Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

  This thriller is one of those films that give the impression that modern urban America is a hellscape.  Almost all of the characters of which half are either corrupt or corrupt-adjacent. Most of the action takes place in a suburban house in a street all of which seems to have been bought up by a Colombian drug cartel. There’s some unnecessary and unexceptional action tacked on at the very end, but before that I enjoyed a story which was tense and which kept me guessing. A police crew get a routine tip-off about a house but when they arrive they discover some $20million.  Straightaway      (Matt Damon) behaves suspiciously by not informing HQ of the discovery. Is he thinking of nabbing most of the drug money? And if so will his crew back him?  Well the two female officers who get the job of counting the cash seem up for the idea.  On the other hand (Ben Aflac) is not cool with the idea leading to tension between him and the captain. And then ther...

For this 1961 drama, written by Arthur Miller no less, director John Huston had at his disposal a stellar cast of Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift, not to mention Eli Wallach who was no slouch in the acting department. The film begins in Reno where Roslyn (Monroe) is getting a divorce.  She has moral and practical support in the form of her landlady, Isabelle, played by the always wonderful Thelma Ritter, who seems to provide this an an unpaid service to any woman who happens to stay at her rooming house.   Divorce out of the way, Roslyn meets aging cowboy, Gaylord (Gable) and his buddy Guido (Wallach), who both have lascivious designs on her and accordingly invite her out to the country with them.  I was thankful that Isabelle tags along as an unofficial chaperone so that this scenario doesn't turn out to be as uncomfortable as it might have done.   They are then joined by a rodeo cowboy they know, Perce, whilst Isabelle drops out of the fi...

This 1932 film runs for just over one hour but still manages to pack quite a punch.   There's not a moment wasted.  A short initial scene on a yacht introduces us to Rainsford, a big game hunter, played by Joel McCrea.  He's asked to empathise with the hunted, to which he confidently asserts that he will always be the hunter, so that's the theme of the film introduced in neon lights right there. Then the yacht is shipwrecked, and only Rainsford survives, washed up on an island in which the only dwelling is a sinister mansion owned by the equally sinister Count Zaroff (memorably played by Leslie Banks).   At least, I found him sinister but Rainsford is surprisingly chilled out, all things considered.   There are two other guests, a brother and sister, Martin and Eve, who coincidentally or not have also suffered a shipwreck.   Rainsford isn't bright enough to realise that Zaroff might be moving warning lights so as to deliberately cause sh...

If this film is anything to go by life in Scandinavia circa 900AD was no bed of roses whether you were a king or a peasant. If the former you might get bumped off by your brother, as happens here in the opening scenes when King Aurvandill (an unrecognisable Ethan Hawke) is killed by Fjolnir.  If the latter you were at risk of being the victim of rape and pillage raids or of being enslaved. Our protagonist, Amleth gets to see both sides of this coin.  As a young boy at the start he sees his father Aurvandill get killed.  After fleeing for his life, he ends up years later surreptitiously joining a gang of slaves which is en route to Iceland, having been acquired by Fjolnir who has lost his kingdom and gone down in the world. At this stage all Amleth can think about is avenging his father’s death and rescuing his mother, Queen Gudrun, who was last seen being carried off by Fjolnir.  However his straightforward desire to wreak vengeance suffers a couple of complications....

This 1967 Sidney Lumet film is an adaptation of John le Carré's first novel, 'Call for the Dead', which features George Smiley who would of course reappear in many later le  Carré novels, although for legal reasons his character name here is Charles Dobbs. Dobbs is played by James Mason, which is decent enough casting.  Less satisfactory is Swedish actress Harriet Andersson as his wife Ann, given that she is over twenty years younger than Mason.   Which is not to say that Andersson doesn't give a good performance.  In fact all of the cast are up to the assignment. Simone Signoret is memorable in the two speaking scenes she gets, and I liked both Harry Andrews and Kenneth Haigh as Dobbs' two sidekicks as he tries to get to the bottom of the mystery of the apparent suicide of a Foreign Office mandarin.   Roy Kinnear gives a nicely judged performance as a small-time criminal caught up unwittingly in the espionage goings-on. Freddie Young used this fi...

This 1932 film is an adaptation of a Noël Coward play directed by Ernst Lubitsch.  If the combination of Coward and Lubitsch suggests a concoction that might be a little too arch for its own good, one can rest easy because it seems that screenwriter Ben Hecht coarsened the play almost beyond recognition. And if that wasn’t enough coarsening, the unlikely duo of Gary Cooper and Frederic March play the two male leads, rather than Lubitsch’s initial choice of Ronald Colman and Leslie Howard. Cooper and March are a struggling painter and writer respectively, eking out an existence in Paris.  When they meet Gilda (played by the wonderful Miriam Hopkins) they both fall for her. She for her part seems equally attracted to both, creating a Jules-et-Jim-type love triangle. Rather shockingly, one imagines for cinema-going audiences at the time, they agree to live together, but as Gilda states explicitly, with “no sex”.  Inevitably though Gilda's relationships with both men moves be...