Reviews

Maybe because it was the first Hollywood movie to be shot in Japan post WW2, or maybe because DP Joe MacDonald is under rated, or maybe a bit of both, this is Sam Fuller's most visually striking film, in my opinion. Some of the outdoor shots of Tokyo in winter, with patches of snow on the ground and city dwellers bundled up and seeming to rush through the not yet completely built up from the war urban landscape have a most evocative quality as do the subdued, blue lit interiors wherein reside the lovers, played by Robert Stack and Shirley Yamaguchi, seeking shelter from the outdoor realities.

Which is a perfect segway to what is wrong with this film, namely too much Bob Stack and not nearly enough Robert Ryan, especially in the rather slow first half. Stack is a most unremarkable actor who, except when he worked with Sirk, rarely rose above the pretty boy level. Here he tries to shed that young star burden by talking in ersatz Bogie/Holden tones and wearing a Bogie/Holden suit but the effort is a bit too obvious and most unconvincing. Yamaguchi is better, although at times a bit too gushy/weepy, but Stack tends to drag her down and their love scenes are quite dull. Once Stack's character successfully infiltrates Ryan's gang of ex military, now current thieves/hoodlums the pace picks up and the film feels on much more solid ground. Ryan is great, as usual, playing a complete and utter psycho/scumbag. His one scene with Yamaguchi has the menace and tension that the early scenes with Stack and her can only fake. And playing the jealous of Stack sidekick of Ryan to homo erotic perfection is Cameron Mitchell. His Marat like death while taking a bath is one of two great action pieces in the film, the other, of course, being the wonderful rooftop, amusement park, police chase with Ryan's evil figure weaving in and out of clumps of baloon waving, presumably innocent children. Give it a B.

...and not much of a beginning or middle, either. Is it just me or is TCM Imports, under Alicia Malone, grimly determined to show every single heavy, stolid, dull, depressing film from Mr. Kieslowski? Just one solid, grey, bleak, enervating shroud until I finally cried "wystarczajaco" right around the time Antec's lovely, grieving widow, for reasons best known to Kieslowski and herself, decides to sleep with a random English dude she picks up in a bar. If I were a cynical sort I'd say that the dour Pole had a commercial side to his foreboding personality as I'm sure the sight of Grazyna Szapolowska's luscious bod did not exactly discourage ticket sales. God knows, you need something to quicken the ol pulse as you watch this bloodless bunch, cigarettes stuck firmly in their mugs, stare into the abyss, weep, occasionally crack a bitter joke and stare some more. For awhile, I was hoping that there would be some courtroom drama since the plot seemed to involve a lawyer trying to free a political prisoner. But at the film's halfway mark nary a judge, jury or executioner were to be found. Unless, of course, you see Kieslowski as the hangman of all that is dramatically compelling. C plus.

Kinda reminded me of another foreign homage to American noir/crime drama shown a couple months ago on Noir Alley, "Le Samurai", in its gripping action scenes and high speed train-like pacing from director Seijun Suzuki and haunting, twilight cinematography from DP Shigeyoshi Mine combined with cardboard characters and a very silly story best described as Women Sex Slaves Meets King Lear. The difference between Suzuki's film and Jean Pierre Melville's is that while the Japanese director's characters tend toward the cardboard and melodramatic Gallic director Melville's folks are cardboard and oh so cool. Both fall far short of the ambiguous, lost, morally pliable people we see in the best Hollywood noirs. Give it a B minus.

