ALL ABOUT EVE
*****
USA
An aging Broadway diva hires as an assistant a conniving ingénue.
As show-business satires go, none could ever outdo this one for its
acidic genius. A tour de force of cynicism and bitchery, with a bunch of
seasoned thespians at the peak of their powers revelling in a sizeable
portion of the most quotable one-liners ever burnt onto celluloid.
wr/dir: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
ph: Milton Krasner
m: Alfred Newman
cast: Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George
Sanders, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, Hugh Marlowe, Thelma Ritter,
Gregory Ratoff, Marilyn Monroe, Barbara Bates
THE ASPHALT JUNGLE
*****
BORN
TO BE BAD
***
USA
If Olivia de Havilland is to be believed, perennial on-screen victim Joan
Fontaine was anything but in real life - which makes this gold-digger
melodrama doubly fascinating. She's consciously playing off her reputation as the
breathless, delicate ingenue, and for the first half hour, you don't
realise this. So for a good thirty minutes, this untypical Nicholas Ray
joint just doesn't appear to be getting anywhere. Only gradually do you
pick up on hints that (33-year-old business
school student) Fontaine is in fact playing a social-climbing vixen and
the point of the story is that she's been subtly, consummately
manipulating everyone around her. And initially, you have to admire
Fontaine for choosing not to telegraph her bitchery and also for so
ruthlessly exploiting and undermining her Hollywood-financed persona. But
then in no time it becomes apparent that those blank-eyed, swaying
half-smiles that the camera lingers on at the end of every scene are
intended to pass for cold, cutting sneers. And then it hits you: this
isn't a meta- performance, it's a bad performance.
Even though this was produced during the period of his
artistic peak, Ray's presence behind the camera can only be felt through
the occasional cynical one-liners and the much-read-into abundance of
staircases.
(The most curious and commendable thing about this picture is
that in Mel Ferrer's painter it features an early, rare and only
arbitrarily veiled representation of a gay man, who comes off as
sophisticated, attractive and even dignified.)
dir: Nicholas Ray
cast: Joan Fontaine, Robert Ryan, Zachary Scott, Joan Leslie, Mel
Ferrer, Harold Vermilyea, Virginia Farmer
BORN YESTERDAY
****
CINDERELLA
****
USA
The pleasures are more small-scale than some of the earlier Disney
features and the animation isn't as finely detailed as in the best of
them, but there is great fun to be had with this one. Cinderella herself
is as blandly wholesome as the lamest Disney heroines - she blends in with
the pastel backgrounds. But the villains - particularly Lucifer the cat -
sneer and leer terrifically, and the gallery of supporting animal
characters (whose voice actors surely must have expended gallons of helium
during the production process to achieve the perfect level of squeak) are
a delight. When Cinderella discovers the dress her anthropomorphic friends
have tirelessly mended just so she can go to the ball, it's cutesy,
cloying, manipulative stuff. But if you had a childhood, you'll grin.
dir: Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi
voices of: Ilene Woods, William Phipps, Eleanor Audley, Verna
Felton, JamesMacDonald
D.O.A.
***½
USA
An accountant is informed that
he has only 24 hours to live.
Slow to establish its set-up, but once it does, the suspense holds.
dir: Rudolph Maté
cast: Edmond O'Brien, Pamela Britton, Luther Adler,
Beverly Garland, Lynn Baggett, William Ching, Henry Hart, Neville Brand,
Laurette Luez
LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES
***
USA
Jean Cocteau adapted his
notorious book (which may never have been a play, but certainly feels like
one) about incestuous obsession into a script and provided the flowery,
very bookish voiceover. It's one of the picture's many highfalutin
elements that don't gel, also including the music from Bach and Vivaldi,
the sister's overwrought posturing, the brother's wooden delivery and an
unconvincing actress playing a boy and his look-alike. There's atmosphere
to the closing scenes but by then it's too little too late.
dir: Jean-Pierre Melville
wr: Jean Cocteau, Jean-Pierre Melville
ph: Henri Decaë
cast: Nicole Stéphane, Edouarde Dermithe, Renée
Cosima, Jacques Bernard
FATHER OF THE BRIDE
****
USA
A comfortably-middle-class-suburban banker's daughter is getting married.
