Kalter Wind im August

Impressive and bold B movie with a fantastic performance from a glowing, Lola Albright. A name that meant nothing to me and although I see she is still working today, her medium has mainly been TV, but why? Maybe this film was just a bit too strong for the time and she never got the attention she should have from it. The story of a young guy with an older woman, nothing new but here dealt with particularly well with no moralising. Much is clearly low budget stuff with some pretty poor 'teenage' scenes but all the scenes involving the gradual seduction and those of the later striptease are shot with astonishing attention to detail and sizzle before you. From her very first advances with the naked foot upon his hand to the startling, aforementioned, strip, these are some of the most sensually shot scenes I have seen in film. Ending is uncompromising too, which comes as a relief.

I was not yet alive when A COLD WIND IN AUGUST made its initial theatrical go-round, but I suspect that it generated a magnitude of criticism during those less permissive times(in response to its ostensibly unprincipled premise and erotically-charged underpinnings). It's a rather prurient melodrama, but far too gracefully formulated to come off sleazy or sexually exploitive in its portraiture of a brassy mid-life burlesque queen who finds herself in a fiery romantic entanglement with a giddy seventeen year-old boy.

Considering that this film is a product of a far less lenient America, it smolders with audacious sexual intimations which surely raised more than a few eyebrows in '61. Still, it generally approaches its subject matter with sincerity and sensitivity...this is a film of uncommon veracity for its time, and could be mentioned in the same breath as BABY-DOLL, LOLITA, and THE NAKED KISS, films which their era's more priggish types may have found to be of questionable social graces. The makers of these and similarly polemical films should be admired for their fortitude in the face of stifling puritan objection.

Commanding performances are provided by two criminally under-appreciated talents, Albright and Marlowe. They have a unique and entirely believable chemistry on screen which is keynote to the film's success. Joe DeSantis shines as well in the role of Marlowe's cautious but understanding widower father.

A COLD WIND has its share of forgivable blemishes, and it may come off rather stilted, possibly even campy to some with its fifty-year vintage...regardless, it was/is a brave undertaking, professionally appointed and deserving of greater appreciation.

7.5/10

This is Lola Albright's all- time greatest work. It is in fact, a work of B-movie brilliance...an art masterpiece if there ever was one. Lola Albright gave the best performance of her career in this movie about the seduction of a younger man. She is at all times believable and convincing...a stripper who can be loving and kind one moment, and a pleasure-seeking, self-centered older woman the next. To be honest, when she is seen on stage in a devil's costume, I thought that the rug was pulled out from beneath me. Talk about provocative, alluring, and extremely beautiful, Lola Albright is "all of the above" and then some. This movie should go down as one of the very best B movies of the 20th century...a title that it justly deserves.

I shall never forget my excitement at first viewing this probably never revived film. Scott Marlowe and Lola Albright were both excellent.There was a general feeling around New York that we were seeing the birth of a new star in Scott Marlowe and that Lola Albright was definitely moving out of TV detective films into a much higher bracket.Instead the director moved into a lifetime of steady but highly inconsistent popular TV productions and Marlowe made only one more film, which had virtually no distribution, before disappearing for over a decade.

I admit this low budget effort,at times,strives too hard for slice of life realism. There is a really awful scene with Albright, her older boyfriend and a neighbor where everybody tries so hard to make it look as if they were not acting that they don't.

But that is neither here nor there.I can not remember a Spring-September romance that carried more impact.That the gritty protagonists are an Italian-American street kid and a stripper adds to the incredible and unexpected poignancy of the situation.Too bad Marlowe and Albright weren't allowed to shoot five more when they were on a hot winning streak but they needed only one such performance to insure that some younger generation will feel the answering cord.This should do really well on DVD reissue and high time.

Kael in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," Waters in (I think) "Crackpot." Ever since I saw Kael's comment (circa 1970), I've wanted to see this. I finally tracked down a DVD pirated from TBS. And it was worth the wait. Yes, it's florid and overstated, but so is opera, and this is the film equivalent of "Traviata": older, "experienced" woman, young man who can't deal with her experience. It reminded me of "Who Killed Teddy Bear?" in that it's another film that is much better than it should be. I can't really say that Albright gives a good performance, but it is a great one, at least in its impact. Her lack of depth feels right for this character, more right than a more subtle performance would have been. It's a paradox of this kind of film.

The film is also surprising frank for 1961. No euphemisms here. Even the boy's father understands what's going on, and is amazingly understanding about it. It's adult, not just in its subject matter, but in its refusal to be coy about it.

I do want to point out one problem with the film. Scott Marlowe's character is supposed to be 17, but Marlowe was about 29 when he made this. Albright was only 7 years older, so you don't get the effect of the age difference, and Marlowe just feels too old to be so innocent. But it's not a killer problem.