Regularly updated blog charting the most important films of the last 104 years.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
308. Giant (1956)
Directed By George Stevens
Synopsis
Drill, Baby, Drill!
Review
The short topical synopsis is simply due to the fact that it would take me a long while to write a proper synopsis of this giant film. At well over three hours long Giant is one of those multi-generational epics, in this case focusing on Texas and its myriad problems.
One of the interesting things about the film is that the idea that I as a foreigner have of the more rural parts of Texas is still not very different from what is portrayed here. Rich but unequal, populated by people who are basically good natured and endearing but also bullishly xenophobic and stubborn.
The film makes a great point of tackling problems of segregation which is a pretty rare thing to see in such a big budget Hollywood production. That is refreshing, but the acting is also pretty great. James Dean gives us his last and best performance has Jett Rink, from humble beginnings to oil magnate. The boy had potential. Elizabeth Taylor is the humane core of the whole film and she plays it gracefully. Rock Hudson is probably the best thing in the film, however. Rock plays a conflicted character and his ageing as a character is the pretty perfect. Also note the young Dennis Hopper as the Reata heir, he had already had a small part in Rebel Without a Cause, but here is his real debut.
Final Grade 9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The first part of the picture was shot in Albemarle County, Virginia, doubling for Maryland, and utilizing the Belmont estate near the Keswick railroad station, which depicted the "Ardmore, Maryland" railway depot. The film begins with Jordan "Bick" Benedict, played by Hudson, arriving at Ardmore to purchase a stallion from the Lynnton family.
Much of the subsequent film, depicting "Reata," the Benedict ranch, was shot in and around the town of Marfa, Texas, and the remote, dry plains found nearby, with interiors filmed at the Warner Brothers studios in Burbank, California. The "Jett Rink Day" parade and airport festivities were filmed at the nearby Burbank Airport. The fictional character Jett Rink was based in part of oil tycoon Glenn Herbert McCarthy (1907-1988). Author Edna Ferber met with McCarthy when she booked a room at the Shamrock Hotel to which the novel and film were based. In the film, the fictional Emperador Hotel was based on the former Shamrock Hotel (known as the Shamrock Hilton after 1955) in Houston, Texas.
The film was premiered in New York City in November 1956 with the local DuMont station televising the arrival of cast and crew, as well as other celebrities and studio chief Jack Warner. Warner Brothers has included the vintage kinescope of the premiere festivities in New York, as well as interviews with cast members, in their special 50th anniversary DVD set.
Capitol Records, which had issued some of Dimitri Tiomkin's music from the soundtrack (with the composer conducting the Warner Brothers studio orchestra) on an LP, later digitally remastered the tracks and issued them on CD, including two tracks conducted by Ray Heindorf.
Director George Stevens wanted to cast fading star Alan Ladd as Jett Rink, but his wife advised against it. The role went to James Dean. Before Elizabeth Taylor accepted it, the role of Leslie was offered to Grace Kelly. William Holden was a leading candidate for the role of Bick Benedict before Rock Hudson was eventually signed.
Giant was Barbara Barrie's first film. Carroll Baker, who plays Elizabeth Taylor's daughter, was older in real life than her screen mother.
After James Dean's death late in production, Nick Adams provided Rink's voice for a few lines. The film spent an entire year in the editing room.
It was the highest grossing film in Warner Bros. history until the release of Superman.
Trailer that completely ignores the anti-segregationist content of the film:
An American couple witness the assassination of a suspicious character in Marrakesh, while dying this man tells Jimmy Stewart about a murder that will happen in London. While they make a deposition at the police station they leave their child in the care of an elderly British couple who promptly kidnaps the boy as a guarantee to keep Stewart schtum. Well Stewart and his wife want to get their child back so they fly to the UK and foil the murder plot and save the child themselves!
Review
Another great Hitchcock film. This man can do little wrong. The film is a remake of one of his earlier works and though I haven't seen the original this was Hitch's preferred version.
As usual there are elements in Hitchcock's film making that mark him for the great director that he is, one of these is the naturalness of the dialogue. Another one is his ease in the creation of fully fleshed out characters with great economy of time. His touch for the vignette is pretty incredible, even if for Hitchcock the film's plot is decidedly average.
