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 […]
Tag Archives: Lupino
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 […]
Two months after the premiere of The Captain’s Paradise (Anthony Kimmins, 1953), a British comedy in which Alec Guinness plays a man with two wives in two separate households, another, much finer American film appeared about a man leading a similar double life. Harry Graham is a traveling salesman whose wife of some time, Eve, […]
Absorbing, moody and brilliantly acted by Ida Lupino, Ladies in Retirement is a fine film based on the play, by Reginald Denham and Edward Percy, about a maid and paid companion, Ellen Creed, who strangles her employer, Leonora Fiske (Isobel Elsom, marvelous), a very, very long-retired chorus girl who lives off the kindness of wealthy […]
Taking their cue from a mindless “featurette” that has been affixed to the recently released DVD of Raoul Walsh’s estimable They Drive by Night, writers have been leaving readers with the false impression that the film lacks unity, is incoherent. Film historians and “critics” (really, reviewers), interviewed, recite some obvious facts, and, following the cues […]
Dennis Grunes 