Reviews

There are very few westerns that aren't built up mainly on a theme of revenge, the western avengers on films must be innumerable, and they are always bold cold-blooded heroes, and there is always some beautiful girl waiting for them. Yvonne de Carlo here though has plenty of skin on her nose, and although Sterling Hayden doesn't exactly treat her as a gentleman, she is after all a good match for him, after all the obligatory fights, fisticuffs and gunfights, including a formidable bunch of Apaches. Any western fan will buy all this and enjoy it even with relish, because of the splendid photo and equally splendid music by Carl Brandt, but it is still a rather conventional piece of routine very far from the more hardcore rough settlements of for example Sam Peckinpah. This is all right, you will enjoy the three great leading actors and their issues, you will even more enjoy the landscapes and the music, but it is hardly a film you would need to watch another time.

In spite of its superficiality and general pastel character, there are a few assets here that should be noted. First of all, the music by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco is brilliant all the way and gives the film a certain refined polish that cannot be denied. This stylishness is further augmented by some wonderful dance performances, the dialog is also in style with this, the costumes and the settings of course, and the fact that it is a travesty of the 'prisoner of Zenda'-story is not disturbing. Actually Alexander Dumas must have been first with this idea, while it is hardly credible that Anthony Hope borrowed it from Dumas - it has happened before in literature that two authors have invented almost the same plot. Here though the plot takes a different turn to the satisfaction of at least one of the ladies, while Anthony Hope deserts them both. It's a great and likeable entertainment with plenty of dashing performances of dancing and fencing and of course some obligatory fights. Anthony Dexter is doing fine, so is Anthony Quinn as usual, and there is nothing wrong with the script. In brief, superficially it is a perfect film, but you will quickly forget it.

I have seen Jean Simmons in most of her roles but this is a special treat. She was great already as a child actress ('Estella' inDavid Lean's "Great Expectations") but proved with the years to have almost an infinity of variety of roles, from the slave girl (in Startacus') to an abused mental patient (in 'Home Before Dark'), constantly varying her repertoire and always being excellent without ever winning an Oscar. Here she is the perfect bag lady joining hands with bums and other undesirables, one of them turning out to be a cop in disguise, masquerading to get at a gang of dangerous drug dealers. When one of the bag ladies gets murdered (Sylvia Sidney) in a brief but splendid performance, she decides to join hands with that cop bum just for the sake of Sylvia Sidney (which the entire gang of bums and bag ladies join in for her sake) risking her life, but there is still room for some wonderful comedy moments - Jean Simmons is seldom seen smiling on the screen, but here that smile is beaming. It's part thriller, part social documentary, part comedy and an interesting gutter view of New York, it is uplifting in spite of the serious trouble and argument, which no audience could possibly mind.

Everyone gets into a panic here, except one, who gets all the worst beatings, but at least he knows how to fight back. Janine Grey is a Swiss secretary at a diamond business company and beautiful as such, but unfortunately she has the wrong kind of boy friend, who decides to use her position to make a heist together with two other bandits. The heist fails completely in a blundering fiasco, as the bank manager gets shot to death by one of the villains, who now are wanted for murder, while Janine, knocked unconscious by the robbers when trying to interfere, wakes up in a state of shock with a total amnesia. Her efforts to put her mind together again is not entirely successful, but fortunately she gets a defender at an old shabby café, a former boxer, who still know how to fight. The complications pile up in a tremendous confusion for everyone involved, while gradually the police gets into the mystery to be able to sort it out. The film ends at the top of the confusion, and you can only hope that the general panic gradually will end.

Dame Judith Anderson has the main part in this film, and the moment she appears you know she will dominate and lead the film to as bitter cataclysms as in "Rebecca" - she just is that kind of actress, and here she reenacts her ominous phantom-like presence with a vengeance. Martin Landau plays the rational inquirer who is called upon to do something about those ghost calls by a sobbing ghost, and he does get through with it. There is another housekeeper who is equally rational and down-to-earth who never for a moment would believe in any ghosts, but even she modifies her mind in the end. Diane Baker is the innocent victim who is married to the last scion of a wealthy family with a grand mansion by the sea, and her final surrender is difficult to melt and accept, as it is an unnecessary weakness. The film is really all about the unending and uncompromising influence of mothers, for good and for bad, giving life and sometimes with a lasting curse. Visually and artistically Joseph Stefano has made a masterpiece, but unfortunately it is rather muddled by all those artificial horror effects. The story could have been made better with less affectedness.

