AndyM108

Absolutely. Fabulous movie, with Roman at her best. It's also one of the few times that Cochran plays a sympathetic character, which also makes it worth watching just for that alone. BTW I used to confuse Cochran with Brad Dexter, even though they don't really look all that much alike. Has Dexter ever played a good guy in any movie? He always seems the embodiment of pure evil.

Joan Bennett is the sole reason to watch that movie. She's terrific, but the film is strictly warmed over Swanson's*. It's the one time George Sanders seems to be just going through the motions, and you know what a fan I am of him. *And that's warmed over Swanson's as in TV Dinners, not Gloria. The movie's also a turkey.

Daisy and Violet Hilton died on the same day, though rather unsurprisingly.

Lorna, this was what my comment was in response to: (cinemafan): I am used to him playing a sneaky wise guy, con man, or more comical roles. Of course Donlevy's McGinty role was the height of his career, but since that fell into the realm of "comical", I didn't mention it as an example of his serious dramatic roles. And I agree that his role in The Glass Key wasn't all that memorable, even if the movie as a whole was terrif. His acting in The Great McGinty was so much more spot on than anything else he ever did that in my mind it almost made him into a one film pony, no matter how many other movies he made.

That's pretty much what Tracy's like in many of his earlier movies. It's hard to imagine a bigger blowhard. Great actor, but often insufferable, and not even in a particularly interesting way. But Young transcends all that, and I guarantee if I'd been around in 1933 and met up with a dream like her, I would've treated her a WHOLE lot better.

If you want to see Donlevy in a much more interesting movie, try Impact, where he survives an attempted murder by his unfaithful wife and then goes undercover so she can stand trial for murder. It's played several times on TCM. And an even better film is Kiss of Death, where Donlevy plays a DA who's trying to get the "good" stickup artist Victor Mature to turn state's evidence against the psychopathic murderer played by Richard Widmark, who pushes a crippled old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs. But though the movie's better, Donlevy's role is pretty bland. Impact gives you a much better display of his talent.

And the least sexy? Greta Garbo in Anna Christie. An' don't be steengy, baby!

Good choices, though using another definition of "sexy", I doubt if any character could top Loretta Young's Trina in Man's Castle. Not only is she Hollywood's all-time glamor girl for sheer physical perfection, but in this movie she's got a sweetness about her that at least IMO is far sexier than if she'd been playing a vamp. That doesn't mean that Man's Castle itself is anywhere near on the level of those three you mention, all of which are top 10 (or maybe even top 5) pre-codes, but Young's sex appeal rises way above the rather pedestrian plot.

This week's highlight movie starts in less than two hours: Mean Streets. This was the breakthrough movie for both Martin Scorsese and Harvey Keitel, as well as being Robert De Niro's first great role as a borderline psychopath. It took a long time for TCM to get around to it, but since they also showed it a year ago maybe they'll eventually make it a regular feature and put it in the prime time spot that it deserves.

I agree that Fury isn't Lang's greatest film, but OTOH I'm always a sucker for Sylvia's Sydney's soulful proletarianette eyes. There's even a Gary Cooper movie I can sit through (City Streets) just to get a glimpse of them. KID! KID!! KID!!!

But after Fury, and before Ministry of Fear, Lang also made the very good noirish You Only Live Once, and right after his most notorious clinker (Man Hunt), he directed the sublime Moon Tide with Jean Gabin, Ida Lupino and Thomas Mitchell. I think it was more a case of avoiding war melodramas than it was any sort of a mid-career crisis. Like so many other directors, Lang handled ambiguity and complexity of motives a lot better than he handled Pure Good vs Unadulterated Evil. Not that everything he directed other than war movies was uniformly great, but his percentage of memorable films from Weimar to Hollywood was about as high as it gets.

Me, too, but when Sanders finally gets his long overdue SOTM tribute, I sure hope that they leave out Man Hunt.

The original review in the New York Times reinforces what I've been saying, even if IMO he overrates Sanders' performance: "It is a film which is handsomely made and directed by Fritz Lang with unremitting intensity. Mr. Lang has also achieved the difficult task in such films of creating an illusion of actuality. Walter Pidgeon plays the leading role of the English huntsman—or rather the hunted—with superior sinew and integrity; George Sanders makes a hard and treacherous Nazi agent; even Joan Bennett handles the role of a Cockney street-walker with delicacy, and the remainder of the cast is up to scratch. "But the script which Dudley Nichols prepared from a novel by Geoffrey Household—the popular novel, "Rogue Male"—has holes in it. For one, the Nazi Gestapo has been endowed with incredible ubiquity. Sly agents are all over the place, and always taking the right turn. For another, the design of the Nazi upon the hunted man after he has escaped is never made properly clear. If it is merely that they want him to sign a paper, why couldn't his signature be forged? And finally, why should he worry after he arrives safely in England? It is preposterous to think he'd be sent back to Germany for trial. "To be sure, Mr. Nichols has attempted to plug up these holes with reasons, but every one of them leaks. And, as a consequence, you constantly feel that the "chase" is entirely contrived. Exciting? Yes, it is. But convincing? No. Somehow you just keep on asking, 'For goodness sake, what makes Captain Thorndike run?' "

It isn't just the ending. It's all those scenes where Pidgeon goes through elaborate maneuvers to ditch his Nazi bloodhounds, only to find them right there either stalking him or waiting for him the second he arrives at his hideout. It happened in the manor house, several different times in the underground, in his cave in the woods, and probably several more places that I've mercifully forgotten. Not to mention that he somehow managed to survive a push off a high cliff without suffering anything more than a few scratches. Quite a man!