I see where critics are trying to elevate this entertaining but flawed film from Vincente Minnelli into the "near masterpiece ruined by evil studio boss" category. I will have none of it (although they seem to have gained a convert in TCM's Alicia Malone). Even granting that MGM head Joseph Vogel cut out fifteen minutes, those minutes were mostly from the Decadent Party scene at film's end and, in my opinion, Vogel or, better yet, Minnelli, should have jettisoned it entirely since what is onscreen is, frankly, embarrassing, kind of a bad Saturday Night Live parody of Fellini/Antonioni immorality. As for the rest of the film, it is an unworthy successor or homage or whatever you want to call it to "Bad And The Beautiful" which is at its poorest in the writing and acting. Charles Schnee's dialogue, so sharp and insightful in the earlier classic, tends toward the overblown and cliche here and the performances, all of which were either very good or great in "B/B", can be summed up as: Eddie Robinson And Pray For Rain. Especially awful is Cyd Charisse but not far behind are Dahlia Lavi, Claire Trevor, George Hamilton (no great shock there) and, at times, like in the awful orgy scene, Kirk Douglas whose sole means of expressing anguish is to glower. Or scream so loudly you can't hear what he's saying (not such a bad thing, come to think of it).

So why do I call this movie entertaining but flawed rather than just flawed? Simple. Despite all the faults listed above, along with a few I haven't listed like overscoring from David Raksin and not enough scenes with Robinson and Douglas together, which are the best in the picture, you keep watching and, miracle of miracles, are not bored. At least I wasn't. And the reason why is not hard to fathom. It is Minnelli, the maestro of late 50s/early 60s lurid and morally corrupt. Call it neo noir if you like or dark melodrama which at times even makes you think, it is not easy to do without inducing ennui and no once does it better than Vincente (well, except maybe Sirk). B minus.

PS...Considerably aiding Minnelli is Milton Krasner's lush cinematography.

And so the environmentalist shall lie down with the swamp rat under the shelter of Protest. Such, at least, is my takeaway from the best scene in this flawed but interesting 1958 Nicholas Ray film where the Man From The Audubon Society and the King Of The Crackers are drunkenly united in their dislike of modern, urban civilization and, in so doing, anticipate the 1960s counter culture by at least eight years.

It's fashionable in film circles to disparage this Ray work and cast as the villain producer/writer Budd Schulberg who fired his Genius Director toward the end of shooting and took his place behind the camera. I somewhat subscribe to this view although with the fairly large caveat that The Genius was injesting heroin at the time, a rather significant detail the auteurists tend to omit. Whoever is to blame, there is no getting around the fact that large swaths of the film involving the early settlement of Miami and the love affair between Christopher Plummer and Chana Eden are as dull as a Marlins double header and that Burl Ives' performance is over the top pretty much throughout rather than in just certain parts of the film that Schulberg may have helmed. So let's give it a generous B minus for the Great Protest as well as other good red neck stuff like the elemental fight for sleeping quarters and the Everglades floozies who Ives so admires.

PS...I notice that Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter, who did the music, did not get a credit. Anti Schulberg Protest?

PSS...An early Peter Falk performance does not make a strong impression. Gypsy Rose Lee, however, does, especially from the neck down.

First, let's list the three good things about this poker faced "comedy":

1) Suzanne Pleshette launching an indelible career

2) Your 1958 Los Angeles Dodgers! (Ist year in my hometown)

3) It's not as racist as I expected.

Otherwise, it's a massive dose of unfunny from Jerry Lewis and Frank Tashlin, both of whom are revered by the French. In Lewis' case you may want to cut them some slack since he did direct at least one near comic masterpiece ("Nutty Professor") but their adoration of Tashlin is really hard to fathom. The guy made just one comedic clunker after another. And comedic directors can't hide behind auteur theory BS like "thematic consistency" or "a strong directorial personality". At some point they have to deliver the yucks. And on that score Tashlin falls woefully short. At his best, say in"Rock Hunter", there are a few moments of genuine hilarity but typically, as here, there are fewer laughs than a random episode of "My Little Margie". And the big, visual comic scenes, like the bunny rabbit schtick, just lie there and rot in the non risible sun. Solid C.

Yet another feeble attempt to rip off the atmo of "Casablanca", made all the more more pathetic because that film's star's newly minted production company, ironically set up to give him better roles than he was getting at the studios, is doing the ripping off.

Just a tired, unengaging job all around. Bogie is uncharacteristically listless as if realizing that this is not going to redound to his artistic credit, (although it did make money). Florence Marley is a poor man's Garbo and a very poor man's substitute for Bergman. As is "These Foolish Things" (an apt metaphor for the movie) to "As Time Goes By". The one good thing that came out of this dreary exercise is the revival of Sessue Hayakawa's career. Oh, and that bomber jacket Bogie's wearing has it all over LL Bean. C minus.