In bank robbery films there is always something that goes wrong, it's infallible, but here you are in for a surprise, because what goes wrong is none of the usual things, mistakes committed, blundering foolishness, the human factor, one of the rogues betraying the rest, no, here everything is quite regular, except for the two delinquents getting distracted by the presence of some cleaning women, which makes them panic and make a desperate decision. In order to escape without complications they put two unavoidable hostages, the bank manager and his secretary locked up in the strongroom, and then what really goes wrong is nobody's fault: the third man with the keys gets smashed up in an accident, and there is no way for the two companions to get at the keys. When they desperately try it raises suspicions, the keys in question are traced, while the two poor perpetrators realise their locked up hostages will suffocate in the airtight strongroom, also they return in a panic not to become murderers also on top of everything. There will eventually be some gathering at the bank vault, but that's not the end of it: then some real trouble begins, the outcome of which will be impossible to guess. It's a great thriller on a very small scale, most of the film occurs in the claustrophobia of the strongroom which makes it reminiscent of a U-boat thriller, but this is even better. Don't bite your knuckles off.

Richard Crenna as a good father with established business and a nice wife (Joanna Woodward) and daughter has his life suddenly interrupted at 48 as he plays tennis and folds up. He is dead at the hospital a few days later without having explained anything to anyone because of his loss of speech. After his death it turns out he has had a mistress since eight years who has a boy, eight years old, his only son. Naturally Joanne Woodward when she learns about this goes mad. When people start to break things and go berserk at home smashing memories and even works of art to pieces you can't help despising these irrational outbursts of uncontrolled ire making no sense at all. This always happens in American films but for some reason never in British films, except rarely and occasionally. You can't appreciate Joanne Woodward's explosions of furious intolerance, but fortunately her daughter and the illegitimate son find each other and provide a safety line to redemption. Both Joanne Woodward and Lindsay Wagner give admirable performances, although Lindsay Wagner is more sympathetic. The frame of the film is rather Douglas Sirk-like, a slow melodrama with a reconciliatory end with really not much happening in between, apart from the settlement drama. It is well done but very conventional. Only Viveca Lindfors sticks out as a bizarre spice in the muddled up relationships.

This is actually a true story although very much adjusted to the necessity of circumstances, since the failure of the Comet project, the first British jet air line airplane, was such a sensitive affair that it had to be hushed up as much as possible. Fortunately some who knew the truth survived and could gradually make it seep out in very well adjusted small portions and without any offensive realism. Nevil Shute was deeply initiated in these problems but dared not write about them openly. Bernard Lee is the old too well experienced pilot who gets into trouble because of one of the airplanes foundering without reason and with no fault of his, the best scene is the introductory one at the trial with George Sanders as the interrogator, and he will appear in two more scenes. Peter Cushing is the competitive pilot who believes the fault was with the pilot, while as far as possible no one could accept that there was something technically wrong about the construction itself. As it was proved, there wasn't actually, but as usual the human factor had failed to include some very serious circumstantial factors, like the weather, the temperature and other pure physical facts. The film is more exciting than a thriller in spite of all the technicalities, and the most spectacular scene is the aircraft's encounter with an unexpected hailstorm. There are more things in heaven than any aircraft engineer could imagine.

The plot does not make sense. It's a weird film about mostly weird people, and they all seem to live in the house of the young artist, where they haunt him in his nightmares. The murder is never straightened out, we never learn what reality happened, and the audience is left in the dark as much as the artist, who only heard some distant unidentifiable noise and some quarrel. The artist's sister tries to save him, and his art model is also concerned about him, everyone seems to notice that he is going nuts, except himself who does not care and just lets himself sink down into weird hallucinations and appearances of ghosts and things like that, the circumstances being hardly improved by a very weird neighbour moving out, who claims to know something but makes no clear statement before he vanishes. The artist constantly loses control. No, this is not a film to be recommended, except to those with a sense for weird morbidity.

There is always something deeply morbid about Joseph Losey's films, and sometimes he over-stresses that morbidity. In this film however everyone's over-strainedness is perfectly logical and natural. It's a great script and drama by Emlyn Williams. An alcoholic father (Michael Redgrave working on his masterpiece of a novel since twenty years) faces the fact that his son in London is to be hanged for having murdered a young girl. Restrained by an institution for detoxification in Canada (Montreal) he can't get out to be present at his son's trial but succeeds in reaching London 24 hours before the execution. Naturally he does everything possible to save his son, but so has already his son's lawyer (Peter Cushing) and the whole jurisdictional establishment. Everything points to his son's guilt, and yet he desperately clings to any straw of hope. There are after all some straws to cling to, but the odds are a faint trace of a minimum. Ann Todd and her overbearing husband (Leo McKern) are also deeply involved in the case, so there definitely is a formidable mess to clear up. This impossible task requires some sobriety, while Redgrave hits the bottle again. It's not a masterpiece, but it is a great film displaying the full width of Losey's undeniable mastership, and you can but admire the result.