A clever suburban satire, it's wittier when it concentrates on the
father forced to reassess his attachment to his daughter than it is when
focusing purely on the wedding's escalating costs. It does build up an
emotional punch though and it's consistently enjoyable, in no small part due to
the presence of John Alton the genius behind the camera and Spencer Tracy
the legend in front of it.
dir: Vincente Minnelli
wr: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett
ph: John Alton
m: Adolph Deutsch
cast: Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett,
Elizabeth Taylor, Don Taylor, Billie Burke, Moroni Olsen, Leo G. Carroll,
Taylor Holmes, Melville Cooper
THE
FURIES
****
USA
An early, astoundingly ambitious Anthony Mann Western about a relationship
with unsubtle Freudian overtones between a fickle cattle rancher and his
temperamental daughter. Mann - or, at least, his scriptwriter -
overreaches to an extent, but consistently he delivers one startling
setpiece after another. And the performances are delicious.
dir: Anthony Mann
wr: Charles Schnee
ph: Victor Milner
cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Huston, Wendell Corey, Judith
Anderson, Gilbert Roland, Thomas Gomez, Beulah Bondi, Albert Dekker,
John Bromfield, Wallace Ford, Blanche Yurka
THE GUNFIGHTER
***
USA
A legendary gunfighter is looking to settle down but is constantly hounded
by young "squints" looking to kill him first and cash in on the
notoriety.
A lean, efficient Western, more concerned with psychological
undercurrents than others and set in a convincing version of the Old West
populated by less than convincing figures. Peck looks too skinny to lift a
gun, Homeier talks like he's in a soft-core gay porno, and Westcott seems
too bland to seduce a high schooler, much less the fastest gun in the
West.
dir: Henry King
wr: Nunnally Johnson, André de Toth, William
Bowers, William Sellers
cast: Gregory Peck, Millard Mitchell, Helen
Westcott, Skip Homeier, Jean Parker, Karl Malden
HARVEY
***½
IN A LONELY PLACE
****
USA
A self-destructive Hollywood
scriptwriter becomes a murder suspect and enters into a relationship with
a neighbour starlet.
Adult, absorbing character melodrama, tightly structured and bent on
pushing the thematic and stylistic boundaries of the period.
dir: Nicholas Ray
cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank
Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid, Art Smith, Jeff Donnell
KING
SOLOMON'S MINES
***½
USA
An African adventure story with piles of mandrills and cobras and
elephants. On its own trashy terms, it works wonderfully well.
dir: Compton Bennett, Andrew Marton
cast: Debora Kerr, Stewart Granger, Richard Carlson, Hugo Haas,
Lowell Gilmore, Kimursi, Siriaque, Sekaryongo, Baziga, Munto Anampio
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NO MAN OF HER OWN
***
USA
A tearjerking vehicle for the
always dependable Stanwyck, where she swaps identities with a dead bride
for the sake of her unborn child and, of course,
ends
up blackmailed. Implausible melodrama (based on a book by Cornel Woollrich),
handled with more finesse than it warrants, and consequently more
compulsive than it has any right to be.
dir: Mitchell Leisen
cast: Barbara Stanwyck, John Lund, Jane Cowl,
Phyllis Thaxter, Lyle Bettger, Henry O'Neill, Richard Denning
LOS OLVIDADOS
****
Mexico
The life of juvenile
delinquents living in the slums of Mexico City.
A raw, visceral mix of violence and misery, horrifying and uninterrupted.
There is an aspect of melodrama, but it's cleverly disguised.
dir: Luis Buñuel
cast: Alfonso Mejia, Roberto Cobo, Stella Inda, Jesus
Navarro, Miguel Inclan, Alma Fuentas, Francisco Jambrino
OUTRAGE
***
PANIC IN THE STREETS
****
USA
The New Orleans police have 48
hours to locate the killer of an immigrant infected with bubonic plague.
Tense Cold War paranoia, presented in the popular, reliable
pseudo-documentary fashion of the period.
dir: Elia Kazan
cast: Richard Widmark, Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel
Geddes, Jack Palance, Zero Mostel
RASHOMON
*****
Japan
This was the film that pretty much introduced Eastern
cinema to a stunned audience at the Venice Film Festival (where it
collected a Golden Lion) and subsequently, the world. It tells of a case
of rape and murder in 11th-century Kyoto, of which the three participants
and a witness each provide a contrasting account. The bandit’s version
includes a terrific sword-fight, the raped wife’s version plays her up
as the wronged innocent, the dead samurai’s version is summoned up
through a medium and the woodcutter’s version reveals each of them to be
a weak, repugnant human being.
Kurosawa’s first international export has proven enormously
influential, not only in terms of sparking up Western interest in Japanese
film, but also in its truth-is-malleable philosophy, the
multiple-viewpoint structure, the direct address of the audience as a
jury, and the evocative use of nature (apparently Kurosawa was the first
director to point his camera directly at the sun). A lot of the
picture’s visceral impact stems from the way the camera glides and pans
through the foliage and the exclusive use of forest locations dappled with
sunlight.
