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This long episode packs amount of astounding of surprises, thriller, mystery and concerns about a battle of wits of Sherlock against Charles Augustus Milverton, a master blackmailer. This is an excellent overlong runtime of Jeremy Brett-Holmes series. In the film appear usual Holmes's cannon as Inspector Lestrade and Mrs Hudson, though no Moriarty, however is a greatest villain, Charles Augustus.<br /><br />It's a genuine ripping yarn with intrigue, thrills, and suspense, including an exciting final twist. This is a particular Sherlock movie but we find to Holmes falling in love with a servant, kissing, crying and even robbing. This time along with the episode ¨Scandal in Boheme¨ with Irene Adler, result to be the only one which Holmes is enamored. Top-notch Brett performance, he alongside Peter Cushing are the best Sherlock TV , while in the cinema is forever Basil Rathbone. Brett performs as a resolutive, headstrong, impetuous sleuth. Here Doctor Watson isn't a comic, botcher, and clumsy pal personified by Nigel Bruce, but is an astute and cunning partner well incarnated by Edward Hardwicke, a perfect counterpoint of Brett. Casting is frankly magnificent, special mention to Robert Hardy as astute nasty. Hardy, today famous by role as Cornelius Fudge in Harry Potter, is a veteran actor with forty years of career and with several success such as, The 10th kingdom and Winston Churchill. Furthermore appear secondaries actors with terrific performances, Nickolas Grace, Sophie Gordon, Serena Gordon, among others. The movie gets a colorful atmosphere , the London streets and 221 Baker Street's house are well designed. The motion picture is well directed by Peter Hammond, director of various episodes. It's a must see for the Arthur Conan Doyle fans.
1pos
Okay, so there is a front view of a Checker taxi, probably late 1930s model. It has the great triangular shaped headlights. There also is a DeSoto cab in this black and white, character driven, almost a musical love gone wrong story.<br /><br />The real pleasure here is the look at 1940s room interiors and fashions and hotel elevators. The hair styles, male and female are gorgeous. If Dolly Parton had Victor Mature's hair she could have made it big. There is an artist loft that would be the envy of every Andy Warhol wannabe.<br /><br />If you watch this expecting a great Casablanca storyline or Sound of Music oom-pah-pah, you will be disappointed. There is a nice little story beneath the runway model approach in this film.<br /><br />My copy on DVD with another movie for $1 was very viewable. The title sequence was cute but not up there with Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or The Pink Panther. This was an RKO movie but it did not have the nice airplane logo that RKO used to use.<br /><br />I liked Victor Mature in One Million, B.C., and Sampson and Delilah and especially in Violent Saturday. See if you can find that one. He was wonderful in the comedy with Peter Sellers called Caccia Alla Volpe or After The Fox.<br /><br />Richard Carlson went on to do I Led Three Lives on TV in the early 1950s.<br /><br />Vic Mature was offered the part of Sampson's father in the remake of Sampson and Delilah. He supposedly was asked if he would have any problems playing the part of the father since he was so well known as Sampson. Victor replied, "If the money is right, I'll play Sampson's mother." <br /><br />Tom Willett
1pos
Looking for Quo Vadis at my local video store, I found this 1985 version that looked interesting. Wow! It was amazing! Very much a Ken Russell kind of film -quirky, stylized, very artistic, and of course "different." Nero was presented not so much as evil incarnate, but as a wacky, unfulfilled emperor who would rather have had a circus career. He probably wondered why on earth he was put in the position of "leading" an empire -it wasn't much fun, and fun is what he longed for. Klause Maria Bandaur had a tremendous time with this role and played it for all it was worth. Yes, Nero persecuted the Christians with a vengeance; one of many who did so. At one point one of his henchmen murmurs: "No one will ever understand we were simply protecting ourselves." He got that right.
