AKA Humphrey Bogart’s first real Hollywood film, playing the tough-guy criminal role that typecast him until the early 1940s. As Duke Mantee, he takes a desert gas station hostage when his getaway car breaks down. The station/diner is run by Bette Davis, who recently met and became enamored of philosophical traveler Leslie Howard. They are [...]
This is the best-known film by Samuel Fuller, whose The Naked Kiss so pleasantly surprised me a few months ago, so I had high hopes for Shock Corridor. And I didn’t like it as much. A detective pretends to be insane to get committed to an asylum in order to find out who killed one [...]
This was part of my attempt to move beyond the New Wave proper and into some of the (non-American) directors who influenced it. Jean-Pierre Melville’s crime films are New Wavish in their appropriation of American crime/gangster genre films, but they precede the films of Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, and Chabrol by a half-decade or so. (Godard [...]
Moving from Germany’s idea of a socially-conscious film to a prime example of 1930s Warner Bros. example of a social problem film. Paul Muni plays an initially optimistic and energetic young man who struggles to find a job during the depression. Eventually, down on his luck, he ends up unwillingly involved in a robbery and [...]
Criterion packages both the 1946 and the 1964 versions of The Killers together, so after I finished watching the earlier one, I popped the later one in to compare. Wow different. You can still see elements of the same story, though the whole diner scene which was taken directly from the short story has been [...]
