Word: thrillers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...characterizations in Captain from Castile are too sharp, the historical material too exact, to allow the book to be dismissed as merely a skillful costume thriller. Its language is sometimes too high flown, its plot too intricate and too neat, to satisfy the exacting requirements of serious literature. But, it is among the best popular fictional accounts of the conquistadores that has appeared (less burdened with history than Edward Stucken's The Great White Gods), less exotic than Salvador de Madariaga's The Heart of Jade. As good reading, certain to take the minds of thousands of readers...
Experiment Perilous (RKO-Radio), a not very thrilling thriller, is the story of a demented Austrian aristocrat (Paul Lukas) who meets, marries and sophisticates a once-pastoral Vermont girl (Hedy Lamarr), then proceeds to poison the mind of her child against her and all but destroy her sanity and her life. He is foiled just in time by George Brent, who takes her back to Vermont, where she and her child rapidly recuperate...
...picture has one glaring fault: it is far too fond of reproducing, by direct quotation, samples of the worst of the careful but uneven prose in which Raymond Chandler wrote the original thriller. Aside from that it handles Chandler's extremely cinemadaptable story so well that, if anything, it improves it in the retelling. It is the story of an indigent Los Angeles private detective (Dick Powell) who, for the sake of a few spare dollars, helps a gigantic imbecile named Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki) to hunt down the girl he loved when he went to jail...
...Half-Moon Street (Paramount) polishes up quite a nice thriller out of a question which has troubled the world (if only in its leisure moments) ever since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. The smoldering question: does scientific curiosity transcend morality...
Hand in Glove (adapted from Gerald Savory's novel Hughie Roddis by the author and Charles K. Freeman; produced by Arthur Edison) commits many crimes but not the fatal one of dullness. A grim pathological thriller, it has a double focus on a young sex psychopath who murders young girls, and on an idiot boy whom the murderer tries to frame...