What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Doctor Strange]

You're both right! I saw both of those films in theaters when I was 10, and many times since.

I watched two recent biopics about authors, with both films named for their first names(!), and both stories largely fictitious...

Emily, about Emily Bronte and how this "oddball loner" wrote something as "true" as Wuthering Heights. A very different take on the Brontes than I've seen before (e.g., the BBC's excellent To Walk Invisible). Charlotte and Emily are always at odds, with Anne in the middle trying to mediate. Brother Branwell - while still a self-destructive wastrel - is Emily's confidant, they do stuff like trip out on opium together. Emily has a torrid secret affair with a local curate and learns about love... Eh, it's well done, but feels pretty bogus.

Shirley, about Shirley Jackson - another oddball loner - with Elisabeth Moss as Shirley and Michael Stuhlbarg (with the swarm turned up to 11) as her Bennington lit-professor husband. It plays as a gloss on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, as they take in - and then manipulate - a grad-student couple who've come to teach at Bennington. A strange film, it has its moments, and I love both these actors... but again, it seems unlikely to reflect much about the real Jackson.

Both are only recommended to other lapsed English majors...

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Nah, Lee Marvin was brilliant in Cat Ballou.

His horse did all the work so much ado over Ballou; which amounts to horseshit compared to a China US Navy epic
streets above Cat Ballou; wherein McQueen indelibly etched ''China sailor'' Jake Holman in solid oak grain plank celluloid. Streets above most Hollywood fare easily, and yet they looked the other way. The book is the look. With finished product the absolute proof.

Pardon my oration. I almost took the film school route to America via New York City and at times whistle fool youth.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

You're both right! I saw both of those films in theaters when I was 10, and many times since.

I watched two recent biopics about authors, with both films named for their first names(!), and both stories largely fictitious...

Emily, about Emily Bronte and how this "oddball loner" wrote something as "true" as Wuthering Heights. A very different take on the Brontes than I've seen before (e.g., the BBC's excellent To Walk Invisible). Charlotte and Emily are always at odds, with Anne in the middle trying to mediate. Brother Branwell - while still a self-destructive wastrel - is Emily's confidant, they do stuff like trip out on opium together. Emily has a torrid secret affair with a local curate and learns about love... Eh, it's well done, but feels pretty bogus.

Shirley, about Shirley Jackson - another oddball loner - with Elisabeth Moss as Shirley and Michael Stuhlbarg (with the swarm turned up to 11) as her Bennington lit-professor husband. It plays as a gloss on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, as they take in - and then manipulate - a grad-student couple who've come to teach at Bennington. A strange film, it has its moments, and I love both these actors... but again, it seems unlikely to reflect much about the real Jackson.

Both are only recommended to other lapsed English majors...

Well, in for a penny and so a pound's shilling worth of my sense of it all.

Obviously, as to my druthers flick, done and done.

The English cinema is parochial proctor of all arisen these isles. Most principally this England. Entire kit, ticket
took baggage claim left luggage posterity. Shakespeare most of it, lord love a swan but the man was begat ba***rd birth by an Irish cock strut upon Stratford for no English blood ever ran his hand. And for other occasional
gamesmen with the hens clucking seed, so be it said. But still the moon and night wind shadows Shakespeare
was not born English blood.

 

[Edward]

A few days ago, I watched 1997''s Hoodlum, with Laurence Fishburne in the lead. A fairly formulaic gangster picture, loosely based on the turf war over Harlem's 'numbers game' in the early thirties. It's no Godfather, but perfectly entertaining if you like that sort of thing. I enjoyed the clothes, and there are some fun performances - Tim Roth in particular exceeding as a villain, as per. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119311/

Yesterday afternoon, I had a go with Here Comes Hell (2019). A low budget, British film. Shot in black and white and presented in a 'vintage' aspect ratio. The look is lovely, but it never quite pulls off the trick of making you forget it's not a period-made film. More akin to the spoof Bullshot rather than Lynch's The Elephant Man. The best description I can give it is that it's something like a prequel to The Evil Dead blended with a touch of Agatha Christy. It's billed as a comedy, but it feels more pastiche than parody. Again, fun if you like that sort of thing. Fairly well executed if note groundbreaking, though it could have been so much better if they'd pulled out all the stops and actually made the 'period piece' convincing. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7947624/

The real star this weekend, though, was Asteroid City. I'm well aware this one has split the critics, with many, it seems, determined to do it down from the get go. Anyone who finds Anderson's usual style twee need not apply, nor those who want to be given a pat explanation for everything, nor those who don't care for Brechtian approaches to plot. Me, though, I loved it. I could happily live on that set.

