Night and the City (1950)

 

NIGHT AND THE CITY  (1950)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Jules Dassin

    Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Googie Withers,

    Hugh Marlowe, Francis L. Sullivan, Herbert Lom,

    Stanislaus Zbyszko, Mike Mazurki, Charles Farrell

Richard Widmark plays a small-time underworld hustler with grandiose dreams and a million schemes, all of them predestined to fail. When he overhears a conversation at a sporting event, he sees his ticket to the big time, a chance to take over London's professional wrestling racket. It turns out to be one scheme - or several schemes - too many. A gritty film noir with Widmark at his cocky, conniving best. Dassin shot it on location for Darryl Zanuck, getting out of the U.S. just ahead of the blacklist, and if the film has a pervasive sense of being hunted and hounded, maybe that's why. His next movie, the French heist classic "Rififi", wouldn't come out for another five years, and he made most of his pictures after that in Europe. 

The Secret Ways (1961)

 

THE SECRET WAYS  (1961)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Phil Karlson

    Richard Widmark, Sonja Ziemann, Charles Regnier,

    Heinz Moog, Oskar Wegrostek, Stefan Schnabel

Richard Widmark plays a guy who's hanging around Zurich dodging a $2,000 hotel bill and a $40,000 gambling debt, when he's recruited to do a little cloak-and-dagger work behind the Iron Curtain. A good, escapist spy thriller, shot on location in noirish black and white, with Vienna filling in for Budapest. Widmark produced. Mrs. Widmark (Jean Hazlewood) wrote the screenplay from a novel by Alistair MacLean.The composer was a young John Williams.

Rollercoaster (1977)

 

ROLLERCOASTER  (1977)  ¢ ¢

    D: James Goldstone

    George Segal, Timothy Bottoms, Richard Widmark, 

    Henry Fonda, Harry Guardino, Susan Strasberg,

    Helen Hunt, Dorothy Tristan, Craig Wasson

A safety inspector (George Segal) and a government agent (Richard Widmark) try to stop a terrorist who's planting bombs on rollercoasters. As disaster movies go, this is a literal carnival ride, but the would-be thrills are unexciting and the actors can't help looking like they'd rather be somewhere else. 3-D might've helped, but not enough. (It was originally released in the wall-rattling process of "Sensurround".) A young Helen Hunt plays Segal's teenaged daughter, and Steve Guttenberg turns up uncredited as a delivery boy. 

Edge of Darkness (1943)

 

EDGE OF DARKNESS  (1943)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Lewis Milestone

    Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, Walter Huston,

    Judith Anderson, Ruth Gordon, Helmut Dantine,

    Nancy Coleman, Morris Karnovsky, Charles Dingle

A rousing World War Two propaganda piece about some heroic Norwegians fighting back against the German occupation. We knew who the good guys and the bad guys were back then, and so did our movies. 

Lady On a Train (1945)

 

LADY ON A TRAIN  (1945)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Charles David

    Deanna Durbin, David Bruce, Edward Everett Horton

    Dan Duryea, Ralph Bellamy, Allen Jenkins,

    George Coulouris, Patricia Morison, William Frawley

A young woman's reading a murder mystery on a train as it pulls into New York City. Looking out the window, she witnesses what appears to be a murder, which she's determined to solve herself, with the help of the author of the book she's been reading. An entertaining whodunit, part comedy and part mystery, with pauses in the storytelling so Deanna can sing a  couple of tunes. Durbin was enormously popular in the 1940s, mostly in musicals, but her career was brief. She eventually married Charles David, this film's director, and retired at 27 in 1948.

They Saved Hitler's Brain (1968)

 

THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN  (1968)  ¢

    D: David Bradley

    Walter Stocker, Audrey Caire, Caros Rivas,

    John Holland, Dani Lynn, Nestor Paiva

Plodding, low-budget sci-fi about a Nazi plot to release some deadly gas and take over the world. From the title, you'd expect a little bad-movie amusement at least, but sometimes a severed head just isn't enough, even when it's the Führer's.

Sabrina (1954)

 

SABRINA  (1954)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Billy Wilder

    Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden,

    Walter Hampden, John Williams, Martha Hyer,

    Marcel Dalio, Ellen Corby, Francis X. Bushman,

    Neila Walker, Joan Vohs, Nancy Kulp

Audrey plays a chauffeur's daughter tangled up romantically with two brothers, a straight-laced one played by Humphrey Bogart and a cavalier one played by William Holden. Bogart did not enjoy working with Hepburn, or on the film. Holden did. See if you think it shows in their performances. 