Westerns and broad comedy don't mix. I know what you're gonna say, "What about 'Blazing Saddles'"? Exception thast proves the rule because Mel Brooks is a comic genius. Otherwise, broad comedy and Westerns don't mix. Ever try to watch re-runs of "F Troop"? The comic relief scenes in John Ford's Westerns are invariably his weakest. And "Cat Ballou", when viewed today, is a bore.

All of which is to say that this Sydney Pollack offering is highly resistible.

By the way, what is it with Pollack and Westerns? Either he's way too waggish, as here, or too friggin somber, as in "Jeremiah Johnson". Good thing he decided to mostly work in the urban comedy/drama genres.

The late career voluptuousness of Shelley Winters is fun to gaze upon, though.

Normally, I'm not a big fan of these Life Sucks kind of films, a sub genre that finds its purest expression in the work of Chantal Akerman and Mike Figgis. However, I will make a semi exception here because I was fascinated that this thing was actually allowed to exist seeing that in addition to being a Life Sucks film it is also a Communist China Sucks film that is shot in the Peoples Republic and that country does not exactly win tolerance awards. So kudos to director Jia Zhangke for courage, if not optimism.

Otherwise, it's pretty bleak stuff. How bleak? Well, let's just say that the general attitude of its characters can be summed up in the words of one of them when he opines that thirty years of life in Datong is sufficient. And what is remarkable about this statement is that this character actually strung a coherent sentence together. Most of the film is composed of long silences and non communication among its various disaffected folks. I realize that this Ozu wannabe stuff is deliberate and intended to reinforce the film's themes of alienation and listlessness. Instead, as many previous reviewers have noted, it reinforces another trope, that of dullness. C plus.

Fairly effective police procedural slash noir. Lots of good scenes, images and performances, courtesy of director Richard Fleischer, cinematographer William De Grasse and the cast. Let's list a few, shall we?

1) The dying speech/flashback of the newspaper editor 2) The uber disturbing scene with the Judge dummy and the real thing in the cop's office on a rainy night (in fact, the use of the rain motif throughout) 3) The emotionally devastated husband of one of the judge's victims (usually spousal breakdown scenes in police procedurals are an excuse for bad acting. Not from Paul Guilfoyle here) 4) Jeff Corey's relaxed, sardonic turn as the number two inverstigator 5) The scene where we first see The Judge's face, which has an eerie, back lot surrealism.

6) The final chase through the Great Urban Gasworks (outdoes Antonioni in "Red Dust", in my opinion)

Pulling against the above good stuff is a flat, rather superficial screenplay from lillie Hayward that does not sufficiently plumb the depths of the chief investigator's emotional instability and flat, rather superficial acting from William Lundigan and Gale Patrick. I also could have done without the story hole wherein the judge turns uncharacteristically stupid and leaves a magazine he's reading behind at a murder site so that the movie can wrap up in under an hour.

I did, however, like Hayward (or Fleischer's) decision not to have Ms. Patrick be one of the Judge's intended victims. Tasking a mediocre actress with such a a scene could only have ended badly. B minus.

In general, I'm not a big Dead End Kids fan. Their first film, appropriately titled "Ded End" and considerably aided by a good screenplay by Lillian Hellman from Sidney Kingsley's play and direction from William Weyler, is powerful but their other stuff can all be gathered under a banner that reads: The Jets Do It Better. The only member with a distinct personality and look is Leo Gorcey (call it Cagney Lite) while the others all meld into one sneering, Brooklyn accented, dark haired juvy. And one wearies of the constant "So's your old man!" schtick that constitutes their dialogue.

As for Bogie, he's pretty much wasted when he's asked, as here, to play a conventional good guy. And Gale Page is a most unremarkable actress. As is Lewis Seiler as a director and Crane Wilbur and Vincent Sherman as scenarists (although Sherman could occasionally rise to the directing occasion, especially with Crawford). Solid C.