ETA: to avoid clogging things up here, I've posted a separate thread with some of my photos from the Studio 180 Exhibition currently running in London, featuring props, costumes and sets from Asteroid City.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Swindle from 1955 with Broderick Crawford, Richard Basehart and Franco Fabrizi


The Swindle is one of Federico Fellini's less-well-known movies, but it is not a lesser effort. It's a powerful and moving portrayal of three low-level swindlers who make their living scamming the poor in post-war Italy.

In crime movies, criminals are often generic "bad guys;" in mob movies, they are evil puppet masters and, today, in Tarantino and Guy Ritchie movies, they're stylish, introspective super geniuses. But in this Fellini effort, they are average guys kinda failing at life.

After opening with a wonderful scene of three crooks working an impressive and complex scam on a couple of poor women farmers - Broderick Crawford's performance as "the bishop" in it is so good it has to be seen - Fellini shows us the real life of these scammers.

It's not very pretty. The youngest of the three, played by Franco Fabrizi, is a live-for-the-moment guy so devoid of morality that it makes you sad because he's not so much evil as soulless. When he dies, there will be nothing to send to hell.

The middle-aged one, played by Richard Basehart, is a genuine family man who loves his wife and infant daughter, but he can't support them as an artist, so he's turned to crime. He tells his wife he's a traveling salesman, but she's beginning to see what he's really doing.

Crawford, the leader of the group, is late middle aged and feeling like a failure as he has little material wealth to show for what seems like decades of scamming, plus he's divorced and hasn't seen his daughter in years.

Fellini then drives all those points home in a series of poignant scenes. We see these guys go from scam to scam, with some, like when they cheat a gas-station attendant, making them look grubby. Also, Baseharts's and Crawford's personal lives are slowly unravelling.

Basehart knows his wife is going to take their daughter and go home to her mother, but what can he do, with no marketable skills, scamming is his only way to provide. He's in a trap now because of bad decisions made earlier in life. Your parents aren't always wrong.

Crawford, the main focus of the movie, also "gets it" too late in life to really do anything. When he accidentally runs into his well-mannered and now college-age daughter who is happy to see him, the sordid pointlessness of his life comes crashing down around him.

She's a sweet young girl trying to pay her way through college to become a professor. She's nice, kind, hard working and honest, everything Crawford is not. His dishonest attempt to help her is his undoing in a subtle but powerfully ironic moral twist.

The "trap" that Fellini sets for us is almost making us root for these guys, or at least Basehart and Crawford, as you kinda hurt for how badly their lives have turned out.

In a final ugly scam, though, that Crawford, now working with new partners, runs, Fellini smartly pulls the rug out from under us on that thought. It's obvious but effective as Fellini forces us to remember that these guys are ripping off the honest poor.

The acting throughout is outstanding. Basehart's performance as the "angelic" looking scammer is memorable. But this is Crawford's movie as the hulking actor gives a career performance playing a man who finally realizes, too late, it's his fault he has nothing in life.

Set in and around dusty and, seemingly, cold Rome, you feel the post-war poverty and hints of economic revival in Italy. It echoes the atmosphere of desperation and emptiness of the lives of the three scammers trying to scratch out a living the wrong way.

The Swindle is powerful and moving in a compact storytelling manner. It's memorable because its sadness sneaks up on you. Fellini almost lets you see the scammers as likeable anti-heroes, until he forces you, and them, to face their cold, sordid and lonely reality.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Blues Brothers (1980)

Bullshit...