Don't watch this film for the sake of Anthony Steel, because he is almost put out at once. You keep hoping for his recovery, he is after all Anthony Steel and the only star attraction of the film, but he does nothing to earn it. He is just swept away by those circumstances, which no one can do anything about, since no one ever could about the force of circumstances. Here they are exposed to their maximum of perplexity of chance. No one is really guilty of anything of all that happens, and yet they all contribute to their fantastic machination, being all perfectly innocent victims of chance. The two boys get away with pure fright, they least of all wanted anything of this to happen, and yet only they caused this fantastic train of events which no one could stop or control. At first the film seems innocent and stupid enough, young boys do foolish things, but when once there is a traffic casualty no one can stop the avalanche of destiny, really the force of circumstances. It's a wonderful, fantastic, skilfully contrived maze of a film, where only the audience can understand the utter helplessness of the unfortunate actors and their most unintentional mess.

Lance Comfort made a long string of excellent thrillers from the 40s and on, and this is just one more pearl in the necklace. Paul, a composer and pianist who composes pop music for a change to make money, is married to an actress, who married him before he went blind, and after the curtain fall of his blindness she would use do anything to get out of her marriage and to dispose of the blind pianist, of whom she is tired of just pitying. So she gets some lovers and use them in an intrigue to set her husband off. The script is very well written and cleverly composed, the dialog is excellent, and above all, the music is outstanding and veils the film in silk. You might object against the cynicism of this brilliant chamber play, but the character of the blind pianist (William Sylvester) outweighs any objection. More often than not, blind men acquire a second sight and deeper sensitivity and sharper sense of reality than any easily fooled superficial eyesight.

In the first scene someone tries to shoot down Roy Scheider but kills his wife instead. That's not a bad start of an intrigue. But the problem here is the lack of motivation. We never learn who or why Roy Scheider had to be killed, and there are a number of assassination attempts. He works for intelligence, all right, but that is not enough. His boss seems to be Christopher Walken, who is expert on wicked roles, and he actually tells Scheider's wife's brother to kill him, but there is no motivation. The lack of any motivation here makes the film absurd in its forced effort to contrive a great action thriller, while nothing makes any sense. There is a girl who also eventually proves to have some desire to kill him because of some grandmother's trauma, which deviation from all sense and logic only adds to the nonsense of this ridiculous plot. Roy Scheider is always good and saves the film in many ways, but the only real value of the film is the fantastic score by Miklos Rosza, in collaboration with no one else than Bernard Herrmann, which adds to the film's character of being nothing else than a poor Hitchcock paraphrase.

This film is amazingly skilfully done, especially as it consistently sticks to facts, although everything is veiled in the euphemism of so called fiction, but the bones stick out of the well dressed flesh, and you can never hide the skeleton. It's a gruesome story with horrible ingredients of torture and brutal violence, all accentuated by unfortunately a most authentic cynicism giving the film a most inhuman character, but as it is so expertly done in total realism all the way you are fascinated and will endure it to the end, not with relish, but with constantly increasing interest and irresistible fascination. Michel Blanc plays the investigating police who after the war tries to get together some documentary of what the French gestapo really was busy about, interviewing many people with astounding objectivity - there is hardly room for any feelings or human upsets in this film, although the chapter is overwhelmingly upsetting. There are a few women who succeed in adding a human touch to the terrors with some emotion, but even the Jewess who gets away is stone cold and betrays nothing of her feelings. It's a great, amazing and admirable film penetrating thoroughly into one of the most revolting chapters of French history, and you will never forget this film for its sharpness.

Margaret Sulllavan was not beautiful, there was nothing really attractive about her, but there was something about her that always made her adorable in every film of hers. Usually she ends tragically in all of them with heart-rending death scenes and departures, but this is slightly different. There are in fact many strikes of comedy here, and several scenes are directly hilarious. The acting is superb, especially by the leading characters Frederic March, Glenn Ford and Margaret Sullavan, but many (if not all) the supporting actors are also contributing to the film with outstanding if not unforgettable performances, including the music score. Erich von Stroheim is his usual character of more depths than one, but also the two other female parts are absolutely smashing, to say the least. This is not one of the best known Remarque novels, but it does deliver all his finest qualities, above all an infinite human tenderness and compassion. This is a film to love and learn from especially in our troubled times, when new dictatorships threaten the entire world.