1pos
Do NOT judge this production by the 2-hour version that was released on VHS in the US, which is a choppy and incomprehensible mess. I had the pleasure of watching the full-length 6-hour version available on DVD from the UK, and was spellbound. The deliberate pace and growing sense of menace are mesmerizing, as is the amazing visual and aural landscape; this is an ancient Rome we have never seen before, and far more authentic than most.<br /><br />Director Franco Rossi was justly celebrated for his 1968 mini-series of The Odyssey, and this mini-series is equally powerful. Just as Bekim Fehmiu became the screen's best Ulysses, so Klaus Maria Brandauer may be the screen's best Nero. Now, I am hoping someday to see Rossi's version of The Aeneid (Eneide) that was broadcast on Italian TV in 1971.<br /><br />I am undecided which version of QUO VADIS is more powerful, this one or the Polish mini-series from 2001; each has different virtues, and in many ways they complement one another. Certainly, either one towers over that Hollywood camp-riot starring Peter Ustinov.
1pos
Methinks the best screen version of Quo Vadis? ever made. Well, yeah, the plot is not so strong and evident as in the book, sometimes meandering and loosing its suspense among aesthetic subtleties. But the film is really and beautifully "strange", has an enigma and style, that other versions - with R.Taylor and the new one from Poland - definitely lack. It has the air of Roman decadence, the beauty of declining paganism and infant Christianity. At least I believe it has). Brandauer, Forrest and Syudov did excellent job in portraying their characters. Forrest's Petronius seems to be the biggest success of the cast (let alone Brandauer who is the one of the greatest actors ever) and accumulates the very essence of this dying world (IMHO). That's it. That is the way it happened, guys... ))) IMHO
1pos
Ironically for a play unavailable on film or video for so long, ARMS AND THE MAN has remained fairly constantly available on stage over the years since its debut in 1894 - in no small part because it has aged so well as a solid satire on the nature of heroism and the business of war. Whenever the world sinks into strife, ARMS AND THE MAN seems to soar as ever more timely and relevant.<br /><br />This is the play which Oscar Strauss converted (leaving out most of Shaw's best ideas) into the successful operetta, THE CHOCOLATE SOLDIER (when Hollywood got to *that,* they left out the last vestiges of Shaw rather than pay him for the rights - he was, by then, an Oscar winner in his own right). While the best of Shaw has always been his ideas and his dialogue rather than his bare plots, in ARMS AND THE MAN, the plot sparkles as well and the master manages happy endings for all concerned. <br /><br />Young Raina (Helena Bonham Carter), daughter of an officer and the wealthiest man in her town, is betrothed to a dashing officer in the Bulgarian cavalry and all seems well until a bedraggled Swiss mercenary (Pip Torrens) from the other side climbs up her drainpipe fleeing from the battle where his army has been routed. As usual in a Shaw satire, nothing is as it first appears and societal conventions are stood on their head in the light of simple - and not so simple reason. There are no "good guys" or "bad guys," just people of a variety of classes getting by on the best of their wits - just like life only better - and naturally with Shaw, the wit is finely honed from all concerned.<br /><br />The early (1932) motion picture version (from Shaw's own screenplay) of this most traditional and traditionally funny of Shaw's stage satires, and one of his first to make a real hit on this side of the Atlantic, has long been among the missing. Shaw didn't sell the screen-rights to his plays - only licensed them for 5 year periods, and it appeared that with rapidly evolving sound technology making 1932 films look primitive only a few years later, Shaw did not renew the license to show it. Consequently, we're immensely in the BBC's debt for finally putting out their 1987 broadcast version in a DVD box with nine other sparkling plays. (Somewhat sadly, PYGMALION, that many view as Shaw's best, comes off least well on this set in a production with Lynn Redgrave and James Villiers.)<br /><br />Even paired, as it is on its DVD, with the less impressive one act, A MAN OF DESTINY, ARMS AND THE MAN makes for a real treasure.<br /><br />Helena Bonham Carter went on, after cutting her teeth on televised roles like this, to a major film career that will bring many viewers to this early role. They should not be disappointed, for Ms. Carter gives a performance in line with the layered innocence audiences have come to expect from her, but under James Cellan Jones' somewhat pedestrian direction (and despite the BBC's uniformly beautiful and well observed physical production), the role's mischievous fire (and her outrage at being underestimated in the last act) is banked at only about 80% of it's potential. <br /><br />Much the same can be said of the real star of the piece, Pip Torrens, as Bluntschli the "Switzer." It's a fine, appealing performance, but doesn't go for the physical comedy implicit in the early scene where the young soldier can barely stay awake despite his mortal peril.<br /><br />These reservations notwithstanding, this is a solid production of a wonderful play transferred to the small screen with aplomb. It deserves to be seen widely and, ideally, prompt an even livelier big screen remake with the style and zest of the recent remake of Wilde's AN IDEAL HUSBAND. Virtually *any* ARMS AND THE MAN is to be cherished, and with a lot of luck perhaps we'll even eventually get to see the original 1932 version. 'Till one or the other surfaces, this production will please anyone who loves good Shaw.
