Category Archive: FILM
The Wages of Fear
(Le Salaire de la Peur) (dir. H.G. Clouzot) (1953) Four men volunteer to drive 2 trucks bearing high explosive over rough terrain to help douse an oil fire. It’s a suicide mission but better than remaining stranded in their no-horse town. Real people and real action, gloriously French and politically incorrect.
Continue Reading →Vertigo
(dir. Alfred Hitchcock) (1958) Hitch’s greatest, weirdest film melds his various obsessions: food, drink, shopping, murder, sightseeing and icy, vacant blondes.
Continue Reading →The Vanishing
(dir. George Sluizer) (1988) A Dutch couple on their summer holidays fight, then make-up. She goes to get some things from the service station shop and that’s it – gone girl. From there, we work backwards, into the dark canals of human activity. Forget the 1993 remake; this French/Dutch original version is brilliant – funny, creepy; one of the best studies of men compelled to plumb life’s mysteries, with fatal results.
Continue Reading →Twelve O’Clock High
(dir. H. King) (1949) Bureaucratic office thriller masquerading as WWII bomber film. If Gregory Peck chewed out a shirker today as he lashes Hugh Marlowe, he’d be prosecuted for bullying.
Continue Reading →Twelve Angry Men
(dir. Lumet) (1957) Still the best case against majority verdicts, a stagey but compulsive jury-room drama with Henry Fonda a standout as Liberal Conscience.
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