Montgomery Clift was one of the most sympathetic actors Hollywood ever brought forth, and every film with him is watchable for his sake. Myrna Loy was always excellent, and she doesn't deny her excellence here. Robert Ryan was one of the most difficult actors of Hollywood, often in very tricky roles, here he is a cynical newspaper editor who employs Montgomery Clift just to see if he can make it, he makes it and resigns. Then there is the argument about the Miss Lonelyhearts column, this is a film about a newspaper column of the most deplorable kind, a column where anyone can squeeze his heart out in tears and blood just to get their self pity under treatment, yearning perhaps for some sympathy and understanding. This is the column Montgomery Clift is taking on with great pains. There is some slight drama also, but the gun is never fired, although you almost would have wished Mr. Shrike to use it against himself. Nathaniel West also wrote "The Day of the Locust" which is even sharper and more ruthless and to the point concerning forces of the establishment, and "Lonelyhearts" although an effort at a settlement with journalism falls deep in the shadow of the "Locust".

Walter Travis (Jason Robards) has been in the business all his life, making money out of people's credulousness, using his daughter (Rosanna Arquette) as a medium to make people believe they get in contact with the other side. But he is in for a shock when his daughter's visions actually prove true, when she foresees deaths and catastrophes that must be termed unpredictable and which actually happen. A journalist (Tom Hulce) gets intrigued by the improbable coincidences of Rosanna's visions actually manifesting themselves in reality and tries to get in closer touch with both her and the father in order to denounce a racket, but instead he is faced by an unsolvable mystery for perpetual perplexity. All three leading characters. Rosanna Arquette, Jason Robards and Tom Hulce make amazing unforgettable performances, and whatever you may think about metaphysics on films this is actually intriguing and makes some sense.

This is a typical Graham Greene story in its very human aspects of things pertaining to espionage, in which business human values are ignored our just ruthlessly driven over. The story involves an employee in the intelligence concerning African affairs, Maurice Castle (admirably played by Nicol Williamson) who is sent to South Africa to take the temperature of the communists there, which leads to his falling in love with a local woman. When they grow serious about their relationship he doesn't know she is expecting a child with an African man now dead, but instead of complicating matters this makes him more eager to pursue the relationship and accept the child. What she doesn't know is that he is now a double agent. Another colleague of his is suspected (Derek Jacobi) and made a scapegoat, while Williamson has to escape, leaving his African wife and her son in England. It's a scurvy cocktail indeed, and there is no end to it. We are left hanging with question marks, and Graham Greene is pleased with just having presented the problem.

Although a film of little children with youngsters in the lead, the chief one being no more than nine years old, this is hardly a film for little children. Walt Disney's first full length cartoon films like "Snowhite" and "Pinocchio" were notorious for scaring children out of their wits and giving them perpetual nightmares, although these masterpieces of children's films are made for no other audience, and this film is related to that kind. Young Frankie is almost constantly scared out of his mind because of what he experiences with weird ghosts of spooky lovely ladies in white waving clothes, like angels, and someone unknown actually trying to murder him for nothing as it seems, and that is just the beginning of his ordeals. The film is beautifully well done, you might question the verisimilitude of the plot, but the interesting thing is that the film is made with the mentality of a child and just as the child would have experienced all these things. The acting is wonderful especially on the part of young Lukas Haas, the camera work is brilliant and the cinematography is impressing, and to all this also comes a refreshing taint of good Italian humour. This is a film very difficult not to surrender to.

Most of the actors here are amateurs, but two of them stick out as professionals, Alberto Sordi and Francesco Golisano. Golisano makes the most sympathetic character, a vagabond boy who lives in the ruins of Colosseum, and the first part of the film is dominated by spectacular scenes from the Colosseum, as the street boys play hide and seek and other games there and are very busy. It's a comedy but a very realistic one, it is a true story, and there are some sinister moments of real neo-realism, as the action takes place during the final act of the war, when the allies invade Sicily and the Germans take a firm grip of Rome. Golisano is best remembered for his leading character in "Miracle in Milan" by Vittorio de Sica eight years later, but he makes an unforgettable character already here. The music is by Nino Rota, it is excellent all the way, and there are many scenes that you would like to return to with some very memorable shots - the camera work is outstanding all the way, like the acting, the characters are all genuine and natural, so this is definitely a film you would like to see some time again.

The main interest of the plot here is that you never really are informed of what it is all about. Sam Waterston as Howard Graham gets into deep trouble from the beginning and is persecuted hard throughout the film, without his ever understanding why everyone wants to kill him. As the audience you are as bewildered and confused as he, you eagerly wait for some explanation which never comes, and like Howard Graham you just learn to think the worst of everyone, as even the one murderer who appears visible never says anything but only waits for him everywhere. This was according to Hitchcock a capital sin in a thriller movie, who was always meticulous about keeping the audience in the clear about everything. Here you are kept confused even beyond the end. It's an efficient thriller though, there are many moments of truth of sustained suspense, and all kinds of great actors walk by as in a parade, like even Shelley Winters and Stanley Holloway as a displaced American couple. Zero Mostel in the beginning makes a wonderful impression, and so does Joseph Wiseman as a very strict and correct Turkish officer. Yvette Mimieux is a relief between all the manhunts and massacres, and fortunately she at least is innocent. The film ends abruptly in Genoa with the story unfinished, and we shall never learn what it really was all about.

This is a very slow melodrama which never seems to move on, and it never does. They are all stuck in a post accident which they have been able to confront, and whenever someone touches the subject he is told to stop it and shut up. Young David Travers comes home from collage unable to carry on his studies, looking up his roots to try to get to understand what happened ten years ago, of which he has no clear memory although he held the gun. He encounters walls of silence by repressed emotions, as everyone feels guilty about nothing. A young girl, Amanda, (Gabrielle Kalomiris) also feels the repression of unreleased feelings and has problems with her mother, who also never has got over the loss of her only son by that accident ten years ago. There are heavy charges here, and someone has to suffer for it, and in the end it's the wrong person, giving new occasions for chains of guilt complexes. It is beautifully done, the actors are all perfect, but the pace does hardly move at all until in the last act.

Two films are related to this one: Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs" and Brian de Palma's "Casualties of War", all equally brutal and revolting, they all tell the same story but in different ways, and this one is like a chamber play version of the drama. Is it an anatomy of the infamous "post traumatic stress disorder", all three characters are Vietnam veterans recently returned from the war, one disgusted by it and practically a pacifist, while the other two, who come to visit him casually by the way, have some unfinished business with him. The moment they enter the house you know what is going to happen, it is over-obvious from the beginning, but Elia Kazan as the master director he was, builds it up carefully and slowly detail by detail, gradually starting up the tension and the towering suspension all through the disaster to the bitter end, finally leaving all four characters hanging in the air with the ruins of their lives. It is brutal and barbaric, but that is what war does to people. They never recover.

If you have seen "The Dresser" once you would not like to see it twice. Even less you would like to see another version with Ian McKellen and Anthony Hopkins, if you saw the real version with Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay. Hopkins is all right and lives up to the role, but McKellen plays it down completely by overacting and exaggerating, appearing constantly drunk, while Courtenay never appeared drunk in spite of his prudent drinking. Emily Watson is also all right, while Edward Fox appears as a surprise in a role very out of his style, the fool unmasked as a modest gentleman. It's an interesting play but a poor travesty deep in the shadow of Shakespeare, and although the Blitz is used as an efficient background, it never becomes a drama, in spite of Hopkins' passionate outbursts. Donald Wolfit was a great actor with a company of his own, but both Finney and Courtenay are fruits having fallen some distance off from his tree.

This monumental biopic is perfectly adapted to Wagner's own pretentiousness, vanity and abominable egoism - it is as interminable as his operas, it is about nine hours long which is a bit too much and too long for a film and actually double the length of Wagner's longest opera. It is beautifully made, there is a magnificent team of all the greatest contemporary actors, but what does all that help when the subject is so utterly revolting? It is worth watching though for all those victims of Wagner, his wife, outrageously maltreated by him from the start, the king whom he ruined, his best friend Hans von Bülow whose wife he took for his own, and shame to say the biopic is rather one-sided to his favour while it omits many vital ingredients, like the anger of both Liszt and Bülow for his seduction of Bülow's wife, (Bülow actually wanted to challenge him to a deadly duel, which the film ignores,) and many other such details. Visconti's film "Ludwig" ten years earlier was more correct, and so was the Wagner film with Alan Badel "Magic Fire" (1956) which included Liszt's great anger and did not conceal the fact that Wagner was a most abominable character. This film is at least truthful enough to reveal his unbearable vanity. Fortunately there was also Verdi who was his opposite in everything, who actually admired Wagner but who Wagner despized and abused like everyone else.