It appeared to be the world's worst idea. Stanley Kramer, who had never before directed a comedy, used over nine million dollars, over three hours' running time, over two dozen veteran comic actors, and the wide, wide Cinerama image to create a "comedy to end all comedies" (it wasn't clear …
King Kong and Godzilla have been the subjects of many "who would win" debates and the two fight their way across Japan, leaving a lot of damage in their wake. Released in the U.S. in 1963 by Universal Pictures.
Roman Polanski's beautifully controlled first feature is an experiment in chemical reaction -- three characters isolated in a placid, bland, watery setting and engaged in an edgy jostle of egos, chiefly that of a well-off sportswriter and that of a hitch-hiking student (the writer's wife is almost dispensable, except as …
A sort of Italian Gone with the Wind, albeit with an appeal somewhat higher-brow, adapted from the Lampedusa novel about the aristocratic way of life imperilled by Garibaldi and his Red Shirts. Twenty minutes have been restored to the 165-minute version released in America in 1963, along with some fine-tuning …
John Huston tries his hand at a much softer-boiled detective story than The Maltese Falcon, a more genteel one, a mere gambol. (And his attitude in Falcon had already been overly sportive.) The "classical" sleuth (George C. Scott) is on the trail of a Master of Disguise, and several heavily …
Alain Resnais brings a good mystery writer's snoopiness and creepiness to a fragmented, elliptical story focussing on the past and the secrets of an aging, part-time antiques dealer and compulsive gambler (Delphine Seyrig, shockingly deglamorized from Resnais's Marienbad), and her tormented stepson, just back from the Algerian War. The contemporary …
Kelp, not Klump! The one Jerry Lewis films that even his staunchest detractors grudgingly give their approval. No other comedic filmmaker, not Chaplin, not even Jacques Tati, knew how to wring gales of laughter through intuitive body placement in the frame quite like Jerry. His visual timing of a gag …
From Japan, a horrors-of-war story pushed onto the supernatural plane. The story itself has to do with a savagely resourceful mother and daughter who survive by killing stray soldiers, stripping their bodies, dumping them into a black pit, and hocking their armor. Kaneto Shindo, an underrated director, offers a heatedly …
In the sequel to his Yojimbo, Kurosawa, keeping a smart eye on the box-office, choreographs even wilder, grander action scenes; however, the inherent confidence and joviality of a successful film formula somewhat diminish the misanthropic, iconoclastic snarl of the earlier film. Mifune, Nakadai, and Kurosawa's stock company of jibbering-monkey performers …
A yellow-journalistic Gentleman's Agreement: undercover reporter commits himself to a mental ward to uncover a murderer, and comes to fit in, there, all too well. The mixed-nuts roster of inmates allows Samuel Fuller to voice his minimal responses to a wide range of large topics (racism, sex, obesity). Good unclean …
Bergman achieves an intense appreciation of physical states — sexual desire, fatigue, illness, old age, a child's smallness — in a stifling, sticky, sensual film about two sisters, travelling companions, one a lustful young mother and the other a moribund lesbian, who make a stopover at a baroque hotel in …
Hitchcock's shocker about an avian air attack on the citizenry of Bodega Bay is constructed along the lines of a sci-fi invasion film. Divested of all logic, this assault on middle-class complacency exposes Hitchcock's sadistic tendencies as nakedly as they have ever been. There is a lightening of load thanks …
Archness dished up in gargantuan portions. Tony Richardson's and John Osborne's overblown pastiche reduces Fielding's novel to chaotic, ill-considered monkeyshines. Certainly it has some redeeming features, for example Diane Cilento's smudged country wench. But generally its tendency to throw in anything, especially a "cinematic" magic trick, to spice things up, …
In the 1960s, the road to a paycheck for most superstar remnants of Hollywood’s Golden Age forked in two directions: big screen fright or the even more terrifying network drama. Ray Milland would go on to appear in an abundance of schlock horror titles (Frogs, The Thing With Two Heads, …