Stewart is great as always, and Doris Day is surprisingly good for what is one of her few dramatic parts, even if she gets to sing Que Sera Sera plenty of times. The colour photography is amazing and this is helped by the choice of scenery in Morocco for the first part of the film. The highlight of the whole film is the great scene at the Royal Albert Hall. It is not one of Hitchcock's best films, but it is still great to watch.
Final Grade
8/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
Music plays an important part in this film. Although the film's composer, Bernard Herrmann, wrote relatively little "background" music for this film, the performance of Arthur Benjamin's cantata Storm Clouds, conducted by Herrmann, is the climax of the film. In addition, Doris Day's character is a well-known, now retired, professional singer. Several times in the film, she sings the Livingston & Evans song "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)" which won the 1956 Best Song Oscar under the alternate title "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)." The song reached number two on the U.S. pop charts and number one in the UK.
An oil heir and his best friend both fall in love with a woman that works for publicity. She gets drawn deeper into the shitty world of the very rich and very disturbed. She gets married to the oil heir, who is shooting blanks and goes back to being an alcoholic because his fishes can't swim. By a fluke she gets preggers, and he thinks the baby is his friend's (his sister helps implant that idea), he hits his wife who miscarriages. Then he leaves the house, comes back into the house, finds a gun and tries to kill his friend. His sister, who is in love with this friend tries to stop him and in the struggle he shoots himself and dies. The wife now stays with the friend and they both fly to Iran. In 1979 the Islamic revolution presumably makes their stay uncomfortable.
Review
As you can see it is not the simplest of plots. Murder, alcoholism, love squares, nymphomania, oil, people falling down stairs, miscarriages, Rock Hudson, fast cars, colour, guns, trial case, hunting, Lauren Bacall, flashbacks, planes, domestic violence, formal dinners this film has it all!
Speaking of Rock Hudson, we are entering a bit of a Hudson season, 2 of the next 3 films, excluding this one, have him on it. And it ends up being an interesting film, if a bit rushed to fit all of that in 1 hour and 30 minutes. Rock Hudson is always OK, and Lauren Bacall is great as usual. The big acting highlight goes to the bitch sister, however, played by Dorothy Malone who got a deserved Oscar.
So it is a family epic story in the style of Dallas or something like that, very soapy story, but because it is condensed there is none of that soapy fatigue. So a good film.
Final Grade
8/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
Lauren Bacall, whose film career was foundering, accepted the relatively non-flashy role of Lucy Moore at the behest of her husband Humphrey Bogart. At the same time she was shooting Wind, she was preparing for a television adaptation of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, co-starring Coward and Claudette Colbert. In 2005, she accepted the Frontier Award on behalf of the film from the Austin Film Society, which annually makes inductions into the Texas Film Hall of Fame recognizing actors, directors, screenwriters, filmmakers, and films from, influenced by, or inspired by the Lone Star State.
Stack felt the primary reason he lost the Oscar to Anthony Quinn (whose winning performance in Lust for Life was less than ten minutes long) was that 20th Century Fox, who had loaned him to Universal International, organized block voting against him to prevent one of their contract players from winning an acting award while working at another studio.
305. Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped or: The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth) (1956)
Directed By Robert Bresson
Synopsis
Man is arrested by the Nazis. He makes plans for escape. In the process he trashes his room, I don't think he'll get his deposit back.
Review
This is the first film to establish two universal facts now accepted by the world: A spoon is the essential item for any escape and Nazis are shit at guarding places. Fortunately this is based on a true story, so it is hard to criticised what have since become clichés.
One great thing about the film is its ponderous nature, it is very slow but it keeps you interested all the way. The slowness actually helps you empathise with the character, everything takes time and he does not have much left, the deliberate slowness of it all only makes you more impatient for the character to escape. In this sense Bresson's characteristic slowness helps this film as much as it hindered Journal d'un curé de campagne, which just seemed pretentious.
So it is a pretty good and satisfying film, it is just long enough taking into account how slow it is. It is shot in a great way which also gives you the notion of the loneliness of prison. The use of Mozart's Kyrie of the Mass in C minor when the prisoner gets to meet other human beings is also effective in illustrating how the smallest company is of such great significance in that situation. Nothing else needs to be said between the prisoners, the music says it all.
Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From wikipedia:
It is based on the memoirs of André Devigny, a prisoner of war held at Fort Montluc during World War II. The protagonist of the film is called Fontaine. The second part of the title comes from the Bible, John 3:8, and in English it is worded this way only in the Authorized King James Version (more recent translations using words like "wants" or "pleases" instead of "listeth"). Bresson, like Devigny and the character Fontaine, was imprisoned by Nazis as a member of the French Resistance.
Ok, The Searchers is another one of those iconic films that everyone should watch at least once. There are depths to a deceptively simple plot that deserve being studied. Ford is holding up a mirror to American latent racism in the portrayal of Native Americans almost as animals to be hunted.
All that being said this is not, by far, the best Western of all time, it is not even the best John Ford Western, Stagecoach was better. In American Westerns on the list up until now High Noon was the best actually. But Ford here shows his mastery at shooting scenery, there probably was not a film that was better shot than this one up until now.
I really dislike John Wayne as an actor, he is always a bit wooden. The rest of the cast is adequate but nothing extraordinary. Some of the comic relief was completely unnecessary. But it is a thoughtful and beautiful film.
Final Grade 8/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The 2007 American Film Institute 100 Greatest American Films list included The Searchers in twelfth place. In 2008, the American Film Institute named The Searchers as the greatest Western of all time. The Searchers is a favorite of Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Ramesh Sippy, James Robert Baker, Brent Spiner, Quentin Tarantino and John Milius.
There's a battalion of singing Japanese, and one of them plays the harp. When they are not committing war-crimes, they sing and dance and all that shit. All that singing and dancing leads to losing the war. After they are interned waiting to be repatriated, they send the harpist out to convince another battalion to surrender. They don't surrender as he is presumed dead. On his way back to rejoin his battalion he discovers a new meaning to his life: to bury the unburied Japanese dead in the battle fields. He assumes the guise of a monk and goes about his business, but his battalion wants his to rejoin them, and do what they can to bring him back. He stays in Burma.
Review
As you might have guessed I love Japanese cinema, be it by Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu or Ichikawa. This film was no exception. It might be slightly more heavy-handed in its sentimentalism than the other Japanese films already reviewed. It might be less believable than those films as well, because with hindsight we know what really went on in Burma.
The problem of war atrocities can be solved by imagining that this was a platoon of good men, and the contrast between them and the guys at the mountain is made clear in the film. As usual the film is incredibly touching, painful and beautiful.
Music is used tremendously well here, and at times it might seem like "The Horror of War: The Musical", but fortunately all the music is completely in context and never gets in any way ridiculous. Another beautiful Japanese film that you should add to your collection.
Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
Awards
1957 Academy awards - best foreign film - nominated - Masayuki Takagi 1957 Mainichi film concours - best film score - won - Akira Ifukube Venice film festival - OCIC Award - Honorable Mention - Kon Ichikawa Venice film festival - San Giorgio Prize - Kon Ichikawa Venice film festival -Golden Lion - Nominated - Kon Ichikawa
Someone decided it would be a good idea to have images of the film to the soundtrack of Opeth... whatever:
Synopsis Shakespeare's The Tempest... IN SPACE SPACE SPACE SPACE SPACE!
Review
Heh. I am an absolute geek for this kind of film. The sets, the music, the special effects, it is all perfect! The mini skirts on Anne Francis are even better! Now Leslie Nielsen is a bit crap in it, but he is forgiven... particularly because you spend the whole film expecting a double entendre of the "Nice Beaver" variety.
The special effects are actually surprisingly good, they really stood the test of time. I think it is generally true of when you do stuff with models instead of animatronics or CGI, in much the same way the ships on original Star Wars are still quite passable while Jar Jar Binks has always been shit.
But you watch this for the sheer glee-factor of it all. Robbie the robot is a cultural icon, the colours are fantastic, the plot is based on the Tempest and therefore it would be hard for it to be terrible, but the little addition of psychoanalytical babble at the end just adds a little bit more of what makes this film great. I suppose you have to be a sci-fi fan to love it, but it might convert you. Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
Gene Roddenberry noted in his biography Star Trek Creator that Forbidden Planet was one of the inspirations for Star Trek. The Star Trek episode Requiem for Methuselah shows many similarities to Forbidden Planet, as it is also based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. The character associations are: Prospero = Mr. Flint, Miranda = Rayna Kapec, and Ariel = "M4" The Sentry Robot.
