Cover of Swamp Thing
If there were any critics in 1982 who praised the movie Swamp Thing, I don’t want to know about it. It is ludicrous and cheap and poorly acted.
As well, it is the most sensual movie apropos of a woman’s breasts I have seen. Usually covered, the breasts are those of Adrienne Barbeau. I don’t think I’ll be recommending the flick on that basis.
The 1952 Man Bait is the first British film noir for Hammer (Brit)/Lippert (U.S.), and a tasteful, civilized film noir it is. But most certainly there is heinous behavior: killings and a near-killing most foul.
Actor George Brent, an American, is not very good, but Peter Reynolds is; and Diana Dors, in her first movie, is passable. Brent plays Dors’s boss in a bookshop, whom Dors is talked into blackmailing by Reynolds, Dors’s new beau. Dors is, or becomes, nearly as morally awful as Reynolds, and she soon alienates the cad. A mistake. Gradually a fellow bookshop employee (Marguerite Chapman) gets entangled in the dreadful affair.
Directed by Terence Fisher, Man Bait is a not-bad, not-boring caper movie. Based on a story by James Hadley Chase, though low-budget, it was promising for the Hammer/Lippert association, especially with its likable cast. I’m glad all British films are not like O Lucky Man! (a dismal dud).
Cover of In a Lonely Place
In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray, is a love story with dangerous neuroticism.
Screenwriter Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) loves one woman (Laurel, acted by Gloria Grahame) and is indifferent to the mysterious murder of another (a hat-check girl acquaintance). This is where it all begins. Steele, not an ordinary man, is often aggressive, and the police know it. They suspect him of the murder. Laurel knows darn well he didn’t do it, but she also grows deeply scared of the gent. There is plenty of grit in the film, and, for once in an old American movie, a sad ending. Maybe his wreck of a marriage to Grahame led Ray to insist on a sad ending.
In any case, the screenplay by Edmund H. North and Andrew Solt is compelling, and the film is nice to look at, with a good number of comely women. As has been claimed, the film’s supporting cast is nothing to crow about, but Bogart is the absolute right fit. Grahame, though limited, is interesting and winsome. A beauty with a preteen voice.
A crime movie with a difference, this.
Cover of Pretty Persuasion
Marcos Siega‘s tragicomic Pretty Persuasion (2005), scripted by Skander Halim, isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. But it didn’t win me over. The plot is literally incredible, concerning three high-school girls, one of them a bashful Muslim, who avenge themselves on a neurotic English teacher by falsely accusing him of sexual harassment. The iniquitous Kimberly Joyce (Evan Rachel Wood) dreams up the idea. Impossible to swallow is the Muslim girl’s going along with it. Impossible to swallow is Kimberly’s ultimate aim. Impossible to swallow is . . . Kimberly’s father, played by James Woods.
What David Denby wrote in The New Yorker is defensible: the film is a “poison-pen letter to a country [America] swollen with self-esteem.” It has a lot to do with disagreeable, narcissistic behavior throughout American society, involving all ages. Even the falsely accused teacher is sorely self-serving. But the truth of the matter is that Evan Wood deserves better than a film which turns its misanthropic attitude toward a 15-year-old girl and not only the film’s adults. Miss Wood handles speech and timing unerringly, and is pleasantly assured in her unrealistic part. Pretty Persuasion is unworthy. As frequently happens in movies nowadays, its dirty-mindedness, to lift Denby’s word, quickly gets boring.
Cover via Amazon
First it was a short story and a radio play, then it became a Hollywood classic with direction and script by Joseph Mankiewicz. All About Eve (1950) is an appealing picture about two faulty women, especially Anne Baxter‘s Eve Harrington.
The themes are self-seeking ambition, hypocrisy (when humility is a mask for treachery), love versus cold striving, and aging. Bette Davis is extraordinary in the film, Baxter is solid. Marilyn Monroe has a small part but is unimpressive.
Eve is not a great explorer of character, but few movies are. At least it’s distinctly interesting. And, in fact, anyone enamored of the theatre ought to see it because it, too, is enamored of the theatre.
