I WAS AN ADVENTURESS (Gregory Ratoff, 1939) Devoid of any sort of charm, acting ability or sex appeal, dancer Vera Zorina comes to precise and electrifying life all too briefly in an excerpt from the ballet Swan Lake, where to Tchaikovsky’s phenomenal music, here on speed, she is choreographed by spouse George Balanchine, who doubles […]
Tag Archives: Joan Fontaine
Ingeniously written by Thomas Monroe, László Görög and Richard Flournoy, and directed to the hilt by William A. Seiter (Roberta, 1935; You Were Never Lovelier, 1942), The Affairs of Susan is one of the funniest Hollywood comedies of the 1940s, thanks mostly to Joan Fontaine’s brilliant, fabulous performance as Susan Darrel, a dynamic woman capable […]
Howard Hawks’s punishment by RKO for the financial failure of Bringing Up Baby (1938) starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, which today is cherished as one of the funniest comedies ever, is that the studio snatched away from Hawks the project he coveted that had been promised him: Gunga Din. Although this rousing adventure film […]
In between the romantic swank of A Place in the Sun (1951), its moodiness attuned to signature dissolves and the forlorn cry of a loon, and the schematic Western Shane (1953), two of his worst, most superficial films, and with the crass, ugly Giant (1956) up ahead, George Stevens made one of his best films: […]
Those who denigrate Fritz Lang’s last American film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, usually describe its story as being overly contrived and “full of holes”—two attributes that a logical person might deem mutually exclusive. Some fault its legal naïvité despite the fact that the script from which Lang worked was written by Douglas Morrow, who graduated […]
Dennis Grunes 