The Doctor Who serial, Planet of Evil, was consciously partly based on Forbidden Planet.
Krell is a major brand of "high-end" audio equipment.
The author Colin Wilson has likened Forbidden Planet's "monsters from the id" to claimed occult phenomena involving monsters from the subconscious, and in his novel The Philosopher's Stone, the destruction of Mu is caused similarly by subconscious monsters from the sleeping minds of the Old Ones.
In Babylon 5, one particular shot of the Great Machine of Epsilon 3 (as seen in the episode "A Voice in the Wilderness") bears a strong resemblance to the bridge through the Great Machine of the Krell in Forbidden Planet. (Babylon 5's producer has stated that this similarity was clear at the time of production but the form the shot took was due to production requirements, and was not a deliberate reference to the film.)
In the computer game Space Quest 6: The Spinal Frontier, when an invisible creature attempts to escape from a cell, it is revealed in an outline similar to the id monster
In The Blob, a poster of Forbidden Planet can be seen during the movie theater scene. The title of the Melvins song "The Fool, the Meddling Idiot" comes from a line of dialogue in the film.
In the film Halloween, Lindsey and Tommy can be seen watching Forbidden Planet while Laurie is babysitting them.
In Jim Jarmusch's 1984 film Stranger Than Paradise the characters Willie and Éva are watching Forbidden Planet on television.
There is an alien race in Captain Kremmen known as the Krells who are possibly named after the alien civilisation in this film.
In the stage musical The Rocky Horror Show (1973), and later the film The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the opening song entitled Science Fiction/Double Feature contains a reference to Forbidden Planet: "Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet."
Episode 20 of the TV Series Painkiller Jane has a similar monster of the Id appearing, shadowed under old superstitions of Gypsy curses.
Lola Montes is a circus attraction where she recounts details of her salacious life through trapeze artists and reconstructions. We see her life through several flashbacks.
Review
Only 700 films to go! Almost there! Here we have the last film of the great director Max Ophuls, and the film where his trademark flowy camera is most apparent. One of the most interesting things about the film is how the camera is always placed in awkward positions, with obstacles partly obscuring some characters in a quite successful effort to make the viewer feel like a part of the action.
The illusion of being part of the action would have been considerably more successful if my DVD was a better one. Firstly it's in cinemascope, meaning you get a little strip of film filling up about a third of the TV screen... then the DVD version I had had bad picture quality to add to that. This is a film I'd like to see in the cinema.
If we get over that, however, it is a fascinating story of a courtesan's rise and fall. The most amazing thing about it all are the sets, however. Opulent does not begin to describe it. The circus arena is amazing, the palacian environments she moves through in her flashbacks are equally amazing, and just the amount of detail in the background makes your jaw drop. Oh and Peter Ustinov is in it as well. Always a plus.
Final Grade
9/10 (It might be different with a better version, and I preferred Madame De...)
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
Lola Montes will be re-released by Rialto Pictures in November 2008, with footage never before shown in any U.S. release. THANK FUCK FOR THAT!
Trailer for the new version... looks much better. Comes out in about a month:
A father running away from the cops hides $10.000 in cash and tells his children never to tell anyone. While waiting for the death penalty in jail he shares a cell with a serial killer preacher who when he leaves jail gets married to his wife. In his relentless search for the hidden money he kills his new wife and chases the children around the countryside.
Review
I remember watching this film quite a long time ago, alone, at night, in my room. And I was freaked. Not quite so freaked now, but I think I am able to appreciate the film better, particularly in the context of 1955. It's a weird film. The weirdest since Kiss Me Deadly.
Robert Mitchum plays the part of his career here as a serial killer preacher, a theme that has been taken up many times later. Oh he also has love/hate tattoos in his hands... a theme which has been repeated to exhaustion. The film is strange for several reasons, firstly it is hard to categorise... is it a film noir? A morality play? A horror film? A children film? Maybe it is all of those things at the same time, and surprisingly it really works.
