Word: unevennesses
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...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...
Sadie Thompson might have recouped many of its dramatic losses with a winning run of songs & dances. But Composer Duke's tunes are undistinguished and the dancing, although better, is uneven: a montage of scenes from Sadie's life has real choreographic color, and last season's Merry Widow team of Milada Mladova and Chris Volkoff have style and skill; but there is too much regulation South Seas wriggling and a generally poor ballet...
...Producer Lewton has wrung an impressive amount of blood out of such turnipy titles as The Curse of the Cat People and The Seventh Victim. He did so largely, as he says, by placing "very ordinary normal people in extraordinary situations." This new film is his first, uneven attempt to show normal people in normal situations. It investigates two working-class families, the steady Hausers, who are old inhabitants of Euclid Street, and the unstable Taylors, newcomers whom war has brought to be next door neighbors. The Hauser parents, both hard at work in a war plant, are eager...
Stacked against, the run of U.S. films, Summer Storm is well above the ordinary. Stacked against the kind of European film it is trying to be, it is as distractingly uneven as a ride in a flat-wheeled streetcar. There are moments of remarkable sensitiveness to season, landscape, and the part they can play in creating erotic and moral atmospheres. There are even moments when handsome Linda Darnell embodies the natural force she is portraying. And Edward Everett Horton somehow manages to suggest that a Tsarist rake would look and act like Edward Everett Horton. But too much of Scripter...
...until Johnny comes march ing home. He quickly changes into his khaki uniform, Sam Browne belt and over seas cap, which are as near to G.I. as regulations allow. (He broods over the fact that he cannot wear regulation buttons, insignia and decorations.) Sometimes he gets in an awkwardly uneven game of ping-pong with his mother, or a swim, but usually he breaks out of doors to climb trees and get all dirty. When this palls he remembers his ambition, and strides down to the guard house to help the soldiers protect the White House. Johnny is usually...