After watching Man Hunt, I feel like Charlie Brown having been suckered in by Lucy's claim that "this time I won't pull the ball away." Look, Joan Bennett was glorious, granted. But Sanders was little more than a cartoon Nazi with no depth whatever*, and Pidgeon was Pidgeon as only Pidgeon can be, forever the staid gentleman no matter what the role. About as exciting as a 21 inning scoreless baseball game played in a rainstorm. But am I misremembering, or did Bob say that this was Lang's BEST Hollywood film? Is he crazy? The worst is more like it. Wholly pedestrian plot, little real suspense, innumerable impossible scenes and premises to swallow, all excused by what? The need to raise homefront morale before we were even in the war? Seriously, while Lang is undoubtedly one of filmdom's all time great directors, how was this movie any better than the equally doltish and crudely propagandistic Mission to Moscow? These cookie cutter wartime movies were understandably rah-rah for domestic purposes during the war itself, but once the war was over and they have to stand on their own merits, it's almost as if once you've seen one of them, you've seen them all. I wish that TCM would cut a lot of these WW2 Hollywood potboilers and start showing more movies made in countries that actually experienced war on their own soil, and accordingly did a much better job of depicting war's complex realities. * And it hurts me to say that, since aside from this dreadful movie Sanders is almost always interesting and one of our most underrated actors.

Ah, if only Richard Estes had been more than 12 years old back then.

That's what reincarnation is for, though if you came back as a housefly you might not even last through Berlin Alexanderplatz, let alone the other 999.

If it's any consolation, here's how the database's top 10 searches stands today: 1.Woman on the Run... 2.Born to Kill (1947) 3.The Longest Day... 4.The Wings of Eagles... 5.Dark Passage (1947) 6.The Hunchback of... 7.Nora Prentiss (1947) 8.The Big Heat (1953) 9.The Maltese Falcon... 10.Man Who Would Be...

All I really know about Ava Gardner is what I see in her films, but you do kind of have to wonder about the judgment of someone who would marry three of the biggest egomaniacs in the history of public life: Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra. Well, at least Shaw and Sinatra were certified musical geniuses, but she would've been much better off in the long run just buying their record albums. But any woman who would marry Mickey Rooney would have had to have been on LSD. Not to dwell on this, but has there ever been anyone whose choice of spouses on a percentage basis was so certifiably insane? I honestly can't think of any three as horrific as Gardner's, unless they were promoting serial marriages inside the Manson family.

I've also never understood the near-universal dislike of Glenn Ford around here. He doesn't have the depth of a Robert Ryan or a Robert Mitchum, but that's more because of his assigned screen persona than anything inherently missing in his talent. Just as Gary Cooper grunts and mutters his way through nearly every part, giving us the good old reliable Hollywood archetype of the strong and silent hero who's stupid on the surface but has childlike wisdom beneath it, and Spencer Tracy always seems to have a hot rivet up his derriere, so Ford often plays a part of an ordinary family man to whom bad things happen, and he always plays it with conviction. About the only movie where he's totally miscast is A Pocketful of Miracles, but that entire film is so inferior to the original version of Lady For A Day that it's hard to blame its crapulence on any one actor.

I never thought of The Big Heat as particularly underplayed, since I've recorded it four times and could have recorded it even more, but I could certainly live with its being shown on a NBNW frequency. Definitely a 9 or 9.5 on a 10 scale. And I'd also put it up there with Lang's best (of many good) Hollywood films, even though I'm even more partial to several that he made in Germany.* IMO Lang's just about up there with Kurosawa and Ozu and Hitchcock for a career that combined quality with longevity. I'd love to see him given a month's long treatment with his German movies being shown to the fullest extent they're available, as well as his French-made version Liliom. *particularly M, Spione and the two Dr. Mabuse movies, and Metropolis to a slightly lesser extent)

Not to mention a truly psychopathic portrait by Lee Marvin. I believe this was his first noir, and it stamped his film persona in cement (so to speak).

What a FABULOUS movie! I only hope this wasn't a one shot deal.

The version I've recorded off TCM is the one in German with English subtitles. It's one of Dietrich's best films.

Glad to see some love for The Damned Don't Cry. TCM shows it fairly often, and I wish they'd beg, borrow or steal Sudden Fear the next time around, but it's definitely the quintessential Crawford. And while I've seen The Women so many times that it's starting to wear a bit thin, I'll always love it if for nothing else but that scene where Crawford tells Rosalind Russell (Mrs. Fowler) as she's leaving the shop, "Do come again----Mrs. PROWLER" Ros gets so flustered she winds up tripping over herself and landing head first into the clothes hamper. All in all this is much more Russell's movie than Crawford, but Crawford gets the best single line. Manpower is at the opposite end of the spectrum: a film so deliciously bad, it must be seen to be believed. Dietrich is teamed with the alpha and omega in terms of quality actors: Edward G. Robinson, who works like hell to salvage what he clearly knows is a mess of a film, and George Raft who persists in rubbing his stink all over every moment he has onscreen. Raft's character actually hits Dietrich numerous times, and he is supposed to be THE HERO of the story (this is shown to be a "good thing.") Truly, a can't miss, but only in terms of it's value to shock and appall. Manpower may be one of only about half a dozen noirs out of nearly a thousand that I've rated under a 5 on a 10 scale, and in this case I think it was about a 2. Having seen its badness once, I think I'll rely on my memory rather than a repeat of the torture. If I want delicious badness, I'll take Death on the Diamond or My Dinner With Andre, even if for that last one I'd need to bring my barf bag. P. S. Lorna, if you haven't seen it already, the one film in August you can't afford to miss is Thieves' Highway, showing on Lee J. Cobb's day on the 17th at 8:00 PM. Cobb is at his absolute best, and the rest of the cast does their part.