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Reviews
Train to Tombstone (1950)
A kind of perfection
I saw this movie in the late '50's on a double feature with A STAR IS BORN,fo all things. And it still stands out sharp in my mind as the worst movie i have ever seen. The cast was a set of cliches as a kind of ripoff of Stagecoach, and there was only one set, the interior of a railroad car. All the action was out the windows, and entirely by rear projection. That was so bad that when the Indians swept past the windows, they must have been 50 feet high. And when someone sent a flock of sheep to stop the train, you saw a flock of sheep, but no tracks, no train. The incompetence of the production reached a kind of perfection.
The Razor's Edge (1946)
sense of the times
I recently saw The Razor'as edge for the first time on TCM, and what surprised me was that though the film begins in 1919, there is no sense whatsoever that we are not in the late 1940's. Of course it is difficult for a movie to recreate an era only 15 years earlier, but there is no concession to fashion, hair styles, or anything that suggests the Roaring Twenties. In the first scene, the band is playing songs of the era, but with 1940's sound and arrangements. Sometimes lack of time sense doesn't matter, but here I think it does.
I'm not sure why Eastern Wisdom has held such a fascination for intellectual writers of the era. I wish some seekers would go off looking for enlightenment within our own culture. The movie reminds me of Lost Horizon where the protagonist goes seeking enlightenment in a thoroughly bogus East.
Argo (2012)
This is the second filming of this story
The film is well done, and exciting, though Ben Affleck made clear in interviews that the actual rescue was not quite so dramatic but was punched up for dramatic purposes. It worked for me! Affleck does a nice job of subduing his own personality in the character he portrays. It is also clear from the pictures the end that the filmmakers were careful to recreate the scenes as closely as possible from archival pictures and videos. Affleck and company did a good job of balancing history and the artistic needs of a commercial movie.
Does anybody know the name of the earlier version of this same rescue? I saw it on video cassette in 1991 but don't remember the name of it or who starred in it.
Flame of the Islands (1955)
A superior screenplay, filmed cheaply on location in the Bahamas.
Flame of the Islands is usually described as a story of a woman and the men in her life, but the heart of the story is about three women: Rosalind Dee, (Yvonne de Carlo); the woman of whose husband she was supposedly mistress, (Frieda Inescort), and the mother of the boy she had loved as a teenager, (Barbara O'Neil). Rosalind is a good woman corrupted by a desire for revenge over the woman who had destroyed her chance for happiness by separating her from the boy she loved as a teenager, but her revenge, small as it is, redounds on people she has every wish not to hurt. That part of the story is fascinating, and one could wish that the story were used in a more substantial production. Unfortunately, the movie ends with a bit of cheap melodrama not related to that storyline. James Arness plays a lay preacher, and one can't help loving a movie with the line: "OK, boys, stand up. Sing "Jesus Loves Me."
The film has a fine score by Nelson Riddle, incorporating two songs sung by Yvonne de Carlo which are wry commentary on the plot.