Dietrich, in her fifth film for von Sternberg, strips off a gorilla suit (to reveal a platinum Afro, among other things) and sings "Hot Voodoo." That aspect of her character is more swallowable than the aspect of Self-Sacrificing Wife and Single Mom. The hallucinatory vision of America's seamy side is …
Jean Renoir's hoorah for the free human spirit: a stagy and sentimental story about a no-good bum and would-be suicide who is fished out of the river and then stubbornly resists all of his bourgeois benefactor's attempts to lead him along the road to rehabilitation. Michel Simon, his leonine head …
Tod Browning's somewhat overvalued shocker, set amid the segregated population of a carnival sideshow. Stiff, heavy-handed, preachy, and often, with its primitive 1930 soundtrack, inaudible; but also curious, compassionate, and unsettling. Certainly not one of Irving Thalberg's run-of-the-mill projects for MGM.
The introductory sequence, in which the rhythmic noises of early-morning Paris are worked into a massive musical number, is in the style of Disney's Silly Symphonies. In most other areas, this Rouben Mamoulian musical is in the style of Ernst Lubitsch (Mamoulian's musicals skip wildly in style, from the gritty …
It’s a race between the British Secret Service and Dr. Fu Manchu (Boris Karloff) to find the lost tomb of Genghis Khan. The Brits had best be the first to break ground lest the merciless Chinese madman — with a British Accent and decked out in an Asian woman’s ceremonial …
A pre-code curio with a 63 minute running time. How can you miss? Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper’s warm up to King Kong — the nighttime jungle scenes share the same sets and sounds — introduces Leslie Banks as Count Zaroff, a tangible threat more terrifying and prevalent, …
Paul Muni as the earliest (pseudonymous) screen incarnation of Al Capone: a megalomaniac with an unnatural possessiveness toward his kid sister (Ann Dvorak, sexily rebellious). The chief threat in this regard turns out to be the mobster's right-hand man, the wolfish George Raft — and Howard Hawks's knack for the …
Frederic March stars as as Marcus Superbus, the prefect of Rome forced to choose between the love of a Christian temptress (Elissa Landi) and his devotion to Emperor Nero (preening Charles Laughton, giddily fiddling as backlot Rome smolders). Cecil B. DeMille's capper to his trilogy of biblical epics — this …
Two congenital jewel thieves of opposite sexes and a mouth-watering millionairess (mouth-watering not just for her millions) form a romantic and larcenous triangle in what's supposed to be Depression-era Europe. But the breathlessly sustained levels of artifice, insouciance, and cold-blooded wit carry it into a world all its own. Or …
Carl Dreyer's ingenious, anomalous, experimental horror film, gropingly photographed by Rudolph Maté through a veiled camera that casts a milky haze over the haunted countryside. The vampire is a white-haired old lady; the hero is a nonplussed do-nothing dandy; and the prevailing mood is one of unprecedented malaise.
A kind of dry run for A Star Is Born, drier in every respect, except in the amount of alcohol consumed by the leading man, here a film director rather than actor. Lowell Sherman, who in reality was both, concentrated afterwards exclusively on directing. There may be an irony there. …