 

[Doctor Strange]

I watched that Fellini film, Il bidone, last year. Very good, and I'm not the world's biggest Fellini fanboy.

Babylon (2022), written/directed by Damien Chazelle.

Let me preface this review by noting that I HATED Chazelle's previous films (Whiplash, La La Land, First Man), and it hurts, because I think he's a very talented filmmaker. He knows how to mount big, complex sequences without relying on CGI, and he gets great performances from his actors. But most of what's in his films is unbelievable (Emma Stone is an actress who can't get work, right?) or embarrassing (just how many times have his characters "explained the importance of jazz"?), and his obsession with HEROIC CREATORS comes across as narcissistic at best.

Babylon wants to be a big story about the transition from silent films to sound and how it derails the careers of silent stars (Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie), and about the crazy excess and danger of the early Hollywood scene. Of course, it's edging into the territory of The Artist and Singin' in the Rain (clips of which even show up as an alleged plot point in the terrible, 20-years-later epilogue). The era's supposed outrageous sexual debauchery and drug use (though not even the correct drugs for the time!) are played up to a level that Baz Luhrmann would find overdone; there are characters/plot threads that appear and disappear, not to mention sudden unexplained reversals. Oh, and there are faux Louis Armstrong and Anna May Wong characters trapped by the era's racism... with so little screentime that their subplots must mainly reside on the cutting room floor.

Somewhere in this bloated three-hour-plus film is a good 90-minute film that wishes it could escape. It all looks fantastic; Pitt, Robbie, Jean Smart and others give thoughtful, full-bodied performances; the film wants - and fails - to say something "important" about movies/creativity, which is sort of admirable. But there's so much here that's out and out wrong for the period, and so much noisy, overwrought self-indulgence.... all suffused with Chazelle's usual pretentious bushwa.

Don't say you weren't warned.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) dir. David Lean, with Peter O'Toole as the titular hero, and Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Quayle, Jack Hawkins, Claude Rains, and many more. Viewed on the 2012 blu-ray restoration version. Epically epic. At 3 hours-plus it takes a commitment on the viewer's part. Visually stunning.

 

[belfastboy]

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) dir. David Lean, with Peter O'Toole as the titular hero, and Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Quayle, Jack Hawkins, Claude Rains, and many more. Viewed on the 2012 blu-ray restoration version. Epically epic. At 3 hours-plus it takes a commitment on the viewer's part. Visually stunning.

This is the only movie I have seen more than one time....3 times so far....pretty sure I will watch it again at some point.

 

[belfastboy]

Minding my grand nephews last night so I watched Adam Sandler in "Hustle". Sandler was actually better than just watchable. It was a credible performance from him. The movie itself was the usual ...predictable story arc ..man in a hole, man overcomes, man on a hill in the end. Cliched, stereotyped, predictive....the usual Hollywood crap but it kept me awake til the parents came home.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

I promised GF we'd go see Barbie for ''date night'' next month and Openheimer whenever.
Snow 'Woke' is coming out later. Disney rumour has it's a shag like Dial but with Gal Godot I can endure.

 

[Fading Fast]

Zoo in Budapest from 1933 with Gene Raymond, Loretta Young, O. P. Heggie and Paul Fix


Who would have thought a movie made in 1933 would blend a modern message about animal rights - including anti-fur zeal equal to PETA's - with an orphanage reform plea all wrapped inside a magical, almost fairytale-like story about a zoo and a special handler?

Zoo in Budapest manages to do all that in this quirky but engaging effort that includes many long, loving shots of animals just being animals; it could almost double as a nature documentary.

Gene Raymond, in his charmingest career role, plays a Doctor Dolittle-like young man who was raised in a zoo by the institute's scientist and leader played by O. P. Heggie.

Raymond, who moves amongst the animals with an acrobatic ease, is loved by all the animals and humans in the zoo except for the zoo's bitter keeper, played by Paul Fix (think Wicked Witch of the West).

Fix wants to have Raymond arrested because he occasionally steals women's furs (and burns them, as he's not doing it for profit) in a pique over the insensitivity these women have toward the animals whose fur they wear. It feels incredibly modern.

