Caltrops - Peter Molyneux's The Movies





	[quote name="Brody Wilder"]<b>WINNER: <i>Black Narcissus</i></b> Follows a squad (section?) of British nuns dispatched to convert a palatial Indian harem into a school and hospital. Isolated on a mountaintop during monsoon season, surrounded by images of carnal pleasure, the sexually frustrated nuns soon descend into insanity and violence. A story that could only be told in vibrant Technicolor; exotic flowers and contraband lipstick splash across the screen with the grotesque eroticism of blood in a Hammer Studios vampire movie. Prefiguring everything from <i>The Shining</i> to <i>Apocalypse Now</i>, the Criterion release comes - like most Powell and Pressburger productions - with a gushing commentary by Martin Scorcese. I feel confident declaring this the most tastefully sensual nunsploitation flick of all time. (Featuring Sabu, the Elephant Boy, Britain's first authentically Indian actor of note. He was last seen in this thread when <i>Arabian Nights</i> barely missed the cut for Best Film of 1942.) <b>New York Undercover: <i>Kiss of Death</i></b> There's something special about a villainous Richard Widmark performance. Here, in his film debut, the bug-eyed psychopath is introduced murdering an old lady by pushing her wheelchair down the stairs. You can call it overacting if you want, but there's something fascinatingly disruptive about the way he hurls himself into every scene like a ticking nailbomb. (Nicolas Cage tried to reproduce his manic menace in the disastrous 1995 remake, but couldn't get a handle on it.) Widmark's presence is grounded by western director Henry Hathaway's decision to film everything in real New York locations, finding the same natural beauty in a courthouse or penitentiary that he would in a mesa or box canyon. The sole weak link is stoic leading man Victor Mature, who perhaps summed up his own talents best: "I'm not an actor - and I've got 64 films to prove it." <b>Toxic Crusaders: <i>Out of the Past</i></b> For as much as <i>Kiss of Death</i> characterized the modern, pseudo-documentarian approach that would come to dominate crime cinema in the post-war years, <i>Out of the Past</i> recalls a darker, more dreamlike style. Poetic realist director Jacques Tourneur (<i>Cat People</i>, <i>I Walked with a Zombie</i>) situates his actors in a matrix of shadows and cigarette smoke, where reality and memory seem to wrestle for control of the frame. Laconic pothead Robert Mitchum stars as a former PI turned gas station attendant, while Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas play the grasping hands of a life he thought buried years ago. Interpersonal relationship horror for two-fisted tough guys. As noir as it gets. <b>Seventh Heaven: <i>Angel and the Badman</i></b> "Yes," I hear you saying, "But what's John Wayne been up to?" For all its success, 1939's <i>Stagecoach</i> didn't user in the Golden Age of adult westerns that it perhaps should have. A few classics followed - William Wellman's <i>The Ox-Bow Incident</i>, John Ford's <i>My Darling Clementine</i> - but these were moody thinking man dramas, not the rollicking adventures Wayne was known for. Still, Marion kept plugging away, his contract with penny-pinching Republic Pictures providing as good an excuse as any to stay out of the war. The Duke's best movie from this period was unquestionably <i>Angel and the Badman</i>, a gentle oater about a wounded gunfighter nursed back to health by a family of pacifist Quakers. When trouble comes, will he have the strength not to fight? (After entering the public domain in 1975, <i>Angel</i>'s central conceit was pilfered by 1985's <i>Witness</i>, though that film changed enough of the details to stand on its own.)[/quote]