The soundtrack is one of the greatest things in the film, with a couple of great songs put to great use. The filming is slightly strange with a lot of animals being filmed for some reason, again it works. Then there is an exploration of Biblical hermeneutics with two characters showing opposed views of Bible interpretation... again it works. Then Laughton had a clear love for German expressionism and old films, the scene of the wife's murder is a perfect example of an expressionist tribute with weird shapes and shadows. He even gets Lilian Gish to come out of retirement to play the foil to Mitchum... we hadn't seen Gish on this list since 1920! It is a true pity that Laughton did not direct anything else, as this was something promising indeed... but like most visionaries their work doesn't get the recognition it deserves in its own time...
Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The film's music, composed and arranged by Walter Schumann in close association with Laughton, features a combination of nostalgic and expressionistic orchestral passages. The film also includes two original songs by Schumann, "Lullaby" (sung by Kitty White, whom Schumann personally discovered in a nightclub) and the haunting "Pretty Fly" (originally sung by Sally Jane Bruce as Pearl, but later dubbed by an actress named Betty Benson). A recurring musical device involves the preacher making his presence known by singing the traditional hymn "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms". Mitchum also recorded the soundtrack version of the hymn.
In 1974, film archivist Robert Gitt Anthony Slide retrieved several boxes of photographs, sketches, memos and letters relating to the film from Laughton's widow Elsa Lanchester for the American Film Institute. She also gave the Institute over 80,000 feet of rushes and outtakes from the filming. In 1981, this material was sent to the UCLA Film and Television Archive where, for the next 20 years, they were edited into a two-and-half hour documentary that premiered in 2002, at UCLA's Festival of Preservation.
Documentary on the structure and horrors of Nazi concentration camps.
Review
This film lasts for a mere half-hour, but it is also one of the more intense half-hours on this list up until now. We have all seen many of the shocking images that this film shows again and again, but the assault on the senses here is relentless, each image more shocking than the next.
If ever a film had a good excuse for shock value it is this film. The whole point of it is to shock the viewer into feeling a revulsion for the attitudes of the Nazi regime and that is nothing but a good thing.
The film is also supremely effective in giving the viewer quite grim food for thought, how can man do this to man? How could so many people accept and collaborate with these horrors? The questions raised about human nature are the really important ones here and the ones to keep in mind to keep it from happening again. Resnais is great in making sharp contrasts between the colour images of the camps in 1955 and the black and white images of death an despair from when the camps were active. Sometimes propaganda is a good thing.
Final Grade 10/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The film was directed by Alain Resnais and written by Jean Cayrol, who had published a collection of poems, Poèmes de la nuit et brouillard (1945), which evoked his experience as a survivor of Mauthausen.
While Night and Fog states that the Nazis made soap from the corpses, this claim is today seen as false.
The whole thing is on youtube, here's part 2 (right after the opening credits):
298. Sommarnattens Leende (Smiles of a Summer Night) (1955)
Directed By Ingmar Bergman
Synopsis
The lawyer Egerman has a very young wife who is not ready to lose her virginity to him. He weeps on the shoulder of his friend and former mistress Desiree, who is now the mistress of a Count. The Count's wife is Mrs. Egerman's friend. Mr. Egerman has a young son who wants to be a theologian and is torn between his sexual impulses and his faith, and meanwhile practices with the maid... while really dreaming of his step-mother. It all comes to a head when all these characters go for a weekend at Desiree's Mother's house.
Review
When you think of Ingmar Bergman, you invariably think of the Seventh Seal, of the knight playing chess with death, and comedy is not really what comes to mind. This is the film to shatter your preconceptions, and it does it perfectly.
I was missing a good comedy of manners, no one has done them so well since Renoir did Les Regles du Jeu, and that is high praise indeed. The film is full of quietly humorous moments that will make you titter throughout, and occasionally laugh out loud.
There is really little wrong with the film. It is funny, sexy, perfectly shot and acted, it delves into deeper metaphysical concerns, it mocks the bourgeoisie and the military adding some social commentary to the whole thing and it has some trademark grotesquery infused in the amazing characters. Unmissable.
