If ever there was a case to sue a movie studio for false advertising, it’s 1944’s Christmas Holiday. Cute and perky songstress Deanna Durbin stars opposite hoofer Gene Kelly’s Cheshire grin. But instead of a light, frothy studio musical, audiences were treated to a rare holiday noir. Dave Kehr referred …
Gene Kelly made his first big Technicolor splash while on loan to Columbia for this Rita Hayworth vehicle. It marks the first partnering of Kelly and then choreographer Stanley Donen. (The two would later collaborate on such M-G-M musical milestones as On the Town and It's Always Fair Weather.) Director …
The loosely connected sequel to Val Lewton's Cat People is stiffer than its forebear, less smooth and supple in its movement. (Gunther von Fritsch was chosen to direct the project, rather than Jacques Tourneur, who had moved on to bigger things, and von Fritsch had to be replaced early in …
Trash with pedigree: a novel by Cain, a script co-authored by Chandler, and fine work from Stanwyck and MacMurray, the latter of whom can always make sin look so unpleasurable. But this is not one of Billy Wilder's more personal projects, shallow and sleazy, and only conformistly cynical instead of …
Damsel-in-distress theatrical melodrama whose fundamental premise has added a word to the English language, a verb transformed from a noun: "to gaslight," meaning something like "to drive crazy; to attempt to induce madness in another; to cause a person to doubt his or her sanity." Fussy, fusty MGM production; dated …
It is perhaps advisable to recall, every few minutes, that when this first hit the nation's movie screens there was a war going on. Otherwise, viewed a safe distance from the general spirit of pulling-together, it may not be wholly clear why this Preston Sturges service comedy earned such hurrahs …
Olivier, doing his bit for the war effort (ca. 1944-45), marshals this Shakespeare history into a patriotic pep rally, with all due pomp and swagger. The backstage-at-the-Globe introduction is clever (and more than that: devotional, spiritual). And if the production never quite loses sight of the stage and becomes a …
Eisenstein's awesome -- almost to the point of unapproachable -- two-part history lesson, done in operatic style, stiffened, inflated, and inflamed. It is especially expressive (or maybe just excessive) in its employment of tapered beards, bulging robes, horrific shadows, crazy-house tilts, hypnotic glowerings. Music by Prokofiev; photography by Tisse; acting …
Vincente Minnelli's inventively color-photographed musical of red-letter-day Americana and greeting-card family life. Not entirely as healthy-minded as it superficially appears, but still a little too. With Judy Garland, Margaret O'Brien, Mary Astor.
Vincente Minnelli's inventively color-photographed musical of red-letter-day Americana and greeting-card family life. Not entirely as healthy-minded as it superficially appears, but still a little too. With Judy Garland, Margaret O'Brien, Mary Astor.
Kurosawa's contribution to the war effort, a semi-documentary about a female employee at a munitions plant (a Rosie-the-Riveter East). Small-scale and human; not a bit disfigured by anything grander; all in all, quite aptly titled. A particularly lovely sequence of the stoical heroine working overtime to catch a possible error.
Enid Bagnold's daydreamy tale of a girl and her horse, and their date with destiny at the Grand National steeplechase, is the perfect movie for all little girls who love horses. (Those little girls, if any, who are excluded from that description may prefer to stay at home, nosing into …
The legend is that Howard Hawks wagered William Faulkner that he could make a good film out of Hemingway’s worst novel (or some such wager), and this was the chosen project. Hawks lets himself be guided in his task by the tested formula of Casablanca. There’s Bogart; there’s some dutiful …
Fritz Lang's cherchez-la-femme thriller, constructed with the grim efficiency of a hangman's noose, though gravely marred by the merciful loophole ending. The filmmaker's follow-up companion piece, Scarlet Street, with the same triumvirate of actors, was not quite so grimly efficient but neither was it so gravely marred. Edward G. Robinson, …