Word: murders
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...plot begins with the murder of a blonde in an apartment on West 83rd Street and ends with the murderer's demise about a week later on the Williamsburg Bridge. In between is an intricate, tense story involving a number of jewel thieves and two untiring detectives. The camera roams pleasantly over most of New York as the detectives close in, and Albert Maltz, the scriptwriter, has even provided moments of comic relief in his caressing tour of the city...
...Many whodunit addicts think that a suspect cannot be held for murder unless there is a corpus delicti-"often used erroneously to designate the physical body of the victim of a murder" (Webster). Actually, corpus delicti is the "substantial and fundamental facts necessary to the commission of a crime." Britain's last murder-without-body was in 1934, when a poultry breeder, Thomas Joseph Davidson, drowned his eight-year-old son. He was sent to prison for life...
...Mourning Becomes Electra" can hardly claim to be entertainment. It can be compared neither to the Hitchcock thriller that also mixes psychology and murder, nor to the "good" European film, also dramatic--but on purely human, and therefore familiar, terms. "Electra" is all O'Neill--deeply emotional, sonorous, and occasionally pretentious. Much of the picture consists of agitated, often repetitive talk, and even the general excellence of the acting cannot always keep the audience fascinated by the tortured characters who seem to keep themselves busy day and night expiating the guilt of their ancestors...
...Neill employed the classical plot as a framework in which he could examine dramatically the suppressed guilt he saw in the Puritan mind. The murder and desire for revenge that divides the austere Mannon family into two camps is also the conflict between Puritanical repression and the open sensuality of the foreigner. Except for details of place and time, O'Neill has not had to change Aeschylus' story at all: the Trojan War has become the Civil War, and Agemmemnon is now the victorious General Ezra Mannon...
Exceptional acting in the main roles overcomes the picture's constant danger of falling into absurdity. Katina Paxinou plays Ezra Mannon's voluptuous, murderous wife with such a convincing mixture of malice and weakness that one forgets completely that the character is itself unrealistic and even ludicrous. Her murder of Ezra is revenged by her two children, the weak Orin, and the strong Lavina (the Electra of Aeschylus). After killing their mother's lover and making her commit suicide, they are obsessed by their own guilt, and Orin, who is played superbly by Michael Redgrave, commits suicide himself, while Lavinia...