Director Billy Wilder and writer Raymond Chandler adapted James M. Cain's hard-boiled novel into this wildly thrilling story of insurance man Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), who schemes the perfect murder with the beautiful dame Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck): kill Dietrichson's husband and make off with the insurance money. But, of course, in these plots things never quite go as planned, and Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) is the wily insurance investigator who must sort things out. From the opening scene you know Neff is doomed, as the story is told in flashback; yet, to the film's credit, this doesn't diminish any of the tension of the movie. This early film noir flick is wonderfully campy by today's standards, and the dialogue is snappy ("I thought you were smarter than the rest, Walter. But I was wrong. You're not smarter, just a little taller"), filled with lots of "dame"s and "baby"s. Stanwyck is the ultimate femme fatale, and MacMurray, despite a career largely defined by roles as a softy, is convincingly cast against type as the hapless, love-struck sap. --Jenny Brown, Amazon.com
The five most popular Hammer films now in this DVD box set! Titles included on this release are: The Quatermass Experiment Quatermass II The Abominable Snowman X the Unknown and Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter.
Farewell To Arms (Dir. Frank Borzage 1932): Ernest Hemingway's tragic wartime romance comes to vivid life in this classic 1932 film starring Oscar winners Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. The cataclysm of WW1 sets the stage for an impassioned story of star-crossed love between a daring American ambulance driver (Cooper) and an English nurse (Hayes) in an army hospital. The tumult of war conspires to push the pair together and then wrench them apart in what becomes an ultimate tes
Massacre In Rome In the last days of the Nazi Occupation, a group of partisans plan an attack on a German police colunm.; Return From The River Kwai One of the last untold stories of World War 2 in the Far East. Starving British and Australian POWs make an attempt to escape Japanese brutality.; Skeleton Coast Colonel Smith's son,. a CIA agent, is captured by some mercenaries involved in an African civil war. Smith puts together a group of military press to save him. ;
The Stranger, according to Orson Welles, "is the worst of my films. There is nothing of me in that picture. I did it to prove that I could put out a movie as well as anyone else." True, set beside Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, or even The Trial, The Stranger is as close to production-line stuff as the great Orson ever came. But even on autopilot Welles still leaves most filmmakers standing. The shadow of the Second World War hangs heavy over the plot. A war crimes investigator, played by Edward G Robinson, tracks down a senior Nazi, Franz Kindler, to a sleepy New England town where he's living in concealment as a respected college professor. The script, credited to Anthony Veiller but with uncredited input from Welles and John Huston, is riddled with implausibilities: we're asked to believe, for a start, that there'd be no extant photos of a top Nazi leader. The casting's badly skewed, too. Welles wanted Agnes Moorehead as the investigator and Robinson as Kindler, but his producer, Sam Spiegel, wouldn't wear it. So Welles himself plays the supposedly cautious and self-effacing fugitive--and if there was one thing Welles could never play, it was unobtrusive. What's more, Spiegel chopped out most of the two opening reels set in South America, in Welles' view, "the best stuff in the picture". Still, the film's far from a write-off. Welles' eye for stunning visuals rarely deserted him and, aided by Russell Metty's skewed, shadowy photography, The Stranger builds to a doomy grand guignol climax in a clock tower that Hitchcock must surely have recalled when he made Vertigo. And Robinson, dogged in pursuit, is as quietly excellent as ever. On the DVD: not much in the way of extras, except a waffly full-length commentary from Russell Cawthorne that tells us about the history of clock-making and where Edward G was buried, but precious little about the making of the film. Print and sound are acceptable, but though remastering is claimed, there's little evidence of it. --Philip Kemp
This delightfully fun and lighthearted comedy is based on Jane Austen's classic novel. Dazzling Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare In Love) shines as Emma a mischievous young beauty who sets up her single friends. Funny thing is...she's not very good at it! So when Emma tries to find a man for Harriet (Toni Collette Knives Out) she makes a hilariously tangled mess of everyone's lives. You'll enjoy all the comic confusion... until Emma herself falls in love, finally freeing everyone from her outrageously misguided attempts at matchmaking!
Soylent Green is landmark science fiction film, a cautionary tale that holds a mirror to a tomorrow rife with ecological disaster. Working well again in the futuristic genre following Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man, action titan Charlton Heston portrays Thom, a detective prowling the dank streets of a polluted, overpopulated Big Apple gone rotten in 2022.He's trailing a murderer and the trail leads to a stunning discovery. Vividly realised, Soylent Green's world gains its power not just from its special effects but from its heart a human dimension magnified by the performance of legendary Edward G.Robinson in his moving screen farewell.Product FeaturesCommentary by Richard Fleischer and Leigh Taylor-YoungA Look at The World of Soylent GreenMGM's Tribute to Edward G.Robinson's 101st FilmDebossed finish on the title treatment of the Steelbook
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