Word: films
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...soso. The film has moved too slowly, and Andy Griffith in his first movie role has been uneven and never quite convincing; but Patricia Neal has provided a sensitive study of what it is like to be in love with a hokum Yokum. And then the villain hits the top. He goes hog-wild, and so does Director Kazan. Instead of keeping the menace down to life size, the script permits its corn-fed psychopath to sphacelate through the U.S. social body like some malignant growth, until he actually threatens to take over the Federal Government. As the driving force...
Following the Budd Schulberg story on which the film is based, Kazan follows the great man from a jailhouse to a penthouse, and the trip is sometimes fun. Kazan takes time to inspect such scenic wonders of TV as the reason-why-sell, the inverse commercial, the collective think, the built-in crowd. He also provides some hilarious examples of TV shoptalk ("Great show. J.B." "Ye-e-es, I think it had size"). And all the while he is sinking the oyster knife into his victim, who loves nothing in the world so much as power-above all the power...
...Garment Jungle (Columbia) exposes the bare facts of life in the dress business. As the film begins, a wealthy dress manufacturer (Lee J. Cobb) leaps at a shapely model and rips the frock off her back, seam by seam, until she stands there looking downcast in her uplift. "Look at all these operations!'' he screams at his partner. "If we ran a union shop . . . we'd go broke making this dress." By paying his workers less than the contract minimum, Boss Cobb maintains what garment gamesmen call "The Edge''-a margin of profit that...
...woozily inaccurate way the film is a biography of Barney Ross (Cameron Mitchell), onetime lightweight (1933) and welterweight (1934-38) boxing champion of the world.* The story starts with Barney's famous victory over Jimmy McLarnin, describes his wastrel ways as champion, and soon comes to his downfall under the whirling assault of the human pinwheel, Henry Armstrong. In the next few years, as the film tells the story, Barney gambles away his restaurant business and (for the time being) the affection of his best girl (Dianne Foster), winds up in the Marines during World...
After that the story's morale goes to pieces almost as fast as Barney's. The camera dotes on scenes of degradation with such lickerish delight that the rolled sleeve becomes a more important symbol of sensuality than the lifted skirt. As for the film hero's cure, it can no more be taken seriously than a tour of the haunted house in an amusement park, although Ross himself has not taken drugs for ten years. As the first of three opium operas that have been scheduled since narcotics became a suitable subject for Hollywood films (TIME...