This is another of those fairly entertaining Hollywood films, like "Moonfleet", "Forty Guns" and the complete ouevre of Jerry Lewis, that French cineastes, for god knows what esoteric, Gallic reasons, have elevated into the critical stratosphere. Jean Luc Godard, perhaps exhibiting his first signs of mental decline, proclaimed it the best film of 1962! To my admittedly crude, savage, Yank sensibilities it is a pleasant enough two and a half hours that rises above the mediocrity line in the animal chase scenes, especially when the animal being pursued is a rhino and falls back down to it in the scenes where humans are interacting by themselves. Certainly, it would have been better with a half hour jettisoned and if I were the surgeon/editor the first to go would be the very lame ass comedy with elephants, Red Buttons and ostriches. And I think I would have tried to come up with a better leading lady than Elsa Martinelli who is definitely hot but whose acting ability is about on a par with Capucine and whose accent is twice as annoying (Every time she said "pockets", I winced). Still, this is a Howard Hawks film so, in addition to the great outdoor action, you have a couple memorable indoor scenes, as well, like the exchanges between The Duke and Hardy Kruger where Hawks' eternal theme of male bonding seems to be at its best and most subtle, and the playing of Stephen Foster, as interpreted by Martinelli and Buttons, on the piano/harmonica. B minus.

This penultimate film from Frank Borzage, made in his mid sixties, is very much a slow moving, sad, bleak old man's film. But then again I'm a geezer myself (albeit not, I fancy, a bleak or sad one) so I can definitely relate. And, unlike the previous reviewer, I think Victor Mature is the best thing about it since his general mien is slow moving, lugubrious and hopeless and, apart from his bad attempts at playing a drunk (agree with the previous reviewer there), perfectly embodies the director's overall tone. Less good is the film's leading lady, Li Lihua, not because she is a poor actress (apparently she was the recipient of the award for best actress in Chinese language films) but because Borzage and his scenarists, Thomas Kelly and James Nablo, fail to provide her with anything beyond the submissive, saintly stereotyped Good Asian Woman role. And the stories and characters beyond Mature and Lihua are, with the partial exception of Ward Bond's chess playing priest, rather dull. I especially disliked the streotyped Cute, Precocious "I shine your shoes, GI" Asian Kid. So, let's give it a very generous B minus for being the last interesting film from a great director.

PS...I want one of those bomber jackets with the map of China on the back.

Clark Gable's only foray into producing (along with Jane Russell and her hubby, Bob Waterfield) is pretty disappointing, especially for a Raoul Walsh western. There are several reasons for this. Certainly an uncompelling story and characters must figure prominently into the overall sense of dismay. And the notable lack of fast paced, tense action, a Walsh staple, certainly helps to drag things down. For me, though, it's the plain and simple truth that it's extremely hard for a fifty six year old leading man, even the great Gable, who looks more like sixty five to be credible as a chick magnet, especially when said chicks are all at least twenty years his junior, and look it, that is the main reason this movie fizzles out. Indeed, the only things that linger in the mind are Jo Van Fleet's fine portrayal of a tired, bitter mom, Jean Willes' doing a good Mercedes McCambridge imitation and that totally weird, Aaron Copeland-like squaredance /ballet, sans piano. Walsh meets David Lynch? Kind of. Give it a C.

Sure is weird seeing Joel McCrea playing a sociopathic racist, huh? Kinda like Lee Van Cleef as the Pope or Barbra Streisand doing a homicidal nanny. It is a credit to McCrea's acting chops that not only does he pull it off but he's darn near as good as Robert Taylor's similarly unexpected, but effective, study in anti Native American prejudice in "The Last Hunt", made two years earlier. (Both performances and films fall short of The Duke in "Searchers", of course, but that's not really a fair criticism considering the greatness of Ford's masterwork).

