Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra as a couple of happy-go-lucky sailors with whom you would not be afraid to trust your sister. They take so shilly-shallyingly long to figure out who loves whom, and to land an important audition with Jose Iturbi, that you sooner or later get your fill …
Trivia experts will instantly peg Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s as the title splashed across the Radio City Music Hall marquee while Michael Corleone and his future bride, Kay, do their Christmas shopping in The Godfather. McCarey’s Bells really has more in common with Coppola’s second installment, inasmuch …
A group of evangelistic nuns fail to make a go of it in a remote Himalayan convent, one of them driven quite mad by lust for an Englishman in shorts. That bit is particularly over-the-moon, and a good bit of the rest of it is at least near-the-brink. But the …
David Lean directs Noel Coward's story about a chance meeting between two happily married strangers.
Marcel Carné's escapist period piece, made in France during the Nazi occupation, looks like an effort to manufacture a movie that belongs on the library shelf beside Hugo and Balzac. For certain, it is a literate piece of work, a-buzz with witty and crafty gab; and it is played with …
Marcel Carné's escapist period piece, made in France during the Nazi occupation, looks like an effort to manufacture a movie that belongs on the library shelf beside Hugo and Balzac. For certain, it is a literate piece of work, a-buzz with witty and crafty gab; and it is played with …
Otto Preminger's plunge into wartime fatalism and pessimism. Nice nocturnal atmosphere and bluesy mood, but routine and mechanical in its marriage-for-money plot. With Dana Andrews, Alice Faye, Linda Darnell, Charles Bickford, Anne Revere, John Carradine.
Joan Crawford took home an Oscar® for her performance as the widow who finds more success in life as a businesswoman than a mother. Michael Curtiz directs.
Wartime espionage thriller, from a Graham Greene novel, with a pervasive air of paranoia (director Fritz Lang had gotten out of Nazi Germany, but not out of its shadow), many atmospheric scenes (plenty of the director's trademark cigarette smoke), and a marvelous climactic moment that employs a pinprick of light …
Beautifully shaped and sharply detailed chronicle of the rise and fall of a conscienceless carny (played with unaccustomed toughness by Tyrone Power): up to the heights of high-society spiritualist and down to the depths of sideshow geek. Beautifully photographed and sharply written, too: Lee Garmes and Jules Furthman, respectively. Somewhat …
Gloomy film noir about a henpecked hubby with an unnourished ego as a Sunday painter, who becomes easy pickings for a manipulative vamp. Fritz Lang's wartime Hollywood remake of Renoir's between-wars La Chienne (The Bitch) offers a fascinating contrast in directorial personalities. Renoir is convivially more interested in the characters …
Hitchcock's psychoanalytic murder mystery makes use of the subject, indifferently, just for a fresh new gimmick (a Freudian sleuth played by Ingrid Bergman in eyeglasses) instead of for its real possibilities. Where those possibilities start is in Gregory Peck's private stifled panics about any kind of striation on a white …
A repeat attempt, with less success, by the director of The Uninvited, Lewis Allen. A genteel and literate chiller (co-written by Raymond Chandler, produced by John Houseman), or in other words, very much an antique chiller. The situation of a governess bedevilled by strange children and a mysterious house might …