Born To Be Bad (1950, Nicholas Ray)

For Nicholas Ray love (or ‘love’) is corrosive. It is unstable and moves with the waves and currents of societal corruption and sickness. Born to Be Bad, despite what Dave Kehr persuasively argued, is not a major work, not a masterpiece and not a particularly important signal in Ray’s career. It sits comfortably somewhere in …

The Big Sky (1952, Howard Hawks)

Is this the most underrated of Howard Hawks’ films? It is, without a doubt, a masterpiece, although it is a film rarely accorded with that distinction (except by the critics, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, who are less fazed by the monolithic canon-complacency of industry-derived or AFI-approved film criticism) and it continues (as far as I’m …

Verboten! (1959, Samuel Fuller)

In 1945 Samuel Fuller was in Czechoslovakia, serving with the US Army as the war ended and the Denazification process beckoned. It was there he shot what was, according to Jonathan Rosenbaum, his first ever film footage; this footage was of the liberation of Falkenau, a sub-site of the Flossenburg concentration camp, the infantrymen showing …

Le Plaisir (1952, Max Ophuls)

“But, my friend, happiness is not a joyful thing.” Was Max Ophuls the greatest, the most perfect of the classical film-makers? In a series of masterpieces throughout three decades (the 1930s, 40s and 50s) he composed images with the soft luminescence, hazy or precise, of Degas (with a similar feeling of constant movement), and stories …

La Poison (1951, Sacha Guitry)

La Poison represents Sacha Guitry condemning a perfidious public, and then gifting that condemnation to them in form of the bleakest, the sourest of comedies. This is not the sort of dark comedy which relies on infantilism, the adolescent or the easy expression (ironic or not) of bigotries and predjudices to make its effect, in …

Bitter Victory: Alternative View

Bitter Victory has none of the self-conscious epicness in its filming of the desert that afflicts so many other works set in the same or similar terrain. The film is shot in cinemascope so there is still a sense of grandness, but this bare expanse becomes a nothingness, a void, a blank of sorts against …

Bitter Victory (1957, Nicholas Ray)

And so the onetime-apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright here makes men look like the ruins of buildings. Jimmy Leith (Richard Burton), a civilian volunteer who was once an archeologist, and Major David Brand (Curt Jurgens) are leading a mission through the Libyan Desert, transporting a set of stolen Nazi documents from Benghazi back to HQ. …