The love that lifted a man to paradise... and hurled him back to earth again! This film is based on W. Somerset Maugham's classic novel of a young medical student's strange infatuation with a cheap and vulgar cockney waitress (Bette Davis). The infatuation turns into a mutually destructive affair. This is the film that brought Bette Davis to fame and secured her future roles as a tough domineering woman. Fine acting by the entire cast with Davis an absolute knock-out.
Repeated viewings can't dispel the shock of the final scene of Suspicion, Hitchcock's classic 1941 romantic mystery--a brief but disorientating confrontation that suddenly inverts the heroine's mounting conviction that she's married a murderer, forcing us to reconsider virtually every scene and line of dialogue that's preceded it. It's a masterful coup de grâce for the director, who has built a puzzle around the corrosive power of suspicion, threaded with deft ambiguities that toy with dramatic conventions and character archetypes in nearly every frame. As embodied by Joan Fontaine, who nabbed an Oscar in this second outing with the director, Lina McLaidlaw is a buttoned-up, bookish heiress whose prim exterior conceals longings for a more engaged emotional life. Her solution materialises in the darkly handsome Johnnie Aysgarth, a gambler, womaniser and spendthrift who flirts, then pursues, and soon marries her. As Aysgarth, Cary Grant is both irresistible and sinister, capable of deceit and petty theft, as well as grander designs on his bride's impending fortune. Lina's passion for Johnnie is clouded by each new revelation about his apparent dishonesty, from clandestine gambling to real-estate development schemes; more troubling are clues implicating him in the death of his best friend, and the prospect that Johnnie may be slowly poisoning Lina herself. By the time we see him ascending a darkened staircase with a suspicious glass of milk, an image made all the more indelible through the spectral glow the director captures in the glass, the evidence seems damning indeed. In fact, even as Hitchcock stacks the deck against Johnnie, and takes full advantage of Grant's skill at conveying such menace, the director also dots his landscape with visual clues to Lina's own neurotic (and erotic) obsessions. The final scene forces us to re-evaluate her behaviour while leaving enough of a cloud over Johnnie to rob him, and us, of a complete exoneration. It's a wicked, unsettling payoff to a brilliantly executed thriller. --Sam Sutherland
The character of Charlie Chan was created by Ohio born Earl Derr Biggers Warner Oland played the part aplomb in this adventure Charlie Chan of the Honolulu police force crack detective and worldwide celebrity finds himself in England and accepts a case where he has to find a murderer in 65 hours to save an innocent man from the gallows the action takes place in a wealthy country home where there is more than one dead body the obligatory assault on Chan himself misleading clues an
The love that lifted a man to paradise…and hurled him back to earth again! This film is based on W. Somerset Maugham's classic novel of a young medical student's strange infatuation with a cheap and vulgar cockney waitress (Bette Davis). The infatuation turns into a mutually destructive affair. This is the film that brought Bette Davis to fame and secured her future roles as a tough domineering woman. Fine acting by the entire cast with Davis an absolute knock-out.
Of Human Bondage: The love that lifted a man to paradise and hurled him back to earth again! This film is based on W. Somerset Maugham's classic novel of a young medical student's strange infatuation with a cheap and vulgar cockney waitress (Bette Davis). The infatuation turns into a mutually destructive affair. This is the film that brought Bette Davis to fame and secured her future roles as a tough domineering woman. Fine acting by the entire cast with Davis an absolu
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