Written by producer Chester Erskine, with a pungent assist from uncredited Nunnally Johnson, Witness to Murder is a marvelous little thriller topped by a finale that moves the viewer in the direction of cardiac arrest. Barbara Stanwyck gives an exceptionally fine, delicately nuanced performance as Cheryl Draper, a forthright interior decorator and painter in Los […]
Tag Archives: Barbara Stanwyck
Spinning off some of our sacred secular memories of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), including certain plot details and a snapshot of Thelma Jordan—like Phyllis Dietrichson, played by Barbara Stanwyck—as a blonde, Robert Siodmak’s absorbing, suspenseful, increasingly magnificent The File on Thelma Jordan, however, differs in two substantial ways: the action isn’t filtered through the […]
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 […]
Perhaps the most solitudinous love poem in the English language, where the poet’s lover, whom the poet addresses, may as easily be absent as present, someone to whom he speaks as though she were with him, Matthew Arnold’s phenomenal 1867 “Dover Beach” endorses fidelity, at least the illusion of love and peace, in a loveless, […]
Starkly photographed in black and white by Victor Milner and beautifully scored by Franz Waxman, The Furies is nonetheless a dispiriting melodramatic Western whose vague echoes of King Lear prove insufficient to keep it from falling flat. Its Freudianism enlists empty routines of love-hate revolving around configurations of surrogate sister-surrogate brother as well as father-daughter. […]
Dennis Grunes 