The same year that Henry Fonda sparkled in The Male Animal, he gave perhaps his worst performance, as a shy, bumbling busboy, in The Big Street, an adaptation of Damon Runyan’s story “Little Pinks” that Runyon himself produced. Pinks is in love with Gloria, a self-centered nightclub singer who becomes a wheelchair-bound cripple after a […]
Daily Archives: June 23, 2008
1725. It is a time of peace, but upon Lord Matsudaira’s instruction swords are being tested on straw dummies in readiness for conflict. Matsudaira has a son by mistress Ichi (Yôko Tsukasa, excellent); cannot he let this matter lie either? Offscreen, Ichi is enormously displeased when she walks in on Matsudaira with another woman; or […]
Nice, France. Bernadette, about twenty, is the object of interest of a horde of schoolboys on summer holiday. The narrator, one of them grown up, explains, “She awoke in us the luminous springs of sensuality.” The film opens on the open road as Bernadette, wearing a skirt, rides her bicycle towards a back-tracking camera. Alas! […]
Dennis Grunes 