[6] Cary Grant plays a wandering Londoner who’s reluctant to settle down. This changes when he discovers his mother, played by Ethel Barrymore, has terminal cancer. Poverty and loneliness drive Grant and Barrymore to desperate measures, and just when you think things can’t get any gloomier, the film ends with foreshadowing of the second world war. None But the Lonely Heart is a dark film, …
[6] This particular adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s book ends on a morally ambiguous note (I don’t think children should ever be lied to), but the film is otherwise passable family entertainment. Jimmy Lydon does a decent job as Dan, the angry young man who comes to live with Jo March (Kay Francis) at her experimental school/farm for boys. The film works best when it …
[7] Ingrid Bergman won the first of her three Oscars for this psychological thriller from George Cukor. Bergman plays a woman increasingly traumatized by her husband, a thief who nearly succeeds in convincing her that she’s losing her mind. It’s easy to invest in a movie when someone’s being mean to Ingrid Bergman. I only wish that she were more empowered in the story’s third …
[4] A young soldier (Guy Madison) struggles to find purpose to his life after returning home from service in WWII. The guy’s problem isn’t as clear as I’d like it to be. His friends (Robert Mitchum and Bill Williams) have obvious injuries, but Madison’s character seems to suffer from nothing more than laziness. The film sometimes works as a soap opera, but I hate to …
[6] Olivia de Havilland won her first Oscar for this sudsy soap opera about a woman who gives up her infant son and spends the rest of her life trying to reconnect with him. The melodrama may be an acquired taste, but no one can steal audience sympathy better than de Havilland. I went with it, happy ending and all. In a neat (and slightly …
[7] Elia Kazan (East of Eden) made the jump from Broadway plays to feature films with this adaptation of the book by Betty Smith. The story centers around a young girl named Francie growing up in Brooklyn in the early 1900’s. Her father is a dreamer who has trouble providing for the family, while his mother works her fingers to the bone to compensate. The girl …
[4] A man named Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) steps in to replace a drunken Santa in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and does such a good job that Macy’s then hires him to play Santa in their stores during the holiday season. But when they find out he claims to be the actual one-and-only St. Nick, they try to have him institutionalized. Miracle on 34th Street resolves in …
[8] Joseph Cotten uncovers a conspiracy surrounding a deceased friend in The Third Man, a masterfully crafted film noir thriller from author Graham Greene and director Carol Reed. Reed keeps the story moving at a brisk pace, surrounding Cotten’s character with a superb supporting cast that includes Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee, and Orson Welles. Robert Krasker’s Oscar-winning cinematography is a revelation, turning war-torn …
[7] In 1880’s Nevada, news spreads of the murder of a local cattle farmer, inciting a few dozen townspeople to form a posse hellbent on lynching those responsible for the crime. Based on the book by Walter Van Tilburg Clark and directed by the always-thoughtful William Wellman (Wings, Battleground), The Ox-Bow Incident is a relatively simple, straight-forward meditation on mob mentality and vigilante justice. When …
[8] Errol Flynn makes a triumphant return to the genre that made him a star (after Hollywood shelved period action flicks for the duration of WWII). Adventures of Don Juan is splashy, colorful, good-humored, and terrifically entertaining. Despite public knowledge that Flynn’s boozing and whoring were spiraling out of control by this point in his life, he delivers a quintessential Flynn performance as the legendary …
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