Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This comedy is the last of five terrific films written and directed by Preston Sturges that were released between 1941 and 1944, in a remarkable burst of creativity. We start off in a bar where our protagonist Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith is feeling very sorry for himself.  His lifelong ambition has always been to emulate his dad and join the Marines, but when he enlisted a year ago he was quickly discharged on medical grounds (chronic hay fever, since you ask). Woodrow was so ashamed of his failure (as he saw it) that instead of going home he’s spent the last year working in a shipyard, pretending to his mother that he was on active service, and ditching his fiancée on the pretence that he has met someone new. Who should then come into the bar but six actual Marines, who are sympathetic to Woodrow's story, especially Sarge (played by the wonderful Sturges regular William Demarest) who knew Woodrow's dad before he died in battle. Before he knows what has hit him the Mar...

What induced me to watch this obscure 1947 thriller with a cast of relative unknowns is a bit of a mystery other than that it seemed to have an intriguing plot, and that it has a decent director in Edward Dmytryk. Dmytryk had fled the US where he had been sentenced to prison for refusing to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, so I guess he was happy to take on any assignment he could get hold of. The screenplay is an adaptation by one Alec Coppel of his own play, 'A Man About A Dog', and in very broad outline the story resembles that of the later 'Dial M For Murder' - a husband who discovers that his wife is having an affair with an American responds by planning 'the perfect murder'. In this case the wife's affair is the latest in a long line, and husband Dr Riordan, a psychiatrist, has had enough.  But instead of murdering his wife he plans to murder the lover, Bill, and just to rub it in he wants his wife, Storm, to know that th...

I'm a Keaton guy and so I have never got around to watching any of Chaplin's feature length films before now.  This is his first, from 1921, and the first of five films to feature The Tramp. It takes a while for Chaplin to appear because first we meet an unmarried mother, who is forced to abandon her baby.  Instead of leaving it outside an orphanage, say, she leaves it in the back seat of a car, although admittedly it is outside a mansion.  How is she to know that almost immediately the car will get stolen?  Anyway, as a result, the baby ends up being looked after by The Tramp. In these early scenes there are a couple of odd moments when the mother is linked to religious imagery.  I can only assume that this is meant to indicate that despite being an unmarried mother she is a good person. We then flash forward five years, and the baby is now The Kid.  He and Charlie have a good scam going whereby The Kid breaks windows so that Charlie can then turn up and g...

Well, I’ve avoided this film up to now because the premise (an elixir of youth) seemed too silly.  The idea might have possibilities in the right hands but here back in 1952 I feared that the treatment would be little more than basic slapstick, despite the copious amount of talent deployed. And I was right. Cary Grant plays Barnaby, an absentminded professor who is trying to develop a formula which might at least slow down the aging process, although his aged boss is looking to actually reverse it. Accidentally, one of the chimps being experimented upon does create such a thing.  Unknowingly Barnaby takes it and for a few hours behaves like a teenager before the effect wears off.  Then his wife Edwina (Ginger Rogers) takes it so that she too becomes a teenager for a while. Then they both inadvertently take a really large dose and regress to toddlers.  Then that wears off and the rest of the rejuvenation potion is accidentally poured down the sink. The end. Unless you...

I would love to be able to watch this film afresh with no knowledge of where it is leading.  At what point if at all would I realise that the planet Charlton Heston and his crew have crash landed on is in fact the Earth?  After all there are several pointers in that direction,  from the Earthlike atmosphere (very fortuitous) to the presence of humanoid creatures, albeit they are mute and have been subjugated by intelligent apes.   But the biggest clue of all (which can’t be overstated!) is that the apes speak English! What are the chances?  Heston’s character Taylor really should give this apparent coincidence a lot of consideration. Mind you, he’s got a lot on his plate.  Because a gunshot wound has left him temporarily mute he’s struggling to convince his scientist captor Dr Zira that he is intelligent even though a rapport is developing between them.   Then there’s the ever present threat of him being carried off for a quick lobotomy or neutering. O...

I had a very good memory of this 1951 Billy Wilder film, which was  ‘inspired’, if that’s the right word for such a dark tale, by a couple of real life incidents, where journalists exploited people’s misfortunes in order to make a better story. Our protagonist is a perfectly cast Kirk Douglas as Chuck Tatum, a washed-up reporter who has been sacked by numerous editors of big newspapers, for reasons  ranging from a drink problem to playing fast and loose with the truth .  Just to emphasise how low he has fallen, our first sight of him is in his broken-down car being towed into Albuquerque, where he has to beg to get a job with the local paper.  Fast forward a year and Chuck is getting mighty frustrated at the trivial nature of the news reports he has to work on.   But fate takes a hand by gifting him a plum opportunity when he is on a typically humdrum assignment out in the wilds of New Mexico and he happens to hear of someone being trapped in a nearby colla...

This story is set in late Victorian England, a time when lighting was by gas rather than electricity.   It was also a time when the legal rights of a married woman amounted to very little. So a woman needed to choose her husband very carefully.  Unfortunately young Paula (an Oscar winning performance by Ingrid Bergman) is so swept away by handsome and charming pianist, Gregory (a foreigner to boot) that they marry within a weeks of meeting. Unlike the titular character in 'The Heiress', Paula has no father to warn her about men who might be after her fortune, because her parents died when she was young, so instead she was brought up by her aunt, a famous opera singer.  Tragically, ten years before the start of the film Paula's aunt was brutally murdered in her home in London (9 Thornton Square). As a result  it seems that ever since  that traumatic event Paula has lived in Italy, or at least not in London. So the last place Paula wants to return to after sh...

This is a thriller where all the moving parts are perfectly synchronised by director John McTiernan, and where it is paced so meticulously that when we get to the climactic scenes on the roof of the Nakatomi Tower they are about as exciting as action cinema gets - I especially love the moment when McClane throws himself off the building and then has to shoot out a window. Bruce Willis is the right actor to play an unsophisticated New York cop who single-handedly has to thwart a bunch of thieves posing as terrorists. They of course are headed up by ruthless yet strangely charming Hans Gruber (a career-defining performance from Alan Rickman).     McClane is just an average guy who has to rely on grit and street smarts to survive, aided by a wry sense of humour.  McClane telling sergeant Al to put $20 on him to survive (‘I’m good for it’) makes me chuckle almost as much as it does Al. This film is confident enough to throw in comedic touches now and then in order to rel...

  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...