At 136 minutes, Mervyn LeRoy’s low-key Home Before Dark, about a woman back home after she is released from a mental hospital, probably requires a bottle of good unblended scotch to navigate and get through; but it’s largely absorbing, attractively wintry gray (the black-and-white cinematography is by Joseph Biroc), and beautifully acted by Jean Simmons […]
Tag Archives: Mervyn LeRoy/Grunes
War service at the advent of the First World War separates an upper-class Brit and a working-class ballerina who, in wartime’s pressure cooker, meet and fall in love in London. Myra, along with her best friend, Kitty, is dismissed from Olga Kirowa’s ballet company for a curfew violation and cannot find work; Kitty descends into […]
Edward G. Robinson, tremendous, claimed the role that made him a star in Little Caesar, Mervyn LeRoy’s ultimately brilliant meditation on the unnaturalness and perniciousness of the American ethos of “rugged individualism,” which, to say the least, wars with humanity’s quest for sociability. LeRoy’s film, based on an unpublished novel by W. R. Burnett, also […]
Paul Muni claimed his signature role and gave his most brilliant performance as James Allen in Mervyn LeRoy’s hard-hitting I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, one of Warner Bros.’s 1930s social melodramas targeting U.S. injustice. This American Les misérables of the South chronicles Allen’s pilgrim’s progress as the jobless veteran is wrongly convicted […]
Douglas A. Roberts, whose initials suggest an elitist organization (Daughters of the American Revolution), “has background,” as we used to say; he is one of those “college boys” that his captain, Morton, whose background is rough and working-class, disdains. (They treated him with contempt when he was a busboy.) During the waning days of the […]
Dennis Grunes 