“Summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield. They smell of heliotrope and jasmine, honeysuckle and clover. The breeze that stirs the curtains is soft and gentle. There’s the hush, the stillness of perfect peace and security. Oh, yes, the summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield–but not for us. Not for us.” Desperate, pregnant, and recently dumped…
Mildred: “I want you to have nice things. And you will have. Wait and see. I’ll get you everything. Anything you want. I promise.” Veda: “How?” Mildred: “I don’t know. But I will. I promise.” The title character of the 1945 classic Mildred Pierce, based on the 1941 novel by James M. Cain, is inarguably one of…
Elsa: The Chinese say, it is difficult for love to last long. Therefore, one who loves passionately is cured of love, in the end. Michael: Sure, that’s a hard way of thinking. Elsa: There’s more to the proverb: Human nature is eternal. Therefore, one who follows his nature keeps his original nature, in the end.…
“I never told you I was anything but what I am. You just wanted to imagine I was.” That claim, uttered by Jane Greer as the devious Kathie Moffat in director Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, is not entirely true. The character is an exercise in self-construction, spending much of the film behind an array of…
After watching season one of Netflix’s popular series Orange is the New Black, I was excited when the opportunity arose to review 1950’s Caged, a similar story of a naive young woman who is imprisoned after collaborating in a crime. Certainly there are many parallels between the two stories. Each was written by a woman…
Many of director Alfred Hitchcock’s films take place in a single setting, restricting the movement of the characters to a central locale. Movies such as Lifeboat (1944), Rope (1948), and Rear Window and Dial M for Murder (both 1954) are claustrophobic and unnerving, filled to the brim with tension and unbearable suspense. The characters cannot get away from one another, and…
As part of our week-long celebration of the 70th anniversary of The Maltese Falcon (1941), today we are taking a look at the third and final film version of Dashiell Hammett’s pulp crime novel. For a brief introduction to this movie, check out our post on Falcon from last year. For a more in-depth synopsis of the film’s plot, we recommend…
For this week’s Saturday Morning Cartoons entry, we’re jumping back in time a couple of years from last week’s post. On a whim last night, I decided to watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Well, perhaps it wasn’t so whim-ish; I saw this post yesterday on grammatically-incorrect movie titles, and it reminded me that I’ve been…
True Classics 