At the same time, an eighteen-year-old orphan girl, played by Loretta Young, from a nearby strict orphanage, who is about to be "bartered" into a menial job for five years, is considering escaping at the zoo.

Finally, in a forced subplot, a young boy with a mean governess is looking to escape her care so that he can go to the zoo and ride on an elephant.

With that set up, all three "escape" on the same day. Raymond holes up in the zoo to avoid arrest; Young flees the orphanage group, and the boy runs away from his governess. Eventually, all three wind up hiding out together in the zoo.

Before finding the boy, though, Raymond and Young meet and, it's strongly implied, have sex while hiding in the bushes. It has a The Blue Lagoon "virginal innocence and discovery" feel to it.

Now that they've taken care of business, Raymond and Young discover the boy and all three hide in the zoo as the mean zookeeper, Fix, leads an ever-more frantic and marshaled search to find them. The three are, symbolically, like the animals in the zoo themselves.

The conclusion has a pretty dramatic animal breakout that ties all the subplots together too easily, but Zoo in Budapest is not a plot-driven movie. Its raison d'être is to advocate for animal and orphan rights in an enchanting story about young love.

The core of the movie, thus, is long sequences of animals just being animals and of Raymond interacting with them in a kind, loving and carefree way. The plot is so thin that Young has barely any dialogue until two-thirds of the way in.

It's also why the characters are, mainly, two-dimensional as Zoo in Budapest is really a fairytale for adults where kind, loving people solve problems with kindness and love, while the bad, mean people ultimately fail.

Zoo in Budapest is offbeat and ahead of its time with its animal rights and orphanage reform advocacy. Its charm is simply in its being: in its beautiful shots of nature, in Raymond's uncomplicated love of animals and in his and Young's youthful passion to be free and together.

Somebody high enough up at Fox studios wanted to say something about animal and human rights and about the joy of nature, so much so that he or she was able to get this unconventional but fun and forward-looking picture made, surprisingly, in 1933.

 

[Doctor Damage]

Babylon (2022), written/directed by Damien Chazelle.

...

Somewhere in this bloated three-hour-plus film is a good 90-minute film that wishes it could escape. It all looks fantastic; Pitt, Robbie, Jean Smart and others give thoughtful, full-bodied performances; the film wants - and fails - to say something "important" about movies/creativity, which is sort of admirable. But there's so much here that's out and out wrong for the period, and so much noisy, overwrought self-indulgence.... all suffused with Chazelle's usual pretentious bushwa.

Don't say you weren't warned.

Yeah, you nailed it here, totally agree. Some good scenes, and Pitt does his best using his age and restraint to bring his character to life, but overall this film is something that should sit on a shelf and be forgotten. Edit: I will add that I felt that the "creators" had three or four different movies in mind, but could only get funding to make one, so they jammed all their "best" ideas into the one film. It's just too much disparate material, and wildly varying tones mashed together.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Yeah, you nailed it here, totally agree. Some good scenes, and Pitt does his best using his age and restraint to bring his character to life, but overall this film is something that should sit on a shelf and be forgotten. Edit: I will add that I felt that the "creators" had three or four different movies in mind, but could only get funding to make one, so they jammed all their "best" ideas into the one film. It's just too much disparate material, and wildly varying tones mashed together.

West coast Gatsby, Fitzgerald and The Last Tycoon tobacco leaf celluloid rolled into one cigar. Pitt's always the saving grace and his maturity adds but cannot save this film. Something to save for further study on cinematic focus.

 

[Fading Fast]

Somewhere in the Night from 1946 with John Hodiak, Nancy Guild, Lloyd Nolan, Richard Conte and Margo Wood


Somewhere in the Night could have been a very good movie, but a too-complicated story leaves this one with its parts being better than the whole.

John Hodiak plays a war veteran who, owing to an encounter with an enemy hand grenade, has a reconstructed face and amnesia.

