Despite its faux-Freudianism and the director’s own rejection of it, Secret Beyond the Door is without doubt Fritz Lang’s best film of the 1940s. Indeed, it is a fabulous, dreamy blend of the Bluebeard legend and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), which it eerily evokes, and, like Rebecca, one of the most compelling tortured-romances to emerge […]
Tag Archives: Michael Redgrave
With one more film to go before he moved from England to the States, Alfred Hitchcock made The Lady Vanishes, winning the directorial prize of the New York critics. If anything, this superlative entertainment is even more highly regarded today than it was in 1938. On a trans-European train headed to London, Miss Froy, a […]
Mike Figgis is a director known for flash and dash (Stormy Monday, Leaving Las Vegas), as befits a career that began with pop music videos; so the restraint of his version of The Browning Version surprises. Terence Rattigan’s famous 1948 play, as well as the famous 1951 Anthony Asquith film that Rattigan himself wrote, have […]
Inexhaustibly fresh and macabre, despite being copied for more than sixty years, the great British horror anthology Dead of Night remains a masterpiece of terror. The protagonist is architect Walter Craig, who is tormented by a recurrent, possibly deadly dream amongst strangers in a country farmhouse, in whose space he has arrived to design two […]
Those foolish enough to plead British director Tony Richardson’s case in film—apparently Richardson did better in theater—always consider as their heaviest piece of artillery The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, written by Alan Sillitoe from his own short story, and starring the always dreadful, thuddingly selfconscious Tom Courtenay (best actor, Mar del Plata), here […]
Dennis Grunes 