Deeper Into Movies
Sirk with the same great cast as Written on the Wind inconsistent dubbing, but the greatest widescreen staging and overheated actors. Our doomed lovers are even more inevitably doomed than ever before, since they are daredevil pilots with engine problems. Inspiration for Slack Bay: In 1932, after Robert Stack s own plane crashes he attempts [ ]
Starving artist Glenn Anders (Lady From Shanghai) loves Nancy Carroll (Broken Lullaby), but Nancy loves Parisian Fredric March (romantic lead(s) of I Married a Witch), but she is married to older Frank The Wizard of Oz Morgan. She s right to prefer March he s a charming nut, playing piano duets with the servants and romping [ ]
Kane Kyne Enterprises runs a sensationalist newspaper/TV empire. As is often the case in crime reporting movies, it s not enough for these guys to cover the big serial killer story, they have to solve it before the cops do, in order to create new stories to cover. Vincent Price is the spoiled kid who just [ ]
Hey, I escaped the ropes of time once more. Between shorter beginning and end chapters, the hourlong middle is a diary of a week spent with family in Lithuania, in a hundred numbered chapters. Handheld scenes, sometimes nicely composed and sometimes quick and jittery, with in-camera editing. See: Sicinski Jonas and mother: Episode 61: the [ ]
Odd human trafficking spy/rescue story, less furious than The Furious but overall better, set in 1900ish San Francisco. Yet another movie where newspaper men have to solve local crimes themselves, sneaking around to find kidnapped brides held in bamboo cages. All the dialogue is philosophical quotes. Costarring every Asian guy they could round up to [ ]
Ultimately a sappy social-issues message movie, worse than My Son John, ending up with an angry mob of college hunks assaulting the precinct. Everyone in this town should be in jail. But it had a promising enough beginning, when broke idiot Frank Lovejoy (played cops in House of Wax and In a Lonely Place) meets [ ]
Dry Detached Experimental Arthouse Cinema but with a bit of dramatic heat, via heightened music, color, poses. Estelle narrates from her notebooks. I pretended I was malleable I know it ll happen again. Her troublesome sister comes to stay, and they juggle two men between them mostly Mustache Paul but also Estelle s ex Jack, counting [ ]
Another 1950s movie about an underpaid, overworked guy who neglects his wife in favor of his job. This time instead of a newspaper man, he s a US health guy trying to save the country from a deadly outbreak, slightly more excusable. Our guy is Richard Widmark (same year as Night and the City and No [ ]
Local boxer beats his wife until she runs into the arms of an adoring Chinese shopkeeper. Multiple gossipy spies get involved, jealousy ensues, everyone dies. Nice story but the titles doing too much heavy lifting; they hadn t invented cinematography yet. Lillian Gish (who I just watched yesterday in Night of the Hunter) lives a dismal [ ]
Real animals in this one, and oh that cyclops design, that makes up for a lot. And there s a lot to make up for: three hours of battle scenes and whinging about the downfall of respectful society. Bunch of excellent actors and the Nolan bombast and the seat-rattling IMAX beat us into submission. MVPs: Cyclops, [ ]