In the 1940s Hollywood produced a number of excellent period thrillers, including John Brahm’s The Lodger, about Jack the Ripper, George Cukor’s Gaslight and Jacques Tourneur’s Experiment Perilous (all 1944). Perhaps the best of the batch is The Spiral Staircase, made by German filmmaker Robert Siodmak during his stay in the States after he had […]
Daily Archives: June 18, 2007
First, it’s not a Western; it’s set in the American West, but it’s something else. Second, Katy Jurado, one of my mother’s favorite actresses, is great. This may be her finest performance. Third, Brando is among Brando’s better directors. Fourth, Brando does better with this material than Stanley Kubrick would have done. I’m glad, therefore, […]
A curiosity, to say the least, Crime Without Passion is an independent U.S. film of the 1930s that has acquired an underground reputation. Showing how, in a particular instance, individual psychology contributes to the outcome we fancifully call fate, it was written and produced by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and released the same year […]
One of the most grotesque, monstrously sentimental movies of recent memory, besides Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004), is Monster’s Ball (2001), about a prison guard who falls in love with the widow of an executed man. The guard is a white racist; the woman, like her deceased husband and their young son, is African-American. […]
Journey Into Fear, from Eric Ambler, was written by Joe Cotten (meaning, Orson Welles perhaps?), “designed” by Orson Welles but signed (for whatever reasons of studio politics) by Norman Foster, and enacted by Welles, Cotten, Warrick, Moorehead, Dolores Del Rio, Everett Sloane, etc. The Nazis are gunning for Cotten, an American businessman, who, ironically, is […]
Dennis Grunes 