Reviews
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Actor? No, auteur! Mark Stevens and Cry Vengeance
Make no mistake, Cry Vengeance (1954) is one of the greatest film titles ever, even surpassing the classic Cry Danger (often delayed but, like this one, coming from Olive Films in 2014), and the big question is, can the movie possibly live up to its name? Yes, it can and does. It's often just as hard-boiled as its moniker, and any hope or optimism the characters find by the end is not the tacke...
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Where's That Been? - Private Hell 36
L.A. detective Cal Bruner (Steve Cochran) is in the right place and right time one evening when he foils a pharmacy robbery in progress and collars one of the thieves. It’s revealed that the arrested man (King Donovan) has a fifty-dollar bill among the money that was stolen, which can be traced to a 50,000 heist that took place on the East Coast sometime before.&nb...
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Wake Up and Live: Ben Bernie vs. Walter Winchell
This 1937 Fox musical comedy starts quickly, and I mean that literally: The 20th Century Fox fanfare cuts off suddenly as we cut to a shot of New York City at night and the credits begin. Now, it's possible this is just some kind of DVD authoring error, but I prefer to think this is how the movie actually played back then and that it is meant to suggest the fast-talking, hectic world of Broadway, ...
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Where's that Been? - Union Depot
When you're Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer - 'the Tiffany's of motion picture studios' - you can produce a film like Grand Hotel (1932) by larding it up with stars (Garbo! Beery! Crawford! Barrymores!) and spending 00,000 on an opulent spectacle that ultimately wins you a Best Picture Oscar. When you're Warner Brothers/First National...well, you have to rely more on your contract players (Joan Blondell! ...
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Where's That Been? - The Sun Shines Bright
I won't make any bones about it: The Searchers (1956) is my favorite film directed by John Ford, provided I haven't seen Stagecoach (1939) recently. I'd even go so far as to proclaim it his masterpiece; an opinion shared by some but not all who are familiar with his work. When discussing The Searchers with my fellow classic film cineastes, the common complaint is that some of the lighter comic m...
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Colorama: Bigger Than Life - Ahead of Its Time
'To ask a paying audience to sit for almost an hour and watch somebody... go through a painfully slow routine of becoming intoxicated from taking too much cortisone is adding a tax of tedium to the price of admission.' Bosley Crowther's verdict on Bigger Than Life, Nicholas Ray's 1956 drug horror film just about sums it up for critics of the time, who unanimously turned up their noses and fled. Bu...
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I, Robot: The Colossus of New York
Olive Films started distributing Paramount owned titles in 2010. In August of 2011, they released The Colossus of New York (1958). When I hear of a movie with a colossus in it, I want to see that colossus get ample screen time, I want to see it look cool, and I want to see it go berserk or at least break stuff. What do we get in this one? Well, we do see plenty of the titular character, it looks p...
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87th Precinct: A Building Block in the Television Crime Drama
In 1956, inspired by the television police procedural Dragnet, author and screenwriter Evan Hunter published Cop Hater, the first of what would eventually be fifty-four novels in a series known as 87th Precinct. Hunter, whose previous novel Blackboard Jungle had been adapted for the movies in 1955 and who wrote the screenplays for such films as Strangers When We Meet (1960) and The Birds (1963), ...
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Colorama: The Charms of Meet Me in St. Louis
There's just something about Technicolor that makes it perfect for stories of nostalgia. In real life, our memories may fade, but it doesn't stop us from reinventing the past into a more beautiful, impossible shape. And so does Technicolor, really. It paints in hyperreal images, creating the world we dream of rather than the one we have. Small wonder then, that movies like Gone With the Wind, Heav...
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Where's That Been? - It's Tough to Be Famous
Naval officer Scott 'Scotty' McClenehan (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) is trapped with his men in a submarine that has collided with another vessel...and the sub is making its way to the bottom, with the crew rapidly running out of air. Scotty suggests to his fellow sailors that each of them beat a hasty retreat via the torpedo tubes, but eventually that's going to leave one man behind with no one to p...