Hodiak, now back in the States and trying to find his identity, follows the only link he has to his past life in Los Angeles, which puts him right in the middle of an unsolved murder and a missing two-million dollars of Nazi loot.

Even that takes some time to learn, though, as the plot unwinds very slowly, so for much of the movie, you're left with just the characters. While Hodiak is a bit wooden here, a strong supporting cast and good individual scenes keeps you, mainly, engaged.

Hodiak quickly meets a good-girl lounge singer played by Nancy Guild who, for no reason, completely believes in Hodiak's innocence and loyally tries to help him unravel his mysterious past.

She's the gem in this one, firing off one-liners or delivering a perfectly timed eye roll or shrug with such verve you wonder why Ms. Guild didn't have a bigger career.

Equally engaging is the police lieutenant, played by a young Lloyd Nolan, who matches Guild for funny asides and understated zingers. Their scene together in a Chinese Restaurant would work as an entertaining and funny skit on its own.

For most of the movie, though, we don't really understand how Hodiak's character ties into the missing money. We don't understand why an oddball local thug has him beat up.

We also don't understand why a nightclub owner, played by a very young Richard Conte, is so helpful and we don't understand how a hard-boiled gunmoll, played with arrant bitterness by Margo Wood, fits into any of it.

Finally, we don't understand how a strange woman, who maybe, had an affair with Hodiak, and her now institutionalized father fit in. Yet, we follow Hodiak out to that creepy mental institution only to see him threatened again and nearly framed for murder.

After all that, and after plenty of dark noir alleys, bonks on the head, guns brandished, sinister waterfront scenes at night and even a couple of visits to an odd fortune-teller hangout for mobsters, it all comes together quickly at the end.

The story pretty much makes sense, but there's an implicit bargain movies strike with their audiences: the longer a movie keeps you in the dark with a complex or convoluted plot, the better the payoff should be.

Somewhere in the Night's payoff, though, is more of a shrug than a wow, leaving the audience kinda disappointed.

Co-writer and director Joseph Mankiewicz it too talented not to keepsyour attention with the aforementioned good scenes, characters and dialogue, but you feel Somewhere in the Night would have been a much-better movie if it had just untangled itself sooner.

Had it been made thirty-years later, even though the movie was just okay, they might have thought about doing a spin off starring Lloyd Nolan continuing his fun take on a police lieutenant with Nancy Guild as his smarter-of-the-two informal partner.

 

[Doctor Damage]

The French Dispatch - Wes Anderson's latest. You know, I liked Anderson's early films, but as his peculiar little stylistic flourishes came to overwhelm the storytelling, he lost me. I only half-liked Moonrise Kingdom, actively disliked The Grand Budapest Hotel, hated Isle of Dogs... and this one just flummoxed me. Anderson is now so deep into his own bizarre viewpoint that emotional truth eludes him as much as anything resembling realism.

I watched this last evening, having had the dvd sitting here for a couple years. I had high hopes, since a quirky film about a quirky bunch of people running a quicky English-language magazine in 1960s France is a move I'd like to see, but this was total crap. I mean one of the crappiest films I've ever seen, or at least of the crappy ones that I've finished watching. Usually when something is this bad I start skipping ahead or fast-forward through it. This I watched beginning to end. Total crap. No characters with any appeal, no characters fleshed out, the least interesting characters on-screen for too long, some key characters onscreen for literally 10 or 15 seconds, nothing of the magazine or its operations, two signature cutaway scenes onscreen for literally seconds, a bizarre and lazy comic book scene late in the film (dude, wtf?), and overall much wanking and giggling inside jokes for literature majors. Unlike you, Doctor, I liked Moonrise Kingdom and accepted Grand Budapest, and until now felt that Darjeeling Limited was Anderson's worst film, but hoo boy, Darjeeling looks like a masterpiece compared to French Dispatch, and I agree 100% with your statement that I put in bold, which is bang on target.