Aside from McCrea several of the supporting players stand out. Forrest Tucker is quite good as kind of a darker Victor McLaglen as is veteran noir character actor Robert Osterloh as a Cavalry Everyman, (the kind of role James Whitmore would have had if this thing were a war film, instead of a Western). And it's good to see Western stalwart Denver Pyle affectingly play perhaps the most humane member of this rather dodgy cavalry company. Less good are John Russell and Susan Cabot, although it's hard to tell if they're just bad actors or if they're saddled with the most pretentious lines of the film's often stiff, soap boxy cum philosophical dialogue. Indeed, if it were not for the numerous scenes of Moral Breast Beating that only serve to slow the movie down I'd rate this Joseph Newman film considerably higher than I do, which is a generous B minus, mostly for Joel.

A potentially interesting, Somerset Maugham-esque father/son conflict, complete with intriguing elements like the remote, great white hunter dad dressing for dinner with his vaguely racist, beautiful Indian housemaid/mistrerss in attendance, is curtailed about twenty minutes in and in its place is inserted your standard, Disney-esque boys adventure yarn involving elephants and casually racist, cartoonishly evil Indian villains. It all points toward a resolution of the conflict that you can see coming about fifteen minutes in or when the vaguely racist, wise Indian manservant of the great white hunter accuses him of cowardice (and is slapped for it). As for the acting, it's fairly bad with Jay North still speaking in sing song Dennis The Menace cadences and Clint Walker channeling Cheyenne with a safari jacket. The Indian actors fare better with Sajid Khan nicely underplaying it as North's kid companion and I. S. Johar doing a good subcontinental Alfonso Bedoya. And the location shooting is stunning. Let's give it a generous C plus because I'm a fan of director John Berry, whose career was cut short by ol man blacklist, and scenarist John Fante, one of the better literary interpreters of my home town.

With apologies to all of you "Deerhunter" acolytes out there, to mention nothing of the few weirdos who regard "Heavens Gate" as a masterpiece instead of the empty bore that it is, this first film from Michael Cimino is far and away his best. Like "Gate", it's set in Montana, but all comparisons end there. This is a deceptively simple tale of four feckless thieves trying to pull off a heist. I say "deceptively" because, as I watched it, I thought it was, at best, a cut above the standard buddy/road pic level, thanks to the great performances of Eastwood, Bridges, Kennedy and Lewis. It wasn't until about three fifths of the way through that the characters got under my skin so that the last two fifths, which deal with their various fates, is quite moving. And the themes of male bonding and betrayal are handled in Cimino's fine screenplay with a welcome dearth of heavy handedness or speechifying. And Cimino the director in his first film shows a deft sense of pace and flow that many a veteran director would envy. Put simply, he does not let the action overwhelm the characters, or vice versa, and there is nothing even close to a dead spot. The film is nearly two hours long but felt more like ninety minutes. Indeed, if it were not for its pervasive, silly sexism (pretty much all the women in it are mindless or floozies or both) I'd be inclined to give this movie a 10. As it is, let's give it a B plus.

Austrian director Michael Haneke's first film is a work of staggering banality. Once again, wearily wheeled out for ritual condemnation, is the European art house crowd's favorite, all purpose villain, the bourgeoisie. Like the pencil thin moustachioed banker in a Western or a monocled "Ve hef ways of making you talk!" Gestapo guy in a WW2 flic, this benighted middle class family, whose unforgivable crime seems to consist in their being middle rather than upper or lower class, is denied all and any vestiges of humanity, originality, or perception, as is this film. As for its "pacing", so much admired by some of my IMDB colleagues below as well as TCM's Alicia Malone, it consists of boring one to death in the first forty five minutes and taking a dump on us the second. Cinematography's good, though. Solid C.

