Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This 1956 film features an older woman who has a relationship with a younger man, who turns out to have some mental health issues.   On the face of it this sounds like a classic "woman's picture", the sort directed typically by a Douglas Sirk or a George Cukor. In fact it was directed by Robert Aldrich, whose films (according to AI) have "a consistent theme of compromised masculinity and individual integrity tested in a hostile world".  So not an obvious choice for this type of drama it would seem. Except that the film stars Joan Crawford, surely the most masculine of female movie stars, what with her strong jawline, intense eyebrows, shoulder pads and the like.  And indeed her character's integrity is tested, so maybe it's not that surprising that Aldrich is able to turn the soapy storyline into something that packs quite a punch. Crawford plays Millie, a middle-aged woman who fears that life is passing her by.  W hen she meets Burt (Cliff Robertson in ...

This 1964 film is about one of my favourite subjects, US politics.   It is an adaptation by Gore Vidal of his own play, set in a party convention which has to choose the man who will contest the Presidential election.  It seems to be everyone's assumption that whoever is the successful nominee will win that election, so there's a lot at stake. The two front-runners represent two strands of US politics, elitism and populism. In the elitist corner is William Russell, played by Henry Fonda in his most principled mode.  He's rich, clever, never short of a literary quote, but has a fragile marriage possibly due to some past affairs of his.   His mental health might also be fragile given that we learn during the film that he once had a nervous breakdown so bad that it hospitalised him for a while.  Vidal based him on the Democrat politician Adlai Stevenson, who lost two Presidential elections. In the populist corner is Joe Cantwell, played by Cliff Robertson...