MonsterHunter

Evelyn Prentice follows that time-honored tradition of having a comedy team appear in a dramatic vehicle where the most drama you get is in just how bad they are when they are trying to be deadly serious (see also Tracy and Hepburn in Keeper of the Flame). This domestic/courtroom melodrama is certainly deadly in every aspect of its execution right down to the irritating little kid that gets trotted out whenever they want to make some point about how much the dad is neglecting his family or how mommy should own up to killing the guy she started running around with just because dad was neglecting the family. William Powell and Myrna Loy, arguably the best duo of the sophisticated comedies of the nineteen thirties (Libeled Lady, Double Wedding, The Thin Man series) look entirely disinterested in every thing that transpires here as they sluggishly shamble somnambulantly through their roles as John and Evelyn Prentice, a well heeled couple that encounters problems once they start to drift apart. Read More »

Elmer Gantry is based on a book by Sinclair Lewis. You may have a hard time believing this but Sinclair Lewis is actually a different person than Upton Sinclair, though Sinclair Lewis once worked on Upton Sinclair’s commie commune. Both of these folks are also separate from that C.S. Lewis guy who wrote those Narnia books about the talking lion. Anyway Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize for literature, was ripped off of a Pulitzer by the Columbia University trustees, won it for real later, declined it, wrote Babbitt, and eventually hired secretaries to play chess with him until he croaked from the effects of alcoholism. Somewhere in all this, he found time to pen what has to be regarded as the definitive novel about the nature of religion as Big Con. Read More »

You don’t have to go any further than the opening credits of this one to know that it’s one of the titans of film noir. Based on a novel written by James M. Cain ( The Postman Always Rings Twice), the film was directed by Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard) with a screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep). The only thing you may wonder about is that it stars Fred MacMurray. If you only remember Fred from his days inventing Flubber and advising My Three Sons what to do about their gender confusion, you’ll be pleasantly surprised that Fred makes a very convincing murderer, schemer, and dude who was a little too smart for his own good. Read More »

Back in the days before there were television miniseries that stretched out over the course of several nights, the only way to tell a really long, bloated story was to make a really long, bloated movie. These movies were called epics and they ranged from the very good like Ben-Hur, to the really awful, like Hawaii. Doctor Zhivago falls somewhere in the middle of the pack, in spite of what all the Zhivago zombies will tell you. It’s a good movie, but not great. Read More »

D.O.A. takes on its subject matter with a stark straightforwardness that literally shows the protagonist as a walking dead man. Frank Bigelow gets poisoned by some slow acting stuff that allows him to run around California for a week before croaking, all in an effort to find out who was behind his impending death. Is there a gimmick in the movies (well, short of 3-D or anything William Castle dreamed up) better than this? Shoot, is there a better metaphor for the futility of life than this? Even if the hero triumphs by solving the case, he still loses by ending up dead! All life is pain and suffering and this movie crystallizes the fact that even if you figure out why, it still doesn’t matter! You’re just as screwed! I suppose the case can be made that this movie shows us that its the struggle to understand things that is really the important thing, but I always got the impression that Frank was aggressively pursuing this case (instead of just loading up on chalupas, ice cream and Vanilla Coke until dying like I would have done) because he was pissed that someone messed up his San Francisco vacation. Read More »

It’s a tale as old as time itself! British kids are out on the marshes playing with a scarecrow when one of them puts a magic top hat on him and the next thing you know, he’s come alive, dancing and singing! Scarecrow then leads his merry band of kids on numerous adventures, teaching them valuable lessons along the way about loyalty, doing what’s right, and how to smuggle the King’s brandy without hanging for it! But alas, all good things must come to an end, and so it is with Scarecrow once spring arrives and he melts all over the swampy marshes! Or am I thinking about somebody else? Read More »

Nine months after Richard Burton was harassed into becoming a Christian by a red beach towel in The Robe, Hollywood decided it was time to take Jesus’ favorite outfit out of mothballs for another go around and sicced Demetrius And The Gladiators on us. Since this whole Christian thing worked out so well for Burton and co-star Jean Simmons (you might recall they ended up on the wrong end of the archery field at the end of the last episode), it was left to Victor Mature to run around squawking about this robe and how it can just butt out of his life when things get rough. Read More »

This one basically boils down to a story of a boy and his blankie. Now, it’s a very important blankie, but still a blankie nonetheless. In this case the guy is Richard Burton and he develops a fetish for the robe that Jesus wore up on the cross. I’m a fairly strong Christian around Easter time and such, but I wasn’t really familiar with this story from the Good Book. They might have had to leave it out of the Classics Illustrated Bible that I regularly consult when I don’t like what my horoscope says, so my ignorance is really not only understandable, but probably expected. Read More »

The Deep is a movie long on scenes of Nick Nolte and Robert Shaw vacuuming up the ocean floor in search of Spanish treasure and short on anything resembling excitement. The movie has also been “credited” with starting the wet T-shirt craze with scenes of Jacqueline Bisset diving around in a clingy top (what? You thought it was because of the scenes where Robert Shaw was diving around in a clingy top?), but once she gets relegated to bored girlfriend status and just hangs out on the boat while Nick and Robert battle Lou Gossett and a big eel, the movie loses whatever momentum it had. Read More »

This movie teaches us the hard way that the only thing worse than a film ending with a big cello concerto is a film that drones on with lots of talk ten minutes after the big cello concerto. Watching Paul Henreid sitting there with a big violin between his legs while he makes all these “either I’m a musical genius or I’m in need of some serious fiber” faces while he plays some obnoxious dirge that composer/rival Claude Raines dreamed up in between bouts of surly self-pity at having lost the affections of Bette Davis, made me realize why you don’t see a lot of love triangle movies involving classical musicians these days. Read More »