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Citizen Kane

starring: Orson Welles, Dorothy Comingore, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Ruth Warrick
directed by: Orson Welles

August 31, 1999
Up until recently I had never seen Citizen Kane in toto.I had seen bits of it here and there in arts classes and on TV.After watching this movie and reflecting I can only envision one man that could ever had played this part to perfection and that was Orson Welles himself.This movie is as much autobiographical as it is biographical,that is there is as much Welles in this picture as Hearst.From what little I have read on both subjects over the years it is amazing how much these two men had in common in real life in their personalities and their subsequent dealings in whatever concerns were of most importance to them at any given moment.It was almost art imitating life imitating art.
But in 1941 both came together in one glorious time which ... Read More:

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Somebody Up There Likes Me

starring: Paul Newman, Pier Angeli, Everett Sloane, Eileen Heckart, Sal Mineo
directed by: Robert Wise

September 01, 1998
James Dean was the first selection for the role. His first it would have been after "GIANT".

Need we say more??

Great movie.

A.C.

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One True Thing

starring: Meryl Streep, Renée Zellweger, William Hurt, Tom Everett Scott, Lauren Graham
directed by: Carl Franklin

October 29, 2002
If there's one actress that can get into the skin of her character, Streep is it. She effortlessly portays a regular housewife, embroidering pillows and decorating cribs one minute, and being a veritable fountain of love and understanding the next! William Hurt turns in a convincing performance too, as the aloof and careless Regular Husband, while Zellweger adds a mean punch with her rich and dynamic presence.

The theme is hardly anything earth-shattering, but there's a fine line between the genuinely moving and the saccharine, and under Franklin's low-key direction "One True Thing" succeeds where many pictures fail by maintaining its dignity and, just as importantly, its honesty. You won't cry out of a sense of obligation, but ... Read More:

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The Enforcer

starring: Humphrey Bogart, Zero Mostel, Ted de Corsia, Everett Sloane, Roy Roberts
directed by: Bretaigne Windust, Raoul Walsh

April 15, 1997
Stark sets, simple dialogue and a straight-forward plot help Bogart dominate this crime film. Every gesture, from his face to his hands, and the way he walks, and every word he says, makes an even bigger impression against this minimalistic backdrop.

The sets at the start are immensely black with long shadows in the dead of night. But as the film progresses and light is let in, through city and through country, things open up. It's a gritty world of immigrants and the unfortunate fear of people with names like Mendoza and Olga.

The character actors do memorable things with their lines and there is a more than effective use of flashbacks in the plot.

The music of a Romantic European orchestra, all heavy with strings and blaring brass, ... Read More:

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Disorderly Orderly, the

starring: Jerry Lewis, Glenda Farrell, Everett Sloane, Karen Sharpe, Kathleen Freeman
directed by: Frank Tashlin

August 05, 2003
Jerry Lewis is Jerome Littlefield, an orderly at a mental institution who acts crazier than the patients. Since Frank Tashlin directed this movie, Jerry is free to concentrate solely on his performance, which he does to perfection. Once again Jerry is the lovable loser, who was thrown out of medical school because he felt the symptoms of every patient he diagnosed. This movie features a lot of great sight gags. Jerry fixes a television set in a patient's room that has poor reception, also known as snow. When he takes out the front of the TV, snow comes flying out of the set and soon fills the room! A patient is in a full body cast from head to toe, looking like a plastered mummy. Jerry accidentally knocks him over, the patient goes rolling down a hill and crashes into ... Read More:

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Men, the

starring: Marlon Brando, Teresa Wright, Everett Sloane, Jack Webb, Richard Erdman
directed by: Fred Zinnemann

July 08, 1997
Although The Men was Marlon Brando's first movie, all the elements of his acting style were in place for the viewers to see. The supporting cast is effective, particularly a young Jack Webb, who shows an acting range beyond that seen in his most famous role as Sgt. Joe Friday in the TV series Dragnet.
A Streetcar Named Desire may have made Brando a movie star, but The Men put him on the map.

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Desert Fox, the

starring: James Mason, Cedric Hardwicke, Jessica Tandy, Luther Adler, Everett Sloane
directed by: Henry Hathaway

June 27, 1991
Henry Hathaway's 1951 film on Erwin Rommel, NAZI Germany's most brilliant tactician whose indirect involvement in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler resulted in his untimely death.

The film is a character study and focuses more on Rommel's relationship with Hitler and the German High Command as opposed to his achievements as a military tactician. Because the nature of his death wasn't very well known at that time, the film focuses on Rommel's deteriorating relationship with Hitler and his eventual participation in the assassination plot. This is normal since, with the film being made only 6 years after the end of WWII, audiences would have been quite unreceptive to a film glorifying a German general's military exploits against allied forces.

All in all, James ... Read More:

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One True Thing

starring: Meryl Streep, Renée Zellweger, William Hurt, Tom Everett Scott, Lauren Graham
directed by: Carl Franklin

August 10, 1999
If there's one actress that can get into the skin of her character, Streep is it. She effortlessly portays a regular housewife, embroidering pillows and decorating cribs one minute, and being a veritable fountain of love and understanding the next! William Hurt turns in a convincing performance too, as the aloof and careless Regular Husband, while Zellweger adds a mean punch with her rich and dynamic presence.

The theme is hardly anything earth-shattering, but there's a fine line between the genuinely moving and the saccharine, and under Franklin's low-key direction "One True Thing" succeeds where many pictures fail by maintaining its dignity and, just as importantly, its honesty. You won't cry out of a sense of obligation, but because the incredible cast drive the ... Read More:

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Patterns

starring: Sally Gracie, Andrew Duggan, Joanna Roos, Ronnie Welsh, Elaine Kaye
directed by: Fielder Cook

June 27, 1995
Even though the description indicates this is a video of the 1956 "movie" with Van Heflin, the tape is actually of the TELEVISION show by Rod Serling with Ed Begley. When I called Customer Service, they were not actually able to check what was really in inventory, just would resend OVERNIGHT, which it did not come by. As you can see by the order date, this whole process has taken quite a bit of time, and still I am having to send both tapes back, as they are BOTH of the T. V. show.

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The Lady from Shanghai

starring: Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Everett Sloane, Glenn Anders, Ted de Corsia
directed by: Orson Welles

June 24, 1994
No, not Welles' best film. It couldn't be, since "The Lady From Shanghai" was actually a chance for Welles to get back in good with the studio system, a.k.a. the money picture that gets made when they won't let you be an artist. (Too, he saw it as a chance to rebuild the waning relationship he shared with then-wife Rita Hayworth.) However, the problem with Welles is that he excels so much at filmmaking that his worst still runs circles around most other directors' best. At 90 minutes long, this is basically an annotated version of the 2 1/2-hour cut Welles had submitted for release prints. Once again (reiterating Welles' career-long battles with his producers) unapproved editors were cut lose on it. But it's still one of the most gleefully dizzy and fun time machines I've come across. ... Read More: