YourGirlFriday

Member since 7/9/2007, last signed in awhile ago.

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Angel Face

ANGEL FACE (Otto Preminger, 1953)
By YourGirlFriday in YourGirlFriday Blog
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"What makes ANGEL FACE a better-than-average noir is that Robert Mitchum plays the man hopelessly out of his element so convincingly. Gone is the noir world of LAURA, where every man is hard-boiled and every woman is a dame. Into the decadent home of Diane Tremayne (Jean Simmons) and her dissipated father (Herbert Marshall) walks Frank Jessup, a genuinely nice guy. Unfortunately, even genuinely nice guys have character flaws, and Frank drifts into an affair with Diane just in time to get the suspicious deaths of her father and step-mother pinned on him. Diane is the real killer, of course, but if noir teaches us anything, it's that nice guys are also fall guys, and Frank is coerced into helping Diane get away with the crime. All through the ordeal Mitchum looks like a man out of place. He may speak Diane's language ("Go ahead, hit me," she says. "No, I'll buy you dinner, then maybe I'll hit you."), but all Frank really seems to want to do is get away from these f ... " [More]

Martha

MARTHA (Rainer Werner Fassbinde ...
By YourGirlFriday in YourGirlFriday Blog
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"One gets the feeling watching MARTHA that Fassbinder was a man with a mission: to debunk bourgeois marriage come hell or high taxes. But the success of this film-treatise depends upon the two principals giving believable performances - when they do, it's funny and thought-provoking. When they don't, it's just a burlesque. Luckily, Karlheinz Bohm had a lot of practice: fourteen years before playing a sadistic sexual deviant in MARTHA, he played a voyeuristic sexual deviant in PEEPING TOM. Both performances manage to delicately convey the strange tenderness behind the perversion, and I assume that anyone who liked one will enjoy the other. In the end, MARTHA doesn't make an air-tight case for Fassbinder's thesis that bourgeois marriage is a fundamentally sado-masochistic institution, but at least it does dramatize it winningly. For example: Martha falls asleep in the sun on the first day of their honeymoon, leaving her with with an excruciating head-to-toe sunburn. Helmut defl ... " [More]

Vertigo

VERTIGO (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
By YourGirlFriday in YourGirlFriday Blog
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"Dorothy Parker was once at a dress rehearsal for one of her plays when the director began bellowing for the leading lady to find herself a brassiere. “God no,” said Parker. “You’ve got to have something in this show that moves.”It is hard to imagine Hitch saying that, or anything like it, about Kim Novak’s famously free chest on the set of Vertigo (1958), but the truth is the same: her body is the single unrestrained exception in a picture that from its pacing to its scenery is meticulously controlled.The plot is one of mistaken identity: Kim Novak is mistaken for someone who has an identity. In reality, she is a beautiful but pliable young woman who gets made over, first by the murderer Tom Helmore for the purpose of seducing Jimmy Stewart, then by Jimmy Stewart for the same reason. (I refer to actors and not characters because a film about the perils of pretending to be someone you’re not, in addition to whatever else it might be, is a co ... " [More]