Joan Fontaine gives yet another brilliant performance (in a role first offered to sister Olivia de Havilland) in Ivy, an immensely entertaining Edwardian thriller based on Marie Belloc Lowndes’s novel The Story of Ivy. Miles Rushworth, who is stinking rich, is the villain; his refusal to have an affair with sexually ambitious Ivy Lexton because […]
Daily Archives: February 12, 2009
Marcello Mastroianni is surprisingly lackluster as Snàporaz in Federico Fellini’s extravagant, tedious La città delle donne, which Fellini once described as his most dreamlike film. The dream is a nightmare, out of which Snàporaz tries to escape once launching it by getting off a train in pursuit of a shapely, sophisticated woman in a fur […]
In between his two best films, The Usual Unidentified Thieves (1958) and The Organizer (1963), Mario Monicelli made the film that (along with Vittorio De Sica’s related General della Rovere) shared the top prize at Venice. La grande guerra is a tragicomical pacifist film about the First World War—“the Great War,” until the Second World […]
Dennis Grunes 