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.