[7] Producer/director Roger Corman completes his series of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe with The Tomb of Ligeia, the story of a man mysteriously obsessed with his late wife, Ligeia. When he remarries, he and his new wife find themselves terrorized by supernatural forces, begging the question — is Ligeia really dead? Vincent Price carries the film as nicely as you …
[3] Elizabeth Taylor plays the powerful and sexy Egyptian queen who fends off Roman conquest while falling in love with its leaders — first Rex Harrison’s Caesar, and then Richard Burton’s Antony. First I’ll be nice to Cleopatra. The sets are sprawling, opulent, and sometime jaw-dropping. Richard Burton gives a powerful, remorseful monologue near the end, and Roddy McDowall gives one of the best performances …
[8] Peter Ustinov directs and co-stars in this adaptation of Herman Melville’s unfinished novel of the same name. Ustinov plays the captain of a British ship sailing to battle against France. His master-at-arms, John Claggart (The Wild Bunch‘s Robert Ryan), is a sadistic man who entraps the ship’s crew in criminal charges and lies about allegations. When a new, doe-eyed recruit named Billy Budd (Terence …
[7] Doris Day and James Garner star in this remake of 1940’s My Favorite Wife, about a woman (Day) who returns home after five years lost at sea only to discover she’s been declared dead and her husband (Garner) has remarried. Move Over Darling is a non-stop comedy of errors centered around a series of misunderstandings. First there’s the shock of learning Day is still …
[6] Decades before James Cameron sank the Titanic and twelve years before Irwin Allen took us on The Poseidon Adventure, writer/director Andrew L. Stone took a pioneering step into the disaster film genre. While Cameron and Allen certainly had more pyrotechnics at their disposal, Stone does a remarkable job utilizing a real luxury liner and building suspense throughout The Last Voyage‘s brisk 91-minute run-time. In …
[6] Joseph Bottoms (The Black Hole) stars as a blind man who receives experimental surgery allowing him to ‘see’ sonar images with help from a device. As he’s getting used to being blind and using the new machine, a taxicab-driving serial killer is on the prowl, picking up young women and cutting them open with a surgical knife while they’re still alive. Eventually, the blind …
[7] Marlon Brando stars in Sydney Lumet’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams Orpheus Descending. (Williams co-wrote the screenplay with Meade Roberts.) Brando plays a young man trying to shed his criminal background and start a new life in a new town. But the new town has three women in it who all find Brando alluring. Joanne Woodward plays the reckless party animal, Maureen Stapleton plays the …
[4] Cher gives her first dramatic performance in Chastity, produced by then-husband and singing partner Sonny Bono. You could call the film experimental, an American hippie spin on the French New Wave of filmmaking. Or you could call it a largely plotless series of improvised vignettes and montages. Either way, the movie didn’t work for me. Cher plays Chastity, a young woman we first meet …
[6] Rory Calhoun, or proto-George Clooney as I like to call him, stars in this kinda silly but kinda fun sword-and-sandals flick that earned Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, Once Upon a Time in America) his first major directing credit. Calhoun plays a visiting war hero on the island of Rhodes who gets tangled in a rebel uprising and a Phoenician conquest. He also …
[8] Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine co-star as women running their own private girls’ school in The Children’s Hour. Hepburn’s character is about to get married to James Garner and MacLaine’s character is pretty melancholy about it. But all their lives are turned upside down when one of their young students, a particularly nasty little girl played with villainous spite by Karen Balkin, accuses the …
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