What classics did you see last week ? (23 Jun- 29 Jun 2019)

hitchcockthelegend

Thanks for sharing your reviews of The Glass Key, Shadow On The Wall, and Kansas City Confidential. They are interesting and insightful, as always.

As for your weekly set:

I am glad you liked Losey’s “M” and could take it on its own merits. That’s not always easy to do. For example, I don’t think the just announced new movie of Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” with Armie Hammer, Lily James, and Kristin Scott Thomas is going to be so easy to swallow.

“The Scarlet Hour” looks very watchable. I’ll try to get to it this week. Michael Curtiz sure had a varied career and was triumphantly successful in many genres. That is why – like with John Huston – he was initially overlooked by the auteur critics because they could not find signature themes or techniques in his films that he had sneaked in while working under the studio system. Instead, he just turned out quality pictures whose direction and editing were appropriate to what was on the screen.

I will say about “Sabata” about what I said in my comments of “Kingsmen” – too much of the same thing. What kept me in the movie was mainly Lee Van Cleef. He commands the screen and builds suspense by making you wonder from moment to moment what he is about to do. His smile is particularly unsettling – and he smiles a lot. The movie tries for a Yojimbo/Fistful Of Dollars plot as Sabata tries to scam a town full of Bad Guys by blackmailing them with his knowledge of their participation in the robbery of federal funds. But instead of Kurosawa’s web of lies and double-crosses, the villains in “Sabata” just send one assassin after another after Van Cleef and he shoots it out with them until he and his two sidekicks decide to turn the tables and attack the gang at their stronghold. I am a great lover of classic American westerns, even those low budget programmers that I used to see on Saturday morning TV as a young boy in the 1950s. But, with a few exceptions, I never got on the “Spaghetti Western” train.