The most deglamorized portrait of Hollywood by Hollywood, not only for its vision of power, manipulation, enslavement, but for its stagy confinement to a single beach house. (Also for its casting of Jack Palance as a representative box-office idol.) Clifford Odets wrote the original play, so the fist falls heavily on the lectern. The space limitations don't hem in Robert Aldrich, usually an action director, as much as you might expect: he keeps throwing elbows with his deep-focus and low-angle compositions. Ida Lupino, Shelley Winters, Rod Steiger. (1955) — Duncan Shepherd
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