Eddie Muller, in his outro, dissed Ryan Murphy's "Feud" for the way it depicted Robert Aldrich, which is ironic since this Aldrich film kinda resembles that steamy, lurid mini series. Certainly Aldrich, like Murphy, knows that if you're going to make an anti Hollywood picture then you'd best populate it with fine actors all doing good work. And plenty of sex and scandal for the fine actors to wallow in. Most folks will rave about Steiger, Palance and "Miss" Shelley Winters, as she's referred to in the credits (letting rich older men know she's on the market?), and rightly so, but I want to take this opportunity to extol what I feel to be the finest acting turn in the film, that of Wendell Corey playing the movie's most ambiguous character, the self hating fixer for Steiger's Harry Cohn. What an intriguing combination of menacing and sad! (with the ironic name, Smiley) In the space of one scene he can go from dolefully asking Palance what he's reading to announcing a murder for hire scheme. And his referring to everyone but his boss as "Kitty" is both breezy and creepy. I also like it that Corey does the foregoing without the scenery chewing of Steiger and Palance. Naturally, such subtlety went unrewarded. Rod and Jack and Miss Winters got all the ink. But Corey's the best in the cast, in my opinion.

So, a fun film about the industry. And maybe if it had soft peddled Clifford Odets' laments about poor, put upon Charlie, the sensitive, art loving, once great actor brought low by the vulgar studio boss it might have been a great film. But at no point in this very long work does Charlie accept even a scintilla of responsibility for his rather shabby behavior toward wife and best friend. Everything is Hoff's fault or The System's fault or Show Biz's fault. Which, of course, renders Charlie's suicide extra gratuitous. And this film a bit too whiny in tone. B minus.

Read on Wikipedia where this film lost its funding three fourths of the way through and had to be financially saved by its star. Surpised, actually. One would have thought that the diet soft drink industry would have rushed to the rescue of this paean to the evils of Big Sugar. Anyway, it's a fairly effective anti capitalist rant, mostly because its director, Gilo Pontecorvo, is able, via his political passion, to plunge us into the chaotic, brutal and tragic world of failed upheavals against exploitation. That it falls short of being an effective cinematic story, as well as polemical propaganda piece, is due mostly to its shying away from its most interesting element, the love/hate relationship between cynical imperialist William Walker, well played by Marlon Brando despite his rent a Brit accent, and unsuccessful revolutionary Jose Dolores, also well played by Evaristo Marquez albeit with an English accent that is very difficult to understand. In its place we are given way too many repetitive scenes of Portugese and English genocide and Brando's character on his soapbox. B minus.

PS...Wonderful, stirring Ennio Morricone title music that sounds like Ray Manzarek meets Africa/Carribean.

Long (almost three friggin hours, to be exact), slow and talky movies like this one are almost always a bad idea and never more so than in a war movie, which this one purports to be, where outer rather than inner conflict is the key element. Good directors of war films, like Raoul Walsh, Sam Fuller and Kathryn Bigelow, know this and are, thus, able to weave character and theme with action so that the film is always in motion, because a war flic that stops moving is, well you know what Woody said about a dead shark. Conversely, this film feels like it was not directed by Edward Dmytryk, who gets credit, but rather by the scenarist Edward Anhalt since it indulges that verbose fellow by periodically bringing the action to a thudding halt while various characters, chiefly Marlon Brando's Good Nazi, Montgomery Clift's Suffering Intellectual and Barbara Rush's and Arthur Frantz's Moral Consciences, opine and hold forth on such weighty topics beloved by late 50s Hollywood screenwriters as Being True To Oneself, The Insanity Of War and The Rigidity Of The Military Mindset with the heavy typewriter implied by capitalization of those topics. The film then lurches back to standard battle scenes to try to remind us that we're not watching some ponderous, three part Playhouse 90 episode but a combat picture. But it's a feeble attempt which does not convince.

And I haven't even gotten to how bad Brando's German accent is. C plus.

So so (or, as TCM's Alicia Malone accurately describes it, "minor") Alec Guinness comedy. A few good moments, like the disastrous seaside holiday where Guinness' ethically challenged man on the make realizes he's hooked up with an equally dodgy gold digger (a way too over the top Glynis Johns) but, for the most part, pleasant if too tepid stuff. Scenarist Eric Ambler sticks too close to Arnold Bennett's novel and, thus, creates, in my opinion, the wrong comic, love triangle. It should have been Machin, Miss Earp and the sexy, saucy Countess (a wonderful Valerie Hobson delivering the film's best performance, by far) rather than Machin/Miss Earp and the very forgettable Emma, played forgettably by Petulia Clark. And the film's second half, dealing with Machin's not very interesting get rich quick schemes and his even duller political rise, majorly drags. As for Guinness, he's a little too comfortable in his role of cheeky charmer, as if he's done it many times before and has nothing new to offer. I wouldn't say he phones it in. Guinness is too great an actor for that pejorative term ever to apply. But, as Machin might say, he tends to rest on his assets. C plus.

