Detective James Wilson (Robert Ryan, brilliant) has been a cop for eleven years. ”All we ever see,” a fellow L.A.P.D. officer explains, “is crooks, murderers, winos, stoolies, dames all with an angle. You get so you think everybody’s like that. Till you find out different, it’s kind of a lonely life. . . . Jim […]
Tag Archives: Lupino
In Sam Peckinpah’s heart-grazing Junior Bonner, Steve McQueen, achingly sweet and complex, gives the performance of a lifetime as Junior “JR” Bonner, a rodeo circuit cowboy visiting hometown Prescott, Arizona, for its Fourth of July Frontier Days, which gives him another shot at lasting eight seconds on bucking Sunshine and at seeing his estranged parents, […]
“Charlie Castle is a man who sold out his dreams but can’t forget them.” The original star of Clifford Odets’s 1949 play The Big Knife was John Garfield; by the time that Robert Aldrich made his leaner, more muscular film of it Garfield was dead, having been hounded into his fatal 1952 heart attack, at […]
Hollywood has always found Hollywood a fascinating subject, but the possibility of scandal, even lawsuits (as unlikely as these were in studio days), have sometimes made it necessary to treat its home stories at a remove, or at a number of removes. When this occurred, Hollywood found itself in a funny bind, because at the […]
The prevalent fear that characterized American life during the McCarthy era: this is the theme of one of the most gripping crime films of the fifties, The Hitch-Hiker. Naturally, those in the motion-picture industry who made the film were especially sensitive to fear that had been generated by the HUAC investigation of Hollywood and by […]
There isn’t one of us who is unfamiliar with High Sierra, the good, solid film directed by Raoul Walsh from a script by John Huston and W. R. Burnett, adapted from the latter’s novel. This is the one about Roy Earle, a thief whose toughness invites the press nickname of “Mad Dog” that his streaks […]
Born in Vienna, Austria, Fritz Lang was a genuine artist in Germany, where he made great films, among them the most magical one ever, Destiny (1921), the two-part Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), the two parts of Die Nibelungen (1924), “Siegfried” and “Kriemhild’s Revenge,” Spies (1928), and M (1931). (One of his most famous silent […]
