Way, way better than his more lavishly produced The Uninvited the previous year, Lewis Allen’s The Unseen is an intriguing, eerie, occasionally terrifying murder mystery. Adapted from Ethel Lina White’s novel Her Heart in Her Throat by Hagar Wilde and Ken Englund, with additional polishing by Raymond Chandler, no less, the film also invokes Henry […]
Monthly Archives: October 2011
Danny Kaye did more than rein in his zaniness to play S.L. Jacobowsky, a Polish Jewish refugee attempting to exit Paris before the entrance of the Germans in 1940; he pretty much dispenses with it, giving a restrained, monotonous performance, and a nearly credible one, for which he won a Golden Globe. How I wish […]
Seventeen-year-old Richard Samuels may be daydreaming, hoping for release from the stultifying high school English class that’s now taking up Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It must be a dream, but the Jewish boy finds himself, on a Manhattan street, hired by Orson Welles to play Lucius, Brutus’s page, in the actual 1937 Mercury Theatre production of […]
Brash and brilliant, and starkly beautiful in black and white, writer-director Kim Ki-young’s Hanyo is a bona fide classic of South Korean cinema. I watched it for the first time last night, on DVD, and am still basking in its residual glow. A pop-eyed, sultry young housemaid quite takes over the bourgeois household of a […]
It is awesome to consider: prolific Portuguese writer-director Manoel de Oliveira was 102 years old, last year, when he made the exceptionally lovely O Estranho Caso de Angélica. (De Oliveira, at 103, is currently making another film—and, ever the optimist, is already planning yet another.) This dark fable, which ends in a room from which […]
Sparkling entertainment that sets three separate strange tales into an engaging, lightly probing frame starring Robert Benchley at his lighthearted best, Flesh and Fantasy questions premonitions and fate, suggesting that “destiny” in reality either masks human compulsions or predispositions or pressures certain outcomes as self-fulfilling prophecy. Dreams—both sleeping and waking ones—figure in, as does the […]
This year, Susanne Bier won the best foreign-language film Oscar for the most powerful and moving film to win the prize since Federico Fellini’s La strada fifty-five years earlier. Bier, a Jewish Dane, won her Oscar (and Golden Globe) for Hævnen, a marvelous exploration of what parents and children do not know about each other, […]
