The Bells Are Ringing (1960) ****
You probably haven’t heard of Judy Holliday. She had just broken through with an Oscar for Born Yesterday (1951) when her career hit the rocks after facing accusations of Communist sympathy in the HUAC trials early in that decade. That was the high point of her career and she only made six other movies. The…
Rio Conchos (1964) ***
Starts and ends as a rootin’-tootin’ western but sags badly in between. The chance of turning it into The Magnificent Four or even The Dirty Pair go a-begging and it’s both revenge- and redemption-driven without either taking enough precedent. And there’s a curious dynamic in that the murderers are clearly smarter than the soldiers. Set…
The Shuttered Room (1967) ***
More Straw Dogs (1971) than The Old Dark House (1963) with for good measure a side helping of Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) thrown in. After a super menacing opening, a sustained sense of threat is all the fuel we get to keep the story going, the horror elements kept at bay as much…
The Best House in London (1969) *
One of the worst – and certainly among the most repellent – films ever made. A hymn to misogyny under the guise of the not very difficult task of exposing Victorian hypocrisy, it labors under the bizarre thesis that all women want to be prostitutes. Screenwriter Denis Norden’s befuddled sense of history is awash with…
American Gangster (2007) *****
I’ve seen this more times than The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) put together, so, for me, yeah, this is the greatest gangster picture of all time. There’s always a snobbery involved in talking about your all-time favorite picture. In discussions, I often find that the movie people consider the best is…
Bye, Bye, Braverman (1968) ***
Director Sidney Lumet didn’t have an easy time of it in the late 1960s. Like The Appointment (1969), this went missing in action. And you can see why. While The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) was straightforward in mixing fantasy with reality, this is more tricksy – in a contemporary way. The fantasy elements…
Danger Has Two Faces (1967) ***
Doppelgangers don’t come any luckier. In this instance the swap is with a married billionaire. Cue you’d think for a romcom, especially if the wife has her own reasons for welcoming a replacement. Except this was made at the height of the espionage boom, so it’s quite a slick thriller, not a laff in sight.…
Guess Who?
Every now and then I come across a book and think this would make a good film. I’ve just finished this particular book and already I can see four movies in it. A fellow, mostly what these days we’d term a nerd – physically awkward, doesn’t have a girlfriend – a farmer’s son, but not…
The Driver (1978) ***
Blasphemy I know but I went to see this back in the day not because of director Walter Hill, certainly not for star Ryan O’Neal, but for the wonderfully edgy Bruce Dern (Smile, 1975). You never knew what Dern would do next. Even his hairstyles tended to be offkey. Without having the choleric demeanor of,…
Behind the Scenes: The “Coming Soon” Business
I used to buy a British monthly movie magazine called Films and Filming, a cut above Photoplay and ABC Film Review but not as hoity-toity as Sight & Sound, and the first pages I always turned to were two particular sections. One was called “New Productions” and the other was “Premieres.” Unlike now when movies…
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The Magnificent 60s 