This bona fide classic may be, as Gregory Mank says, the best American horror picture of the 1940s. The teaming of Boris Karloff and Henry Daniell is sensational. Producer Val Lewton gives the players career-best characterizations and dialogue, and director Robert Wise adds tension and chills. Bela Lugosi is in for a supporting part. Icing…
Why do stories about resisting the Nazis seem so important right now? Here are two discs from different labels, with one subject. Both stories are set in Germany during the war, but the approaches are quite different. A political prisoner struggles to subsist in The Fiancée an East German classic from the part-educational DEFA Film…
The man who did what and then what? Robert D. Krzykowski’s first feature isn’t a throwaway joke, but an elegantly crafted and designed fantasy grounded in human values. Sam Elliott’s crusty sixty-something secret agent comes out of retirement to save the world again — will the slaying of another bizarre horror lay to rest disturbing…
It’s wacky, daffy and incredibly square, yet Frank Tashlin’s late career Doris Day romp has a certain gotta-watch interest factor: the male cast of clowns performs the sexist comedy well, and Ms. Day’s fantastic screen personality brightens everything. Space-age executive lothario Rod Taylor hires Doris just for romantic purposes, while Arthur Godfrey, John McGiver, Dom…
The work of a great, original, natural filmmaker, Wanda continues to confound viewers that don’t recognize honest human reality when they see it. A woman dispossessed, uprooted and adrift no longer has a self-definition, just a basic drive to subsist and find someone who values her. Morals? It’s hard enough just to survive. Director-actress Barbara…
It’s big, it buzzes, and it screams like a banshee. So why is the Mantis monster so ho-hum? Universal-International tried to squeak out another boffo big bug epic but 1957 screens were already crowded with grasshoppers and scorpions. The screenplay is derivative, and somebody allowed producer William Alland to throw in every stock shot that…
This is a big one, the restoration we long thought would never come. CineSavant tries to explain what makes Edgar G. Ulmer’s masterpiece uniquely memorable, how it works its Loser Noir magic, and why this particular restoration bodes well for a certain class of picture mired in murky rights issues. Meet Al Roberts, a hard…
Douglas Sirk took our heads off with this intense, thematically adult tale of love and obsession in a Depression-Era flying circus that’s the open air equivalent of the marathon dance craze — pilots die to thrill the crowd. The terrific-looking show provides career-best roles for some deserving actors: Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Jack Carson and…
Verily, Blu-ray 3-D is better than most theatrical 3-D! Paramount’s fourth and last 3-D production went out to theaters only in 2-D, so for all practical terms this Kino/3D Archive restoration is a depth-format premiere. Expect a kissing scene or two: lusty Fernando (¿Quién es más macho?) Lamas and demure Rhonda Fleming succumb to the…
With his exaggerated visuals, eye-popping color and frantic characterizations, Frank Tashlin has been promoted to a genuine ‘fifties icon. This freewheeling comedy hits on the Top Tashlin fetish subjects: Hollywood glitz, Madison Avenue neurosis, dynamic women, wimpy men and… and… bosoms, dammit. As the bubbly yet calculating sex symbol Rita Marlowe, Jayne Mansfield places career…
Sherlock Holmes fans have another good version of a favorite Holmes tale to savor, a late German silent film in full expressionist mode, set on an impressively moody English moor. One can see the influence of silent action serials and then-recent haunted house horror hits. And it is said that this is the first picture…
William Hurt, Christine Lahti and Elizabeth Perkins do excellent work in this superior drama which delivers an important, unforced life lesson. An emotionless hotshot surgeon gets a dose of his own medicine when he’s hit by a cancerous tumor, and is put through the same wringer that so humiliates his patients. What might be a…
Robert Siodmak’s first film noir is a visually expressive masterpiece in the lush romantic tradition that imposes a dreamlike mood on a nightmarish story. Ella Raines goes to extreme lengths to break the conspiracy that’s sending her boss to Death Row, aided by the Kafka-like indifference of modern Manhattanites. Franchot Tone is the man with…
Hollywood classics don’t have to be stuffy — this 1940 swashbuckling adventure has style, great action, laughs and one of the most attractive screen couples of their day, Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell. And that’s not mentioning a superb fencing match, a great, quaint Spanish dance, and a smart cast directed by Rouben Mamoulian at…
This moody, unsettling whodunnit benefits from sensitive cinematography, fine direction and a perfectly-cast group of players. Stephen Boyd gets a worthwhile starring role, backed by some good names and a nice debut from Judi Dench. What I don’t understand is why Pamela Franklin, possibly the most talented and versatile young English player ever, didn’t become…
All hail the memory of Stanley Donen. We also appreciate the razor-sharp satire of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, whose genius Donen preserved in this hilarious Faustian comedy. Poor pitiful Stanley Moon bargains with the Devil for seven chances to win the woman of his dreams, which naturally turns out to be a big mistake….
