A traditional fairytale kingdom of enchanted forest, decaying castle, and magic, poetic occurrence is laid out by Jean Cocteau, perfect in every detail: the crowd-pleasing cinematic sleights-of-hand, the resplendent, soft-toned imagery of France's "quality cinema," the fragile, fine-china beauty of Josette Day, and the humiliatingly hairy makeup of Jean Marais.
William Wyler's story of three World War II vets who come home to...a different world.
The Bogart-Bacall team's playful, pattycake exchanges are quite dated now, although at times still quite salacious, and the adaptation of the labyrinthine Raymond Chandler mystery novel is not as baffling as it is reputed to be. However, there is also a grand confidence in the allure of film noir atmospheric …
Seamy mystery story about a discharged veteran (the military experience explains his poker-faced savoir-faire in the face of death) who returns from the war accompanied by a shell-shocked puppylike Army buddy, and who arrives at his tacky L.A. apartment just in time for his wife's murder. Raymond Chandler's script outfits …
Not as good a movie as Mamoulian's Blood and Sand or Parrish's Fire Down Below (nice pun), this sinful South American melodrama nonetheless offers the definitive image of Rita Hayworth as man-trap. Intoxicating tropical-kitsch decor; moody photography by Rudolph Maté. With Glenn Ford; directed by Charles Vidor.
If the Grinch in you has difficulty getting past the saccharine silliness of Miracle on 34th Street, how about a Christmas film that opens with an alcoholic druggist bringing his fist so hard against his delivery boy’s head that blood flows from the lad’s ear? And for a beloved yuletide …
If the Grinch in you has difficulty getting past the saccharine silliness of Miracle on 34th Street, how about a Christmas film that opens with an alcoholic druggist bringing his fist so hard against his delivery boy’s head that blood flows from the lad’s ear? And for a beloved yuletide …
The opening is an intense, to-the-point illustration of the gangland rub-out in Hemingway's brusque short story. What follows is a blander, slacker, but carefully wrought specimen of detective fiction, as an insurance flatfoot ferrets out the whole story behind the short story. Definitive film noir score by Miklos Rozsa. With …
Smoothly tuned vehicle for Ida Lupino, delivering a been-around-the-block performance as a lower-bracket nightclub chanteuse who comes to L.A. to visit her kid sister, and comes within the gravitational pull of a suave mobster. A sure feel for the territory, despite the studio settings. Robert Alda, Bruce Bennett, Andrea King, …
The Marx Brothers' impoverished mise-en-scène is always inadequate to any purpose larger than a vaudeville skit, but it looks especially limited in their takeoffs on such well-defined genres as the cowboy movie (Go West) and the spy movie (this one). Directed by Archie Mayo.
Alfred Hitchcock's high-rent spy romance, in romantic Rio de Janeiro, maintains an atmosphere of crackling sexual tension, with Ingrid Bergman as a loose liver wooed (too well) by a suave American agent, and propelled, against both their better wishes, into squeamish wedlock with a Nazi. Cary Grant, Claude Rains, Louis …
Infidelity leads to murder when seedy John Garfield and sizzling (but spoken for) Lana Turner plot to do away with her troublesome husband in this Hollywood adaptation of James Cain's crime novel. Tay Garnett directs.
British title: A Matter of Life and Death. Either way, one of a veritable epidemic of WWII-time supernatural fantasies, centered around an RAF pilot who escapes the clutches of death when his plane goes down. Ah, but has he gotten away for good? The early Technicolor achieves a high level …
The manhunt for a fugitive Nazi, resettled as a college professor in Small Town, U.S.A., yields easily to Orson Welles's penchant for intimating a monstrous unwholesomeness afoot everywhere. At the outset, Edward G-Man Robinson flares with patriotism, rapping his pipe on the desktop until it cracks in half; afterwards he …