The 1940s was Hollywood’s principal decade of noirs. One of the finest examples is Dark Passage, a dark descent into questions of identity and of innocence or guilt. The story here, from a David Goodis novel, fascinates. Wrongly convicted of his wife’s murder, a San Quentin escapee, Vincent Parry, in the dead of night undergoes […]
Daily Archives: March 21, 2007
Among the loveliest and most oddly moving American film comedies, I Was a Male War Bride blends genres seamlessly. This generic crossbreeding wasn’t unusual in the late forties and early fifties: Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) crossbred the “woman’s picture” with film noir; It Happens Every Spring (Lloyd Bacon, 1949), the sports film with fantasy; […]
Like his later, demented Insomnia (2002), Christopher Nolan’s Memento is so odious and dreadful that one must wonder what spiritual or intellectual deficiencies would account for someone’s finding the film the least bit attractive. How often can one say this about a film?: There isn’t a single interesting shot in Memento. Something else: it’s silly. […]
The lives of famous persons are each a kind of living document, but one seen through a glass darkly—in part, the smokescreen of fictions that they themselves have invented and promulgated. They are, if you will, the authors of their own documentaries. With their passing, another document encapsulating their lives comes into play: the newspaper […]
“Are you a good man or a bad man?” the little boy asks his imprisoned grandfather, an underworld Indian don. The old man, who has spent a lifetime helping others and righting social wrongs, and also killing, answers, “I don’t know.” Nor do I, in a film that has given me a wrenching moral workout, […]
Dennis Grunes 