This is a quite stylish adaptation of parts of Proust's first three "Remembrance Of Things Past" novels. Director Volker Schlondorf captures the stifling social atmosphere of Proust's fin de siecle Paris where snobbery and social cruelty have been elevated to an art form. And Sven Nyqvist's seductive camera and Jacques Saulnier's stunning art direction ensure that many of the scenes resemble Courbet and Caillebotte paintings. And there is not anything close to a poor performance from the entire cast, with Jeremy Irons, Ornella Muti and Fanny Ardant especially skilled at capturing the tragedy and superficiality, often in the same scene, of the French aristocracy and their acolytes.

Still, for all of the above qualities, I cannot help but feel that Schlondorf and his co scenarists, Jean Claude Carriere, Marie Helene Estienne and Peter Brook, have largely chosen to tell the wrong story. At its heart Swann's tragedy with Odette is one of snobbery, not jealousy. He gains her only to lose access to the world of the aristocratic Guermantes which he desires even more than the courtesan whose former profession is the reason for his ostracism. And rather than focus on this cruel irony, too much of the film, in my opinion, is taken up with Swann's neurotic, obsessive pursuit of Odette, and his Othello like behavior vis a vis her many flirtations. Not only does this weaken the power of the social themes so vital to Proust's zeitgeist but it leaves very important characters, like the Baron De Charlus (an excellent Alain Delon) and the Duke De Guermantes, as well as the tropes of homosexuality and anti Semitism related to them that are also key aspects of Proust's world, unexplored in any but the most surface manner.

Bottom line: An ambitious but flawed film that is well worth your time. B minus.

Maybe it was the fact of watching it while its leading man, seventy five year old Gerard Depardieu, is set to stand trial for sexual assault. Or maybe it's that Francois Truffaut is simply better when he's in Paris and not trying to be Hitchcock. Whatever it was, I found myself vehemently disagreeing with TCM's Alicia Malone that this suburban, obsessive adultery tale "packs a punch". Unless, of course, Ms. Malone meant "punch" as in barbiturate overdose. Because other than Fanny Ardant's study in sardonic, smoldering sexuality (basically what saves this film from complete mediocrity) it's a real snore. And like most snores it features dull, subsidiary characters who add nothing, like Madame Jouve, Roland and the hospital psychiatrist. And scenes that are laughable in their attempt to be taken seriously, like the garden party where Bernard loses it and the even stupider scene that follows where his wife forgives him. C plus.

Thanks to cinematographer Lee Garmes this film has an appropriate for 1945 Hollywood noir-ish look, but, oh ye gods! Is the story and mood one long lugubrious slog, with every overwrought, humorless key on the amnesia scale being played to consummate, meldodramatic idiocy by director William Dieterle and scenarist Ayn Rand, the latter of whom is taking a holiday from praising capitalism to, instead, wallow in schmaltz. The players pretty much follow Dieterle/ Rand rather than Garmes with Jennifer Jones equating memory loss with infantilism and thus speaking in a breathless, girlish sing song throughout, a piece of annoyance which, naturally, got her an Oscar nomination. Joseph Cotten is, as usual, more restrained but his stubborn refusal to even attempt a British accent since he's, well, playing a friggin Brit, is also a bit on the irksome side. The supporting cast of actual Brits speaking in actual British accents fare better, especially Anne Richards (who was to have the lead role until David Selznick pushed his girl friend in front of her), Gladys Cooper and Cecil Kelloway. Give it a generous C plus, mostly for Garmes.

PS...Also notable is Victor Young's score which, although overdone like everything in this movie, is also, at times, beautiful.