The Tingler (1959)

 

THE TINGLER  (1959)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: William Castle

    Vincent Price, Judith Evelyn, Darryl Hickman,

    Patricia Cutts, Philip Coolidge, Pamela Lincoln

Vincent Price plays a scientist whose research has him delving into the nature of fear. It seems that at a certain moment of absolute terror, something called "the tingler" attacks the spinal column, and the only way to avoid certain, horrible death is to scream. This might be schlockmeister William Castle's most inspired creation, and certainly one of his greatest gimmicks, released in a process called "Percepto", whereby little vibrating buzzers were placed under the theater seats and timed to go off at certain points in the film, an effect enhanced by having most of the climactic scary stuff take place in a movie theater. The movie's still good for a late-night laugh, but the shattering impact of watching it in "Percepto" in 1959 can only be imagined. 

The Front Page (1974)

 

THE FRONT PAGE  (1974)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Billy Wilder

    Jack Lemm0n, Walter Matthau, Susan Sarandon,

    David Wayne, Vincent Gardenia, Allen Garfield,

    Charles Durning, Austin Pendleton, Herb Edelman,

    Martin Gabel, Harold Gould, Carol Burnett

Walter Matthau plays wheedling editor Walter Burns and Jack Lemmon plays wiseguy star reporter Hildy J0hnson in Billy Wilder's adaptation of the Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur play. It really feels m0re like a play than a movie, with the actors shouting their lines, a sense of timing that's both severe and flat-footed, and most of the action confined to a couple of sets. The slapstick stuff with Martin Gabel as a gunshot victim on a runaway gurney looks like something out of Blake Edwards. Viewers with a particular interest in old-school printing should at least catch the opening credits. 

Something To Sing About (1937)

SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT  (1937)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 

    D: Victor Schertzinger

    James Cagney, Evelyn Daw, William Frawley,

    Mona Barrie, Gene Lockhart, Philip Ahn,

    Marek Windheim, Richard Tucker, Dwight Frye

Cagney plays a bandleader who gets the call from Hollywood and goes west to make a movie. He does a little hoofing along the way.

She (1965)

 

SHE  (1965)  ¢ ¢

    D: Robert Day

    Ursula Andress, Peter Cushing, Bernard Cribbins,

    John Richardson, Rosenda Monteros, Christopher Lee

Three Brits, idling around Palestine at the end of the First World War, set out to look for the lost city of Kuma, a fabled center or wealth and power in ancient Egypt. They find it, somewhere down around Ethiopia. A fantasy adventure from Hammer with location work in Israel's Negev Desert, based on the novel by H. Rider Haggard. Decently produced, but not terribly exciting. If you watch it with an eye on anything other than Ursula Andress, look for the bits lifted straight from "Lawrence of Arabia". 

The Searchers (1956)

 

THE SEARCHERS  (1956)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: John Ford

    John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles,

    Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, John Qualen,

    Olive Carey, Henry Brandon, Ken Curtis,

    Antonio Moreno, Harry Carey Jr., Hank Worden

The first thing that happens in this movie, a ranch-house door opens on a shot of John Wayne riding in out of the desert on a horse. The last thing that happens, John Wayne walks out into the desert as the ranch-house door closes behind him. In both cases, it's Wayne in the desert, alone. Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a Confederate Army veteran who embarks on an obsessive quest to rescue his niece from the Comanche raiding party that kidnapped her (and murdered her family) as a young girl. When he learns she's become the wife of a Comanche war chief, his mission takes on a darker objective: to kill her. It's one of Wayne's most iconic roles, and one of his toughest performances: haunted and bitter, an avenging angel and a seething psychopath. He might've won the Oscar for "True Grit", but he deserved it for this. A signature line of dialogue repeated several times by Wayne in the movie inspired a hit rock-&-roll song by Buddy Holly.

The Long Voyage Home (1940)

 

THE LONG VOYAGE HOME  (1940)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: John Ford

    John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter,

    Barry Fitzgerald, Ward Bond, John Qualen,

    Arthur Shields, Mildred Natwick, Wilfred Lawson

Early in World War Two, a merchant vessel crosses the Atlantic over hostile seas, with a cargo of high explosives earmarked for the British war effort. The crew's the usual gang of boisterous, hard-drinking salts, plus a tall, lanky Swede who's leaving the ocean behind and heading back to the family farm outside Stokholm. There are some gaps in the overall narrative, but Ford's focus is more on the incidentals: the death of a sailor (Ward Bond), a kangaroo court that forms when a crewman's suspected of espionage, an opening sequence that wordlessly captures the casual boredom of life at sea, and a lengthy episode in which the men, on shore leave, barely escape being shanghaied (and one of them doesn't). The script doesn't give Wayne much to say, and since he's trying to say it with a Swedish accent, maybe it's just as well.

Stagecoach (1939)

 

STAGECOACH  (1939)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: John Ford

    John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Thomas Mitchell,

    John Carradine, Andy Devine, Donald Meek,

    George Bancroft, Berton Churchill, Louise Platt

The stage to Lordsburg stops in the middle of the desert to pick up a lean, young fella with a rifle in one hand and a saddle in the other. The camera zeroes in for a closeup, and John Wayne becomes a star.