Storm Warning is a melodrama that attacks the Ku Klux Klan and the failure of people to rise up against such instances of social evil and speak the truth. Having purchased the “hot” stage property A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, Warner Bros. was contractually obligated to wait until the end of the play’s […]
Daily Archives: June 10, 2007
One of the great American novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter takes as its theme the past’s imprint on the American present—the degree to which American consciousness is steeped in bigotry, heartlessness and narrowmindedness. The story is set about a century prior to its publication, in Puritan New England in the early colonial days. Hester […]
Widely regarded as one of John Ford’s failures, The Fugitive is based on Graham Greene’s story “The Labyrinthine Ways.” It’s a splendid film, if not quite a match for its predecessor in the Ford œuvre, My Darling Clementine (1946), which is widely considered a masterpiece. Both films profit from a fine lead performance by Henry […]
This is the sort of thing I cannot understand. Less than two years earlier, Anthony Harvey, the director of the inflated, misshapen, sentimental, largely rhetorical The Lion in Winter (1968), made a fierce, elegant Dutchman, adapted by Amiri Baraka from the ferocious play, a contemporary U.S. racial parable, by Baraka when he was still using his birthname, LeRoi Jones. […]
Cruel Intentions is the fourth film version of the late eighteenth-century French epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses, by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. The book is an early psychological novel investigating sadistic sexual manipulations and games among the idle rich. Valmont is a heartless seducer who, along with his confidant and accomplice, Madame de Merteuil, takes […]
Dennis Grunes 