Jack Lemmon won an Oscar for his middling portrayal of Harry Stoner, partner in a Los Angeles dress-manufacturing firm who is at loose ends as he desperately tries to keep the business from going under, in Save the Tiger, a drama that’s occasionally rich but more often as frayed as Harry’s hopes and dreams. Partner […]
Monthly Archives: June 2009
Semi-sensational in the dark style of his Mildred Pierce five years earlier, Michael Curtiz’s Young Man with a Horn, allegedly based on the life of jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke, slides bumpily from individual story into moral fable. This is one film that gets thinner and thinner, and more and more ridiculous, as it hums along. […]
“Beginnings are always difficult.” Think of Venice as a modern Eden—except that Ernst Lubitsch sullies the image of gleaming canals at night by showing the collection of garbage by gondola. The garbage collector, a jolly sort, sings an aria—to distract himself from the stench. In Trouble in Paradise, master thief Gaston Monesque falls for Lily […]
Four Men on a Raft was part of the ill-fated, never completed Orson Welles documentary about Brazilian culture and politics, It’s All True. It is a reconstruction of the voyage on a sailing raft that four impoverished fishermen had made eight months earlier from Fortaleza to Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s capital, to present in […]
Greta Garbo proves herself a wondrous comedienne as Nina Yakushova Ivanov, nicknamed Ninotchka, a no-nonsense Soviet emissary sent to Paris to sell former tsarist Grand Duchess Swana’s jewels to alleviate Soviet financial duress. Swana, living in Paris, wants back her jewels—for themselves, but also in a psychological attempt to reverse history. Meanwhile, Ninotchka has fallen […]
Dennis Grunes 