Final Grade
10/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The film's plot – which involves switching partners on a summer's night – has been echoed many times, notably in the films of Woody Allen, most explicitly in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. Bergman's film was made by Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince into the musical A Little Night Music, which opened on Broadway in 1973.
Phenix City, Alabama is a lawless town, full of mobsters, gambling joints, rape, murder, intimidation and all things nice. The Pattersons rise from apathy to take on the system!
Review
As my wife says this is a very B film. That means several things, on the one hand it is low-budget with all the problems that come with it, some of the acting is less than stellar, as are some of the lines and effects. On the other hand the fact that it is B lets film directors of this time get away with quite a bit more violence and lets them land a more visceral punch than otherwise would be possible as well as being weirdly more politically conscious.
There were not many films at this time where a little black girl could be picked up from the street only for us to see a car throwing her dead body into the main character's yard, and then gives us a good look at her body while children scream. And then you get to see the police completely dismissing the case as a "dead nigger kid". This is Alabama in the 50s after all.
The way in which the film portrays police and state forces helping out the mob is one of the most interesting things in the film. This leads to a sense of claustrophobia, there are no good guys to turn to, even the guys with good intentions resort to vigilantism and are infiltrated by mobsters. Ultimately it is not an amazing film because of some bad acting and general shortcomings of its low-budget which were not that skilfully overcome, but it is still an interesting watch. It is a particular pity that it is a very hard to get film, I watched a downloaded version recorded from Spanish TV with subtitles in Spanish... which are more than a bit annoying.
Final Grade 8/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The drama depicts the real-life 1954 assassination of Alabama attorney general Albert Patterson in Phenix City, Alabama, a city controlled by organized crime, and the subsequent imposition of martial law. Some prints of the film include a 13-minute newsreel-style preface including interviews with the actual participants.
James Dean must have been the worse student at the high school, as he is clearly in his mid 20s pretending to be oh so traumatised by high school. Plato gets shot. Good, you killed some puppies off-screen you sick fuck!
Review
The first half of the film is really not that great. Dean and Wood were never great actors, I am sorry to say. Dean was a pretty face who died too soon, Wood was a medium to good actress who died too soon, none of them were great. Dean was no Brando, who was not only attractive but a great actor.
That said the film starts picking up later on when the action focuses more on Plato, the Sal Mineo character, which is frankly the most interesting of the three. The film gets few point for script or acting.
It does make up on originality, however, but bear in mind that this is originality for its time, as most of the themes have been repeated endlessly in cinema and TV. From the chicken-run to the switchblade knife it is now all old hat, but it is important to keep in mind that it wasn't old hat then. The film had the guts to tackle teenage frustrations and mental imbalance like none other before it, and for that it is worth watching.
Final Grade
8/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The mansion in which Jim, Judy and Plato seek refuge was also Norma Desmond's house in the film Sunset Blvd.. It was owned by millionaire J. Paul Getty.
A man gets to a town in New Mexico looking for who sold guns to the Apaches that killed his brother! He wants to kill that person! URGH!
Review
Ok I get the idea that Anthony Mann's Westerns with Jimmy Stewart were all very important and all that, but frankly I would have been happier with just watching Winchester'73, which is undoubtedly the best of the five films. Now I've watched three of the 5 and fortunately there are no more.
This is not a bad Western, but it isn't very good or interesting as well, it feels dated, the story feels stale and clichéd, the scenery is pretty and Stewart is charismatic but there are plenty of other Westerns where the scenery is pretty and Jimmy Stewart could be sticking babies on spikes and he would still be charismatic.
And I love Westerns, so I can only imagine how boring this would be for someone who doesn't particularly care for them or even dislikes them. If you love Westens like me, it is entertaining but not riveting... merely watchable, there are plenty of better ones out there. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing that right with it that it would justify your time particularly, when put next to Kiss Me Deadly, the last film watched here, it looks like a dinosaur.
Final Grade
7/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
It was adapted from a story of the same title by Thomas T. Flynn first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1954, and thereafter as a novel by publisher Ward Lock in 1955.
Trailer, the statement that Jimmy topples all previous achievements in this film should be used as an example for hyperbole for centuries to come:
