Word: woolrich
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Another man with visions: he can see death coming but is powerless to stop it. Vaudeville mindreader John Triton (Robinson, in the first of two haunted Woolrich roles) has presentiments of doom for a child playing with fire, a newsboy heading into traffic, his own fiancee, her eventual husband. All of these quickly died. Now, 20 years into his premonitory curse, he has a forewarning of doom for his beloved?s rich daughter (Gail Russell). The world thinks Triton is mad, and he does too, but his conscience goads him to warn her that she will die under the stars...
...Night? was Woolrich?s prime mixture of the paranoid and the paranormal - a cocktail that rarely fizzes in this flat adaptation. You will make do with minor pleasures: Robinson?s walking-dead pallor as Triton (who calls himself ?a zombie in reverse?); Russell?s fragile beauty (she would drink herself to death at 36); the movie?s last words, that ?there are things on earth still hidden from us. Secret things, dark and mysterious.? Like the resolution of a Woolrich plot...
...Prime-cut Woolrich: the accused must corral the killers to exonerate himself. And who could be more helpless than a child - alone, abandoned, unbelieved - pursued in the dark by a murderer? This atmospheric thriller, shot almost entirely at night, tautens the suspense like rough hands around a little boy?s neck. Driscoll was a Disney star (?Song of the South,? ?Treasure Island?) who somehow knew the way to plant fear and grit on a winsome face. He makes ?The Window? one of the most modest and satisfying Woolrich adaptations. Driscoll earned a special Oscar for his acting that year...
...Julie, but wants to be asked; the pompous politician (Michel Lonsdale) who suggests they have sex so that ?You can say, ?For one hour he forgot about France and gave himself to me??; the skirt-chasing artist (Charles Denner) who is almost too charming to kill. But not quite. (Woolrich minutiae: Lonsdale?s son is called Cookie - the same name Ricki Lake gives her son in ?Mrs. Winterbourne...
...film version has a softer, woozily sentimental view of the bridal couple; it shows them running through a meadow in ecstatic slow motion - really. And it dispenses with the novel?s resolution. Woolrich?s killer was the best friend of two of the men; in the film (where he?s played by Jean-Claude Brialy) his function is merely to cast a net of suspicion on the bride. [SPOILER] In the film, the killer is one of the group of five (brutish Daniel Boulanger), who is put in jail before Julie can kill him. Julie materializes at the artist...