife–gets it. Mason’s a man with a life threatening chronic illness who has to take special medication. Slowly–though not too slowly–that medication starts making him psychotic. Rush is the faithful wife who ignores…
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If it weren’t for the cast, there’d be very little to distinguish A Cry in the Night. John F. Seitz’s black and white photography is often–but not always–quite good, though director Tuttle struggles with the composition. He composes for the squarer Academy ratio, not widescreen. Cry in the Night is widescreen. And David Buttolph’s music…
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Giant has a fairly good pace for running three hours and twenty minutes. Even more so considering almost the entire second act is told in summary, with stars Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean gradually getting more and more old age makeup. At his “oldest,” Hudson has a bulk harness, which is simultaneously obvious…
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Patterns is a short and simple picture. Van Heflin is the new man at a corporation; he suspects he’s there to replace his assigned mentor, Ed Begley. He has a ruthless boss (Everett Sloane) and a similarly ruthless wife (Beatrice Straight). Will Heflin, called a rising young man (Heflin was forty-eight on release), give in…
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The Creature Walks Among Us is a surprising disappointment. It never has potential exactly, but it does have something. Arthur A. Ross’s script is rather good for this production. Right off, Ross has decent science dialogue. His character interactions are good. And then it’s clear the cast is fairly solid too. I mean, sure, they’re…
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I have a long nostalgic history with The Mole People, which I won’t get into, but there will be tangents. Because The Mole People’s one of the reasons I got into classic film. It’s one of the reasons I prefer watching black and white films for concise intellectual pleasure, usually in run time but sometimes…
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Some of Rock Rock Rock! is awful. Director Price goes for the most boring shot every single time–with his cast members on cheap sets, never making it into location establishing shots. Just once would’ve been great. There’s some really bad acting too. Fran Manfred, Teddy Randazzo, Jacqueline Kerr. Randazzo has the “excuse” of being a…
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Anastasia manages that fine line between being dramatic and a constant delight. Ingrid Bergman’s performance is magnificent, with Arthur Laurents’s screenplay–and Litvak’s direction of her–never quite letting the viewer in. It’s a mystery after all–is Bergman’s Anastasia really the last Romanov. Laurents and Litvak construct a narrative where that question doesn’t matter anywhere near as…
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John Ford is never trying to be discreet with The Searchers, he’s just not willing to talk down to the audience. In the first ten minutes of the film, he and screenwriter Frank S. Nugent quickly establish John Wayne’s character and his relationship with his family. Ford, Nugent, Wayne and the rest of the cast…
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Unfortunate Americanization of the original Japanese GODZILLA adds dubbing and Raymond Burr to the story of a nuclear-powered monster destroying Japan. The whole atom bomb metaphor gets shucked; the script is bad, the shoehorning of Burr is bad (in writing, performance, and direction). See the original. Skip this one. Even if you have nostalgia. DVD,…
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The Man Who Knew Too Much is Hitchcock’s only remake and, as such, it probably ought to be a whole lot better. The resulting film suggests he really wanted to make a Moroccan travelogue and symphony picture… assuming he didn’t set out to make a turgid thriller. There’s also something else awkward about Man–Doris Day.…
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Siodmak sure does love his medium shots. He uses the same medium shot for every indoor scene in Curucu, which, along with the atrocious acting and writing, brings some regularity to the film. I’ve wanted to see this one since I was a kid, mostly because of the excellent poster. It’s strangely unavailable from Universal,…
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The end of Rodan makes the monster’s death tragic—there are two Rodans (giant pterosaurs) and one commits suicide after its mate dies in volcano fumes. Even more tragic is the Japanese defense force hounded these big dumb birds until they intentionally attacked populated areas and those volcanic fumes? The defense force, advised by a rather…
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What’s strange about Warning Red—a Federal Civil Defense Administration commissioned short about atomic attack—is how effective some of the short can be. Not the silly stuff about the nuclear attack or the neighborhood banding together, but the actual procedural. Joseph Cunningham heads all over his destroyed neighborhood, trying to find his wife and child (of…
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I first saw The Killing when I was in high school. I had a great video store and one of the employees–lots of the employees were film school students–recommended the film to me, raving about Kubrick’s use of fractured narrative. He didn’t call it a fractured narrative, I don’t remember what he called it, maybe…
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The Fastest Gun Alive–to put it mildly and politely–is a turkey. I thought, given Glenn Ford in the lead, it was going to be at least a decent Western… but it’s not. Ford’s great (more on him later), but the script is atrocious. It’s rare to see a script so fail its cast; to the…
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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.…
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Entertaining comedy-Western has Clark Gable trying to find some hidden treasure. Only thing is he’s got to convince, seduce, or steal from the original thieves’ widows. Adding to the trouble, besides there not being enough Gable to go around, is their very protective mother-in-law, Jo Van Fleet. Too thin but nice stuff with Gable, Van…
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