It’s low-rent Noir A Go-Go: Angela Lansbury is a double-crossing femme fatale in this independent cheapie with modest charms. You can’t trust anyone these days, especially real estate developers with plans to collect Your life insurance. Lansbury is the seductive ‘motivator’ with a preference for late-night rendezvous in the high mountains, where everything is a long drop, nudge nudge wink wink. She makes with the hotcha come-ons but rugged Keith Andes is the one who goes around topless for an entire reel. One of the most obscure ’50s films noir, this one gives us a peek at an evocative Hollywood location or two.
A Life at Stake
Blu-ray
The Film Detective
1955 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 76 min. / Street Date September 7, 2021 / 24.95
Starring: Angela Lansbury, Keith Andes, Douglass Dumbrille, Claudia Barrett, Jane Darwell, Gavin Gordon, Charles Maxwell, William Henry.
Cinematography: Ted Allan
Set Designer: Robert Haver
Film Editor: Frank Sullivan
Original...
A Life at Stake
Blu-ray
The Film Detective
1955 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 76 min. / Street Date September 7, 2021 / 24.95
Starring: Angela Lansbury, Keith Andes, Douglass Dumbrille, Claudia Barrett, Jane Darwell, Gavin Gordon, Charles Maxwell, William Henry.
Cinematography: Ted Allan
Set Designer: Robert Haver
Film Editor: Frank Sullivan
Original...
- 9/4/2021
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Before we delve too deeply into the weeds, this viewer finds it imperative to make two big caveats. First, any finished movie, as Tfh Fearless Leader Joe Dante often preaches, is a bit of a miracle. Completing a project, especially a low-budget indie like Bride of the Monster (1955) that culled resources together from disparate backers and was at one point shut down three days into production due to a lack of funds, is a feat to be applauded. I am fully aware of that reality, even though I will take pains to explore the many shortcomings of this notoriously flawed cheapie chiller. Second, the actual protracted production of this picture, which was at one time to co-star Bela Lugosi and his fellow Universal monster luminaries Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr., is as compelling as the movie itself. So we’ll be touching on some behind-the-scenes morsels, too.
Bride of the Monster...
Bride of the Monster...
- 5/11/2020
- by Alex Kirschenbaum
- Trailers from Hell
In many ways, Steve Reisch's "The Cassavetes Project" is a product of the age-old industry adage: "Make your own luck." As a young actor living in Los Angeles in 1981, Reisch approached John Cassavetes outside the rehearsal space of his project, "Three Plays of Love and Hate." Unsure of how his proposal would be received, Reisch asked Cassavetes if he was looking for someone to document the making and shaping of the mammoth theatrical undertaking. To Reisch's surprise, the legendary director took him up on the offer and told him to be ready to begin the following morning. As the title suggests, "Three Plays of Love and Hate" was a trio of Cassavetes-helmed plays (two of them adapted from original works by Canadian playwright Ted Allan) housed in a Hollywood theater that was being completely overhauled specifically for the production. At the center of the troika was a pair of...
- 10/22/2015
- by Steve Greene
- Indiewire
John Cassavetes’ magnificent swan song, Love Streams receives the Criterion treatment this month, an addendum to the previously released five-title collection from the auteur. The film was surrounded and conceived amidst its own set of peculiar circumstances, and thus exhibits its own frenetic energy that sets it apart even within Cassavetes’ own oeuvre. After filming commenced, the director famously receiving a diagnosis that he would only live another six months due to cirrhosis of the liver. Unquestionably, this imbued his strange, wonderful, and reverential exploration of love’s complicated facets with a sharp melancholy. An adaptation of Ted Allan’s stage play, the film won the Golden Bear at the 1984 Berlin Film Festival, but wasn’t marketed properly and received a drowned out theatrical release. The film concerns the reunion of an estranged brother and sister, a pop writer Robert Harmon (John Cassavetes) and recent divorcee, Sarah Lawson (Gena Rowlands...
- 8/26/2014
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Love Streams
Directed by John Cassavetes
Written by Ted Allan and John Cassavetes
USA, 1984
Love Streams, John Cassavetes’ final film as an actor and penultimate film as director, is also one of his most unusual features. While his distinctive work can oftentimes be divisive, it’s easy to see how this film more than most others could be rather off-putting to those not appreciative of, or even accustomed to, his filmmaking technique.
Cassavetes adapted the film with Ted Allan, based on the latter’s play, and the film’s structure is one of the more vexing of its attributes. Dropped into two parallel lives, with little to no backstory, only gradually are we able to piece together certain details. First, there is Robert Harmon (a worn and weary Cassavetes, his failing health evident). Harmon is a writer, a drunk, and a womanizer, and he is supposedly working on a book about nightlife,...
Directed by John Cassavetes
Written by Ted Allan and John Cassavetes
USA, 1984
Love Streams, John Cassavetes’ final film as an actor and penultimate film as director, is also one of his most unusual features. While his distinctive work can oftentimes be divisive, it’s easy to see how this film more than most others could be rather off-putting to those not appreciative of, or even accustomed to, his filmmaking technique.
Cassavetes adapted the film with Ted Allan, based on the latter’s play, and the film’s structure is one of the more vexing of its attributes. Dropped into two parallel lives, with little to no backstory, only gradually are we able to piece together certain details. First, there is Robert Harmon (a worn and weary Cassavetes, his failing health evident). Harmon is a writer, a drunk, and a womanizer, and he is supposedly working on a book about nightlife,...
- 8/14/2014
- by Jeremy Carr
- SoundOnSight
Capa and Taro lived, loved and died on the frontline, becoming the most famous war photographers of their time. As a new novel about them is published, we explore their real relationship
It begins with a photograph. In 1934 a struggling Hungarian photographer, André Friedmann, living in exile in Paris, is commissioned to take publicity pictures for a Swiss life insurance company's advertising brochure. On the lookout for potential models, he approaches a young Swiss refugee, Ruth Cerf, in a café on the Left Bank and convinces her to pose for him in a Montparnasse park.
Because she does not entirely trust the scruffy young charmer, Ruth brings along her friend Gerta Pohorylle, a petite redhead with a winning smile and a confident manner. So begins the most iconic relationship in the history of photography, and an intertwined and complex story of radical politics, bohemianism and bravery that, in the intervening years,...
It begins with a photograph. In 1934 a struggling Hungarian photographer, André Friedmann, living in exile in Paris, is commissioned to take publicity pictures for a Swiss life insurance company's advertising brochure. On the lookout for potential models, he approaches a young Swiss refugee, Ruth Cerf, in a café on the Left Bank and convinces her to pose for him in a Montparnasse park.
Because she does not entirely trust the scruffy young charmer, Ruth brings along her friend Gerta Pohorylle, a petite redhead with a winning smile and a confident manner. So begins the most iconic relationship in the history of photography, and an intertwined and complex story of radical politics, bohemianism and bravery that, in the intervening years,...
- 5/12/2012
- by Sean O'Hagan
- The Guardian - Film News
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