Word: falcon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Glass Key (Paramount) is the best melodrama since The Maltese Falcon (TIME, Oct. 20, 1941), also based on a Dashiell Hammett shocker. It also clears up any lingering doubts about the status of 29-year-old Alan Ladd. He is the livest thing to turn up in this sort of scarehead since James Cagney in The Public Enemy...
...best scene stealers in the business and one of Hollywood's more sinister personifications of Evil (Man Hunt, The Son of Monte Cristo). As Evil, Sanders' greatest asset has been a suggestion of cold intelligence and a nasty sneer. Hounding Evil, as The Saint and as The Falcon, has been duller work...
Ably abetted by the triple threat team which placed "The Maltese Falcon" tops on last winter's entertainment bill, director John Huston has turned a routine espionage film into one of the fastest, most exciting pictures of the year. Unlike the "Falcon," "Across the Pacific" will not make movie history. Its plot and script, dashed off on a typewriter far less subtle than Dashiel Hammett's, are standardized portions of spy melodrama. The usual number of dead bodies up tortuous alleys combines with some amazingly handy Johnny-on-the-spot acts to make for a film which in other hands...
...enjoy this picture. On the surface it has just substituted the Oriental face and accent for the Tentonic, but between the scenes of gun battles and pursuit are dramatic interludes which for their intensity and independence of melodramatic props are reminiscent of the best of the "Falcon." So whether you like your thrills plain or salted, "Across the Pacific" is more than a good way to waste an evening...
Since the "Maltese Falcon" every Humphrey Bogart picture has been a bit of an anticlimax, in spite of the fact that they've all been better-than-average gangster movies. "The Big Shot" is no exception to this rule. Getting off to a bad start with rather a trite flash-back, it soon picks up speed in telling its non-too-original story of a gangster who tries to go straight...