by Steve-O of Film Noir of the Week
After getting a Dear John letter from her boyfriend overseas, a young girl goes out on a blind date with a heel. She blacks out after drinking half-a-dozen mixed drinks but remembers fighting off the man with a poker. She goes into a panic when a police manhunt begins for her. A Los Angeles reporter tracks the mystery woman down before the police can get to her. But is she innocent? Read More »
In a peaceful Ukrainian village, the school year is just ending in June 1941. Five young friends set out for a walking trip to Kiev, but their travels are brutally interrupted when they are suddenly attacked by German planes, in the first wave of the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union. When the village itself is attacked and occupied, most of the men flee to the hills to form a guerrilla unit. The others resist the Nazis as well as possible, but soon the village is placed under the command of a Nazi doctor who begins using the town’s children as a source of constant blood transfusions for wounded German soldiers. Meanwhile, the small group of young persons tries desperately to take a supply of firearms to the guerrillas. Read More »
Storyline
Five O’ Henry stories, each separate. The primary one from the critic’s acclaim was “The Cop and the Anthem”. Soapy tells fellow bum Horace that he is going to get arrested so he can spend the winter in a nice jail cell. He fails. He can’t even accost a woman; she turns out to be a streetwalker. The other stories are “The Clarion Call”, “The Last Leaf”, “The Ransom of Red Chief”, and “The Gift of the Magi”. Written by Ed Stephan Read More »
Synopsis : “Eve. Eve, the golden girl. The cover girl. The girl next door. The girl on the moon. Time has been good to Eve. Life goes where she goes. She’s been profiled, covered, revealed, reported — what she eats and what she wears, whom she knows and where she was, and when and where she’s going. Eve. You all know all about Eve. What can there be to know that you don’t know?”
-Addison DeWitt, Theatre critic Read More »
Synopsis: Based on the turn-of-the-century play Our Two Consciences by Paul Anthelme, Hitchcock’s I Confess is set in Quebec. Montgomery Clift plays a priest who hears the confession of church sexton O.E. Hasse. “I…killed…a man” whispers Hasse in tight closeup–and, bound by the laws of the Confessional, Clift is unable to turn Hasse over to the police. But police-inspector Karl Malden has a pretty good idea who the guilty party is: all evidence points to Clift. It seems that the dead man had been blackmailing Anne Baxter, who was once in a factually innocent, but seemingly exploitable compromising position with Clift. Tried for murder, Clift is released due to lack of evidence, but he is ruined in the eyes of the community. Then it is Hasse’s turn to make that One Fatal Error. I Confess is frequently dismissed as a lesser Hitchcock, due mainly to the quirky performance of Montgomery Clift (who, it is said, steadfastly refused to take direction). Today, four decades removed from its on-set intrigues, the film has taken its place as one of the best of Hitchcock’s “between the classics” efforts. — Hal Erickson Read More »