Not enough love is set aside for this ambitious, under-budgeted Lost Civilization epic. John Agar and Cynthia Patrick find love in an ancient albino civilization that worships a Death Ray and enslaves a race of Subterranean Humanoid Underground Dwellers — Mole Men, what else? Is it unconvincing? Does the production lack polish? Well, it…
What can you say about a hybrid gangster picture that generates a good feeling about people? We really like this show — Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman and Bill Murray’s characterizations are fresh and surprising — and refreshingly non-PC, with David Caruso, Kathy Baker and Mike Starr providing solid backup. Everything’s in fine form under…
High class Italo filmmaking slips into the ’70s with Luchino Visconti still on top. This handsomely appointed period drama recreates Venice of 1910. Make that a highly stylized recreated Venice. As curiously enacted by Dirk Bogarde, Thomas Mann’s story of a composer’s inner turmoil over a maddeningly attractive teenaged boy becomes a one-man ordeal. Death…
It’s cold-blooded murder, I tell ya! Feisty Ruth Gordon goes undercover to find the evidence of homicide at Geraldine Page’s desert home, where companion-housekeepers keep disappearing. Robert Aldrich produced this marvelous, E-Ticket battle between celebrated actresses, and the result is a creative new solution for retirement finance problems! What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? Blu-ray…
Olinka Berova is as sexy as Ursula Andress, but even with a new woman producer Hammer’s She sequel doesn’t give this new She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed much of a chance — the story just sits there and the kingdom of Kuma is woefully under-produced. Good photography and acting help, but one doesn’t earn high marks for the Boys…
Those scurrilous Italian ‘mondo’ films are difficult to see in original versions; this Something Weird double bill yields an American hybrid of one of the better (?) examples, given the classy touch of a narration by George Sanders. A second oversexed pseudo-docu is a homegrown mongrel (careful, don’t touch) with all the credibility of today’s…
Director Bryan Forbes tries his hand at comedy. His nostalgic Victorian farce features an eclectic choice of Brit stars — established greats John Mills & Ralph Richardson, the freshly-minted Michael Caine, reigning jester Peter Sellers and even a debut for the collegiate pranksters Peter Cook & Dudley Moore. It’s a beaut of a production with…
Fiery dame Susan Hayward carries this far-flung ‘women’s epic’ to delirious romantic extremes, as her Irish heroine defies nature and exploits admirers to claim the hunky Dutchman of her dreams. Using apartheid-ridden South Africa as a background for a cheerful white conquest wasn’t as touchy an idea in 1955 as it is now, but it…
Brigitte Bardot proved her mettle as a dramatic actress in H.G. Clouzot’s strikingly pro-feminist courtroom epic, that puts the modern age of ‘immoral’ permissiveness on trial. Is Bardot’s selfish, sensation-seeking young lover an oppressed victim? Clouzot makes her the author of her own problems yet doesn’t let her patriarchal inquisitors off the hook. La vérité…
Last fall’s audience-pleaser is indeed a pleasant surprise, not because it’s a classic but because it isn’t plain awful. An unnecessary third remake of a Depression-era Cinderella story has been concocted to showcase the special talents of Lady Gaga, who indeed comes off as the most personable and deserving star-to-be-born since Judy Garland. Bradley Cooper…