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We love this Fritz Lang western even though it’s not particularly good; only in hindsight do we realize that the brilliant director’s intentions may have been compromised. High-key lighting does Marlene Dietrich no favors, but she scores good scenes performing with Arthur Kennedy (revenged crazed cowpoke) and Mel Ferrer (tranquilized gunslinger). Lang fans will be impressed by the gaudy, over-bright restored Technicolor, and we can always blame Howard Hughes.

Rancho Notorious

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1952 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 89 min. / Available at Amazon.com / General site Wac-Amazon / Street Date January 10, 2023 / 21.99

Starring: Marlene Dietrich, Arthur Kennedy, Mel Ferrer, Lloyd Gough, William Frawley, Jack Elam, George Reeves, Frank Ferguson, Dan Seymour, John Doucette, Dick Elliott, Russell Johnson, Charlita.

Cinematography: Hal Mohr

Production Designer: Wiard Ihnen

Dietrich’s wardrobe designed by: Don Loper

Editorial Supervisor: Otto Ludwig

Original Music: Emil Newman

Written by Daniel Taradash, Silvia Richards

Produced by Howard Welsch

Directed...

Prepare to let your jaw drop: Jennifer Jones and Charlton Heston’s sleazy bucolic ‘romance’ comes off as two-way sex harassment, with suggestive one-liners that make us cringe. Are there other pictures like this? Is this where dolts came to believe that women wanted to be treated like stupid squeeze toys? The great King Vidor directed, with no sign of intentional satire — the bizarre, eventually violent Southern-set melodrama is a one-of-a-kind grotesque spectacle.

Ruby Gentry

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1952 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 82 min. / Street Date April 24, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.96

Starring: Jennifer Jones, Charlton Heston, Karl Malden, Tom Tully, James Anderson, Josephine Hutchinson, Phyllis Avery, Barney Phillips.

Cinematography: Russell Harlan

Film Editor: Terry Morse

Original Music: Heinz Roemheld

Written by Silvia Richards from a story by Arthur Fitz-Richard

Produced by Joseph Bernhard, King Vidor

Directed by King Vidor

I have two basic thoughts on 1952’s Ruby Gentry. First,...

Had Ruby Gentry been penned several years earlier, it would have most likely been swooped up as a star vehicle for Joan Crawford, especially as this screenplay was penned by Silvia Richards, whose script for 1947’s Possessed gave the larger-than-life star one of her three Academy Award nominations. Instead, this luridly tinged tale of backwoods swamp lust serves as a proto-type for the hysterical class issues later sharpened in the theatrical melodrama of Tennessee Williams’ adaptations, and while too tawdry for 1950s sensibilities, this late period King Vidor doesn’t have the same camp value as the ill-fated Beyond the Forest…...

Joan Crawford Movie Star Joan Crawford movies on TCM: Underrated actress, top star in several of her greatest roles If there was ever a professional who was utterly, completely, wholeheartedly dedicated to her work, Joan Crawford was it. Ambitious, driven, talented, smart, obsessive, calculating, she had whatever it took – and more – to reach the top and stay there. Nearly four decades after her death, Crawford, the star to end all stars, remains one of the iconic performers of the 20th century. Deservedly so, once you choose to bypass the Mommie Dearest inanity and focus on her film work. From the get-go, she was a capable actress; look for the hard-to-find silents The Understanding Heart (1927) and The Taxi Dancer (1927), and check her out in the more easily accessible The Unknown (1927) and Our Dancing Daughters (1928). By the early '30s, Joan Crawford had become a first-rate film actress, far more naturalistic than...

During the editing (which is when I really start to see the film), I saw that it was Hitchcock who had guided us through the writing and Lang who guided us through the shooting: especially his last films, the ones where he leads the spectator in one direction before he pushes them in another completely different direction, in a very brutal, abrupt way.

—Jacques Rivette on his Secret défense (1998), fro http://www.jacques-rivette.com/

Long before the much-vaunted, high-concept ‘mind-game movies’ like Memento (2000), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) or Inception (2010), there was Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door… (1947). The film is like a broken puzzle at every level, virtually begging us to rearrange its pieces and find its key. Indeed, one almost needs to formulate a ‘hypothesis of the stolen film,’ Ruiz-style, since the movie we have before us is not quite the one Lang and his talented writer Silvia Richards (Possessed,...

Possessed (1947) Direction: Curtis Bernhardt Cast: Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Raymond Massey, Geraldine Brooks, Stanley Ridges, John Ridgely, Moroni Olsen Screenplay: Silvia Richards and Ranald MacDougall; from a story by Rita Weiman Oscar Movies Van Heflin, Joan Crawford, Possessed From the moment we see her shuffling across town in a comatose stupor to the homicidal climax, Possessed is Joan Crawford's picture all the way. And once you get past some of its contrived psychobabble, this Curtis Bernhardt-directed melodrama is also one of her best. [Note: Spoilers ahead.] In Possessed, Crawford plays Louise Howell, a private-duty nurse inexplicably obsessed with David Sutton, a cynical, hard-drinking mechanical engineer played by Van Heflin. That brings up my biggest objection to Possessed: the casting of the bland Heflin in a role that required an actor with a certain amount of animal magnetism. This viewer, for one, was unable to understand what made him put the...