Feels more like ninety. Either way, it is almost as effective as summer camp for keeping the kids tied up a spell. David Niven, Cantinflas, Shirley MacLaine, and practically everyone else in the Screen Actors Guild are in it. Michael Anderson directed.
The first of Jean-Pierre Melville's many emulations of the American film noir, and much scragglier in appearance than the later Le Doulos, Second Breath, and The Samurai. The semi-documentary and lyrical evocations of Montmartre at night seem rather at odds, here, with the classical gangster-film iconography. But the idealization of …
The first blast of Kon Ichikawa's double-barreled anti-war attack. Where Fires on the Plain (1959) was to take the carnal approach (with its literal and metaphorical cannibalism), this one takes the spiritual, with its penitent Japanese infantryman voluntarily leaving the world of the living and joining that of the dead …
Ferenc Molnar's fantasy, Liliom, has been Americanized (a lot of corn, plus Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae), Hammersteined ("When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high..."), and Hollywoodized (lighter-than-air color, broader-than-barn screen), and it endures rather well ("Walk on through the wind, walk on through the rain..."). …
A sort of Ronald Reagan tropical melodrama riddled by Luis Buñuel with good, nasty, subversive gags. E.g., Michel Piccoli's devout Catholic missionary, obliged to pretend to a vigilante mob that he has spent the night with a prostitute, hangs his head with hand-in-the-cookie-jar shame while the mob whoops with laughter; …
Habitually overpraised science-fiction classic, whose Freudian pretensions hope for intellectual stature on the basis of Walter Pidgeon's professorial windiness in expounding them. Robbie the Robot, with his rotating gizmos and flashing lights, may be ingratiating as robots go; and the amorphous transparent id is exciting; but the others in the …
Jayne Mansfield provides the former cartoon director, Frank Tashlin, with a useful, cocktail-napkin figure of a woman; and the view of early rock-and-roll, at its sharpest, combines an almost anthropological aloofness and a xenophobic revulsion. It all goes soft during the obligatory "guest" spots for Little Richard, Fats Domino, Gene …
Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra star in Charles Walters' musical remake of The Philadelphia Story.
Martin and Lewis, in their last film together, on a cross-country trek to get an eyeful of Anita Ekberg in Tinsel Town. The stretch done in the style of glossy postcards is sublime. The rest is above the team's average. Directed by Frank Tashlin.
The standard science-fiction theme of dehumanization and the standard 1950s theme of conformism (the idea of "pods" taking the places of human beings seems particularly apt) are put over with a low-budget action movie's sense of strain, urgency, brutality. With Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter; directed by Don Siegel.
Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner star in Rodgers and Hammerstein's tale of cross-cultural romance(?) between a Siamese king and his children's governess. Directed by Walter Lang.
Kirk Douglas, typecast for anguish, as Vincent van Gogh; and Anthony Quinn, typecast for Best Supporting Actor Oscars, as Paul Gauguin -- an intellectual pair if facial hair is any indication. And director Vincente Minnelli, reputed to be a "painterly" colorist, proves it by gazing studiously at the famous canvases. …
Hitchcock's remake of his own 1934 thriller. Many people claim to prefer the earlier version. But Hitchcock did not go to all the trouble to do it again because it had gone so well the first time; and he got it better, if still not perfect, the second time. (He …
Alain Resnais's half-hour documentary on the Nazi concentration camps, juxtaposing past and present. The present, where the camp sites look like ghost towns, is done in tranquil, richly colored, lyrical passages; the past, where the ghosts themselves spring back to life, is done in colorless, nightmarish newsreel footage. The subject …