The framing bits with
the woodcutter and a priest reconsidering their faith in humanity are
ham-fisted in their approach (and lead to a conclusion that so contradicts
everything that went on before, it feels almost Hollywood-imposed), but
also beautifully photographed.
dir: Akira Kurosawai
ph: Kazuo Miyagawa
m: Fumio Hayasaka
cast: Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo, Takashi Shimura,
Masayuki Mori, Minoru Chiaki, Kichijiro Ueda, Fumiko Homma
RIO
GRANDE
***
USA
The last chapter in John Ford's moderately pleasant, generally uninspired
and intensely romanticised Cavalry trilogy. This one's as much about
commander John Wayne and his boys suppressing them nasty Injuns as it is
about Wayne rebuilding his broken marriage to Dixie-blooded Maureen O'Hara
and learning to bond with his estranged son. Wayne is adequate but the
rest of the performances range from grating (Victor McLaglen's 147th
variation on a burly comical Irishman) to clogged-up (O'Hara channelling
the Joan Crawford school of cheekbones under pressure) to vacant (the
blank-faced runt you're supposed buy as the progeny of O'Hara and the
Duke). And though it's clear that Ford is deeply and emotionally invested
in his story (there's a sense throughout the movie that somebody's about
to break into tears for no tangible reason), you're not necessarily sure
why this is.
dir: John Ford
cast: John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Ben Johnson, Claude Jarman Jr.,
Harry Carey Jr., Chill Wills, J. Carrol Naish, Victor McLaglen, Grant
Withers, Sons of the Pioneers
LA RONDE
*****
STAGE FRIGHT
****
STROMBOLI
***½
SUNSET BOULEVARD
*****
USA
An unemployed Hollywood screenwriter gets involved with a reclusive silent
screen diva.
The acerbic highpoint of several legendary careers. A blistering
exposé of Hollywood's dark closet, crafted with consummate style and
elegance. The design and lighting of Norma Desmond's baroque mansion alone
ranks among the screen's great achievements. And then there's that
delicious conceit of the dream factory handing out a slew of Oscars and
nominations and politely clapping along to its blackest nightmare.
dir: Billy Wilder
wr: Charles Bracket, Billy Wilder, D.M. Marshman
Jr
ph: John F. Seitz
ad: Hans Dreier, John Meehan
cast: William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von
Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Fred Clark, Cecil B. DeMille, Hedda Hopper,
Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, H.B. Warner
VARIETY
LIGHTS
****
Italy
Federico Fellini's first directing gig was in collaboration with
then-established but since-forgotten neo-Realist Alberto Lattuada. It's a
cosy, tender portrait of a bunch of unflappable, perennially squabbling
variety show performers, with the plucky, womanising, egocentric Peppino
De Filippo at their head.
Both directors cast their wives in principal roles:
Carla del Poggio (a Rita-Hayworth look-alike) as an ambitious small-town
beauty-queen who worms her way into the troupe, then sleeps her way beyond
it; and the great Giulietta Masina as the fading star and committed
partner to De Filippo's deluded showman.
Certainly Lattuada's contributions must not be
underestimated, but a lot of Fellini sticks out in the the detail, the
warmth, the atmosphere and the humanism.
dir: Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada
wr: Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada, Tullio Pinelli,
Ennio Flaiano
ph: Otello Martelli
cast: Peppino De Filippo, Carla Del Poggio, Giulietta
Masina, John Kitzmiller, Dante Maggio, Checco Durante, Gina Mascetti,
Giulio Cali, Silvio Bagolini, Giacomo Furia
WALK SOFTLY STRANGER
***
USA
The opening scenes promise a minor but solid noir as a shady,
smart-alecky stranger enters a small town and adopts an alias. But the
picture gradually settles into weathered melodrama with the love of
wheelchair-bound Valli showing the righteous path to tormented Cotten.
dir: Robert Stevenson
cast: Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Spring Byington,
Paul Stewart, Jack Paar
WINCHESTER
'73
*****
USA
Anthony Mann beefed up a declining genre when he decided to carry his
fetish for murky psychologies from the B-noir across to the Western with
this - the first of eight he made with the formerly wholesome James
Stewart (whose acting had become invisible at some point between Harvey
and this). They have an unusually clever script to work with -
revolving around a lusted-after rifle exchanging hands with two very
different men on its trail - and a terrific cast. Beyond the morbidly
hilarious casting of Rock Hudson as an Indian chief (I shit you not) and
an unbilled cameo for a young (and already wooden) Tony Curtis as a
cavalry recruit, there is the nasal cackle and delicious sneering of Dan
Duryea as the trigger-happy psycho (who else?) and the lovely, grounded
presence of Millard Mitchell as the hero's seasoned right-hand-man.
dir: Anthony Mann
wr: Borden Chase, Robert L. Richards, Stuart N. Lake
ph: William Daniels
cast: James Stewart, Shelley Winters, Stephen McNally, Dan
Duryea, Millard Mitchell, Charles Drake, John McIntire, Will Geer,
Rock Hudson, Jay C. Flippen, John Alexander, Steve Brodie, James Millican,
Abner Biberman, Tony Curtis
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