The Stop Button Posted by on October 26, 2012

North by Northwest seems a little like a Technicolor version of an early Hollywood Hitchcock–the regular man combating the bad guys against incredible odds (at an American monument no less), but it’s a lot more. The film’s a tightly constructed proto-blockbuster; there’s not   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on October 25, 2012

Upon hearing John Barry’s beautiful opening titles music, I realized it was unlikely High Road to China would live up to its score. It does not. It does, however, at times, come rather close. The film takes place in the twenties, with Bess Armstrong as a flapper who hires WWI...   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on October 24, 2012

Lassiter suffers from a definite lack of charisma. Not from leading man Tom Selleck, who looks a tad too tall to be a jewel thief, but from his leading ladies, Jane Seymour and Lauren Hutton. Seymour plays the girlfriend, which should give Lassiter an edge–if Seymour and Selleck had any...   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on October 22, 2012

Penguin Pool Murder, besides the peculiar title (and lack of a definite article), opens like almost any other early thirties mystery. A possible unfaithful wife, Mae Clarke, has a swindling louse of a husband, Guy Usher. When he ends up dead, there are multiple suspects. Only the murder occurs at...   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on October 17, 2012

All My Dear Miss Aldrich is missing is a good script. Well, it’s missing some other things, but with a good script, it could have survived. The film has a lot of events in the first thirty or forty minutes, with the remaining minutes centered on a mystery. But it’s...   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on October 11, 2012

How to Be a Detective is a disjointed Robert Benchley miniature. He sets it up as a lecture on detecting practices and director Feist (and Benchley and his co-writers) miss the jokes. Towards the end, Feist mimics detective movie filmmaking techniques, which gives the short a boost, but it’s   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on October 10, 2012

It’s not difficult to assign blame for Miss Pinkerton‘s failings, it’s difficult to identify anything good about it. I suppose Joan Blondell bad in the lead, but she isn’t good. She’s just doing a persona. Wait, George Brent is good. He’s the police inspector wh   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on October 9, 2012

One Wet Night is profoundly unfunny. It’s not terrible or anything, just not funny. It even might deserve points for having the idiot butler be a white guy (Bert Roach). But Roach is the butler to two more idiots, a couple played by Alice Howell and Neely Edwards. Wet is...   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on October 8, 2012

The Spiral Staircase opens with this lovely homage to silent cinema. Director Siodmak takes great care with the setting in time–Nicholas Musuraca’s sumptuous cinematography helps–and then Spiral becomes a waiting game. Certainly if Siodmak took such great care with one sequence, h   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on October 4, 2012

Director Deitch does a couple brilliant things with The Hobbit. First, he condenses a novel of some three hundred pages to eleven minutes. I’m fairly sure it’s not a faithful adaptation, but there’s a wizard, a hobbit and a ring so it’s fine by me. Second, he turns The Hobbi   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on October 2, 2012

Our Lady of the Sphere has two definite narratives. Jordan’s cut-up animation seemingly defies narrative, as eggs are landing on the moon, which then grows flowers, but I found two definite ones. The first has to do with a falling child. Jordan opens Sphere with the child falling, later showi   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on September 28, 2012

It takes about seventeen minutes for Monkey Business to start. The first seventeen minutes are the Brothers running around a cruise ship, on the run from the ship’s officers. In those seventeen minutes–about a fifth of the picture–they manage to get in a number of gags, including   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on September 27, 2012

If I knew how Eggeling made the shapes in Diagonal Symphony move–or if I was really into geometry (but probably not)–I might appreciate it more. The short is some shapes doubling and duplicating until they eventually start rescinding. The shapes aren’t interesting; in fact, when E   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on September 18, 2012

Harry Edwards flops on every sight gag in All Night Long, seemingly a combination of his inability to direct comedy and star Harry Langdon’s lack of comic timing. However, otherwise Edwards does a great job with the short. He’s got an excellent dinner table sequence and a lot of special   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on September 16, 2012

Boys Will Be Joys is a strange Our Gang outing, simply because the story doesn’t belong to the Gang. Instead, sixty year-old industrialist Paul Weigel has grown bored being a successful grown-up and just wants to goof off. Luckily, he happens to be developing a plot of land the Gang...   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on September 15, 2012

Calling Love’s Surprises a tepid comedy would be an understatement. Writer-director-star Linder fails to understand the very basics of drama, which puts the whole short in the dumps right off. It opens with a dinner party. The three men at the party all run off to grab hidden flowers for...   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on September 14, 2012

Almost all of Creature from the Black Lagoon is a compelling mix of science fiction, workplace drama and horror. The Creature makes a great “villain” because there’s nothing human about him (except maybe his fixation on leading lady Julie Adams) so it’s possible to both fear   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on September 13, 2012

About the only thing good about Geometria is Juan Carlos Muñez’s photography. It’s very stylized, very red and blue, but it’s competent throughout and there are a couple great shots. It’s clear Muñez and del Toro shot it in an apartment or house, but Muñez gives it real scal   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on September 12, 2012

The Glass Key‘s a murder mystery, but its solution–and even its investigation–is incidental to the rest of the picture. From about seven minutes in, director Heisler defines Key as something quite different. Leading man Alan Ladd isn’t a detective, he isn’t even partic   read more

The Stop Button Posted by on September 10, 2012

“No character development, please, we’re British.” There’s nothing to recommend The Quatermass Xperiment. Walter J. Harvey’s black and white photography is fantastic, but it can’t recommend the film. Xperiment is so stupid, it appears screenwriters Richard H. Lan   read more