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Where's That Been? - Chain Gang (1950)
'Lord knows I'll never make an Academy Award movie,' legendary movie producer 'Jungle' Sam Katzman reputedly observed at one time, 'but then I am just so happy to get my achievement plaques from the bank every year.' A filmmaker who founded B-picture studio Victory Pictures Corporation (in addition to several others), Katzman was churning out cheap East Side Kids vehicles and Bela Lugosi horror p...
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Where's That Been? - The Ring
Although I'm not much of a boxing fan (simply because I can't embrace the concept of two men beating each other's brains out), I do enjoy watching films on the subject--because the great ones, as a rule, move farther beyond the mere brutality of the sport. For example, Body and Soul (1947) and The Harder They Fall (1956) both address the issue of corruption in the fight game (Harder even calls fo...
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Happiness Ahead: Hey... It's Dick Powell!
What better harbinger of happiness ahead is there than a beaming Dick Powell singing the title song directly to you, the viewer, while superimposed over a lovely backdrop? There can be none better, I say, and Happiness Ahead (1934) indeed lives up to its title and to that striking beginning. Powell sings for several minutes over the credits, and it certainly is a dynamic way to open a film. It's ...
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Where's That Been? - Moonlight Murder
Operatic tenor Gino D’Acosta (Leo Carrillo) has been warned by a mystic (Pedro de Cordoba) that if he attempts to sing in a performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the Hollywood Bowl as scheduled…well, he’s going to be turning in his voice for a harp, because he will die as a result. D’Acosta is a superstitious sort—but he’s also vainglorious, and insists the show must go on. Sadly, he doesn’t ev...
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Classics 101: The Hitch-Hiker (Blu-Ray)
Kino International has upgraded its six-year-old DVD release with a brand-new transfer of this excellent, creepy, threadbare thriller, brilliantly restored to HD. It’s sparse, tough movie-making with a number of good sequences. If it’s eventually done in by its miniscule budget, it is still one heck of a thrill ride. Someone is killing drivers along deserted Southwestern desert highways, and so o...
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I Married a Witch: Whimsy with a Little Bite
New Englander Wallace Wooley (Fredric March) has no idea of the trouble set to rain down on him. Centuries earlier, his Puritan ancestor Jonathan (also played by March) was responsible for the ritual burning of two witches, Jennifer (Veronica Lake) and her father, Daniel (Cecil Kellaway). Before succumbing at the stake, Jennifer curses the Wooley family, declaring that none of Jonathan’s descendan...
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The Uninvited: Hold That Ghost!
The Uninvited (1944) may be the best 'ghost story' of the classic film era, combining lush romanticism with genuine spookiness. It's taken a very long time for this much beloved and admired film to come to DVD, but it's proven worth the wait, now available in a fine print from the Criterion Collection (released on both standard DVD and Blu-ray on October 22nd, just in time for Halloween). It coul...
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Colorama: The Curse of the Thing - Vampires Go Technicolor
NOTE: In order to avoid confusion with the 1931 Bela Lugosi movie, I’ll refer to the 1958 adaptation by its American title, Horror of Dracula. “The curse of this thing is the Technicolor blood: why need vampires be messier eaters than anybody else?” The movie in question was 1958’s Horror of Dracula and the comment was made by Audrey Field, one of the British censors of the time. She was even mor...
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Where's That Been? - Show Them No Mercy!
Outside a palatial mansion that is identified by a block of sculpted stone bearing the name “Hansen,” a crowd of onlookers has gathered to watch as policemen and other authority figures drive up in cars and through a set of iron gates. Inside the house, there’s a full-blown crisis in progress: the son of Kurt Hansen (Herbert Rawlinson) has been snatched by kidnappers and a ransom of 00,000 is bei...
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Betty Boop, Volume 1: Crisp, Clean and Beautiful
The past decade has seen a kind of renaissance for the animation of the Fleischer brothers. Their most acclaimed cartoon series, Popeye the Sailor Man, was restored from the original negatives and treated to a lavish three-volume set of releases packed with extras and special features. Their lauded 1940s adaptation of the Superman comic book series has been remastered and released in its own compl...
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