Of the many characters played by the nonpareil Humphrey Bogart, that of In a Lonely Place, Dixon Steele, most hints at the hard-bitten malevolence underlying his shtick as the “tough guy” of the movies, just as it suggests the nature of the man himself and his own tendencies. Humphrey Bogart plays a burned-out screenwriter manqué, Dixon Steele, who tends toward…
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Taken to the Montluc prison in Lyon, France, a former member of the French Resistance is sentenced to death after a protracted imprisonment. He has hatched plans of escape, and a fellow prisoner by the name of Orsini has tried—and failed—to escape using his own plans. The countdown to his execution, after stalling for many months, makes every succeeding day…
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Inaugurating the late period of his creative production, Late Spring bears those hallmarks that were to acquire worldwide renown, the signature of the Japanese master craftsman, Yasujirô Ozu: waist-high static shots above the tatami mat; long takes lingering on the composed resignation of the characters; “pillow shots” as exterior cutaways to the environs; the glacial, deliberate pacing that sees the…
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A slow-moving depiction of class decay and the coming of modernity, The Music Room, directed by Satyajit Ray, is as pleasing and substantial a film as those of The Apu Trilogy. It features Chhabi Biswas as an aging nobleman landowner during the last days of a preindustrial culture whose ways have long been decaying. This decay and industrialization, represented by…
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A fond and evocative re-creation of its forebear as directed by F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu the Vampyre still contains all the hallmarks of its director, Werner Herzog. Like Murnau’s film, Herzog’s is a period piece that shifts between the Transylvanian highlands marauded by the sinister, malicious Count Dracula, and the sleepy port city of Wismar (filmed in Delft, Netherlands); like that…