I haven't seen Anderson's recently released Atomic City or whatever. I hope he's back to normal with that, otherwise I'd say his career is over and nobody should give him a dime ever again to make films. Kinda like Walter Hill, or Woody Allen. I realize everyone has to pay the rent, but c'mon, don't pi$$ all over your own legacy, because eventually all that will remain of you will be your legacy. And with Anderson, it looks like he peaked early, and has been on a downhill slide for a long time with. This seems to be a problem with people who become successful, they then start to indulge their weirder ideas and think they have to keep reinventing the wheel, and then their output gets weird.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Yup, Atomic City sounds like more of the same, and is maybe even more distantly removed from reality. I'm waiting for cable/whatever, since I'm probably going to hate it.

The frickin' stop-motion animals in Fantastic Mister Fox display more humanity and believability than Wes Anderson's recent live-action characters!

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

View attachment 535886
Somewhere in the Night from 1946 with John Hodiak, Nancy Guild, Lloyd Nolan, Richard Conte and Margo Wood


Somewhere in the Night could have been a very good movie, but a too-complicated story leaves this one with its parts being better than the whole.

John Hodiak plays a war veteran who, owing to an encounter with an enemy hand grenade, has a reconstructed face and amnesia.

Hodiak, now back in the States and trying to find his identity, follows the only link he has to his past life in Los Angeles, which puts him right in the middle of an unsolved murder and a missing two-million dollars of Nazi loot.

Even that takes some time to learn, though, as the plot unwinds very slowly, so for much of the movie, you're left with just the characters. While Hodiak is a bit wooden here, a strong supporting cast and good individual scenes keeps you, mainly, engaged.

Hodiak quickly meets a good-girl lounge singer played by Nancy Guild who, for no reason, completely believes in Hodiak's innocence and loyally tries to help him unravel his mysterious past.

She's the gem in this one, firing off one-liners or delivering a perfectly timed eye roll or shrug with such verve you wonder why Ms. Guild didn't have a bigger career.

Equally engaging is the police lieutenant, played by a young Lloyd Nolan, who matches Guild for funny asides and understated zingers. Their scene together in a Chinese Restaurant would work as an entertaining and funny skit on its own.

For most of the movie, though, we don't really understand how Hodiak's character ties into the missing money. We don't understand why an oddball local thug has him beat up.

We also don't understand why a nightclub owner, played by a very young Richard Conte, is so helpful and we don't understand how a hard-boiled gunmoll, played with arrant bitterness by Margo Wood, fits into any of it.

Finally, we don't understand how a strange woman, who maybe, had an affair with Hodiak, and her now institutionalized father fit in. Yet, we follow Hodiak out to that creepy mental institution only to see him threatened again and nearly framed for murder.

After all that, and after plenty of dark noir alleys, bonks on the head, guns brandished, sinister waterfront scenes at night and even a couple of visits to an odd fortune-teller hangout for mobsters, it all comes together quickly at the end.

The story pretty much makes sense, but there's an implicit bargain movies strike with their audiences: the longer a movie keeps you in the dark with a complex or convoluted plot, the better the payoff should be.

Somewhere in the Night's payoff, though, is more of a shrug than a wow, leaving the audience kinda disappointed.

Co-writer and director Joseph Mankiewicz it too talented not to keepsyour attention with the aforementioned good scenes, characters and dialogue, but you feel Somewhere in the Night would have been a much-better movie if it had just untangled itself sooner.

Had it been made thirty-years later, even though the movie was just okay, they might have thought about doing a spin off starring Lloyd Nolan continuing his fun take on a police lieutenant with Nancy Guild as his smarter-of-the-two informal partner.

American post war cinema with veteran main character focus is always fine sample film fare but you're right
about complexity here. Thinking about a Bogie which has him an ex para and his buddy is murdered, and he
goes to a church for confession because he thinks he may be next, and he speaks to a chaplain ex para who just happens to be there visiting, so the narration unfolds. A valid technique and one I'd enjoy used more often today.

 

[Fading Fast]

Sudden Fear from 1952 with Joan Crawford, Jack Palance, Gloria Grahame and Bruce Bennett


When Sudden Fear was made, Joan Crawford movies were a profitable cottage industry in Hollywood, but one where the viewer often had to suspend disbelief about Crawford's age as younger men tripped over themselves to sleep with her. But not in this one.

The plot here calls for Crawford to be the older woman. But don't worry, this complex story still asks the viewer to suspend disbelief at a few plot turns and during the climatic action sequence. But in truth, how many movies don't ask for a little "give" here and there?

Crawford plays a wealthy San Franciscan heiress who is also a successful Broadway playwright. As the movie opens, we see her reject the actor, played by Jack Palance, auditioning for the male lead in her new play. He angrily confronts her, but it's her play, so she wins.

Crawford, later on a train to Chicago where she'll connect to a San Francisco train, runs into young, handsome Palance, who turns on the charm. To keep seeing Crawford, he pretends he was going to San Francisco too, as he discreetly buys a connecting ticket in Chicago.

Is Palance just trying to prove he's a better actor than Crawford thought? Or is he truly falling in love with her? Or is he simply interested in marrying a rich woman? We don't really know, yet, but once in San Fran, the romance advances to marriage and all seems to be going well.

Enter noir queen and classic femme fatale Gloria Grahame, playing Palance's old girlfriend from New York who wants in on the Crawford money. It's a bit "censored," but Grahame's hold on Palance seems to be sex, as otherwise, he could tell her to just pound sand.

Plenty have killed for sex and money before, so it's no shock when Grahame and Palance plot to kill Crawford. Still, it feels off, as Palance, who appeared okay simply being the husband of a rich older woman, seems to casually accept Grahame's suggestion of murder.

He does accept it, though, which leads to both of them plotting to "off" Crawford in the next few days as they, incorrectly, believe she's about to rewrite her will in an unfavorable way for Palance. The irony is that she was planning to leave almost everything to him.

The movie is about half over and now comes a huge coincidence and a hard pivot as Grahame and Palance's discussion of their murderous plan is, accidentally and unknowingly to them, captured on Crawford's fancy home office recording machine.

Crawford, alone in the office the next morning, hears the recording, naturally freaks out and, then, being an author, plans an incredibly elaborate scheme to protect herself and exact revenge on Grahame and Palance.

It will be up to each viewer to either accept or not that Crawford didn't do what most people would do at this point: go somewhere safe and contact her longtime friend and lawyer, played by Bruce Bennett, to divorce Palance. But then there wouldn't be much of a movie.

We get, instead, a second half of intense drama as Crawford, worrying she'll be killed by Palance at any moment, attempts to execute on her insanely complex plan to eliminate both him and Grahame.

If you just go with it, it's fun, even if it's often hard to believe. There are so many coincidences involved, small clues that could give her plan away and near misses that would spoil it, that it almost becomes camp, but it (maybe) doesn't quite cross the line.

If it doesn't, it's because Crawford, Palance and Grahame, acting pros, sell the story hard, as they never let you think for a second that everyone's life isn't on the line. The climax goes all in on the drama, but again, the three leads try to keep it from spiralling out of control.

Credit also belongs to director David Miller who had to make this unwieldy plot work, which for the most part, he does. His final action scene is a bit hard to believe, but if you suspend a little more disbelief, it's a fun and even tense sequence.

Being a Crawford film, Sudden Fear is a professional effort from the first frame to the last. The black and white cinematography makes wonderful use of San Francisco's noir-perfect backdrop. It's a world you want to live in, sans the threat of murder of course.

There are better and there are worse Crawford movies from this period in her career. Still, Sudden Fear, if you forgive it some excesses, is a fun enough murder melodrama held together by Crawford's indomitable acting will along with big assists from Grahame and Palance.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

You know Fast Crawford was quite attractive in middle age, so a May-December plotline here is drawn with heavy
black legible lead. Although my preference might be a less patrician type and younger Ingrid Bergman or a college
age beauty like Dorothy Malone, women like Joan Crawford had staying power. Greer Garson, Heddy Lamarr, Joan
Blondell. Rhonda Fleming, lovely rose with thorns type. Barbara Stanwyck. With today's over emphasis youth and
vapid, hard to find the middle aged chess queen sort with looks and style to match.