1pos
With few exceptions, most of George Bernard Shaw's plays have virtually disappeared from the theater these days. Too arch, too talky appears to be the general verdict. This BBC version of one of Shaw's funniest plays doesn't refute that verdict. It is certainly arch and talky, but it is also wonderful. And because of the quality of British theater, it is perfectly cast with actors whom -- with the exception of Helena Bonham Carter -- most of us have probably never heard of. Carter is splendid as the Bulgarian girl who shelters the professional "chocolate soldier" (Pip Torrens) and later falls in love with him. One might quarrel with the especially ridiculous interpretation of Sergius (Patrick Ryecart), the Bulgarian cavalry officer who led the charge into the enemy's lines and succeeded only because the enemy had the wrong ammunition for its machine guns. However, the role invites over-acting and Ryecart was obviously told to over-act. The other players are letter perfect. Carter as the self-dramatizing Bulgarian "aristocrat" and Torrens as the Swiss soldier-of-fortune are at the play's center, of course, and they are wonderful. Yes, "Arms and the Man" comes across as a filmed play. But you're unlikely ever to see a Shaw film that doesn't betray its origin. The plots are generally clever. However, Shaw is all about the dialog. The action is minimal (even in St. Joan) and the sets are immaterial. Enjoy this for what it is.
1pos
Comedies often have the unfortunate reputation of having little real depth. Arms and the Man, proves that notion to be false. Shaw's play is full of comedic drama, combining an entertaining plot with true philosophical depth.<br /><br />On one level, Arms and the Man is a successful, and somewhat unique, romantic comedy. The young, melodramatic, and superficial Raina comes from a military family deeply involved in a war; her fiancé and her father are both military officers. She is shocked, one night by the arrival of an enemy soldier. She rescues him, knowing that she'll have to keep the incident a secret from her family forever, and the soldier eventually leaves. Of course, once the war is over, that soldier comes back, forcing each of the primary characters to reevaluate their values and their relationships.<br /><br />It is quite interesting how Shaw layers meaning within the rather standard comedic plot. Shaw manages to comment on class constructs, on the absurdity of war, and even on the nature of love. And, of course, he does this with the Shavian wit and within a satisfying plot. There is so much here to think about that I think a lot can be missed in a single viewing. Arms and the Man is excellent comedic theater and is definitely one of Shaw's best works.<br /><br />"Arms and the Man" is both an amusing and thought-provoking movie that retains its relevance even today, more than a century after it was first conceived. Shaw mocks at the popular theories on war and love and combines a military satire with a taunt on love and family structure. The play has flashing wit, buoyant humor and bitter sarcasms. A good example of Shaw's dialog is the statement by Captain Bluntschli to Serguis: "I'm a professional soldier: I fight when I have to, and am very glad to get out of it when I haven't to. You're only an amateur; you think fighting is an amusement". Indeed as a Swiss hotel-keeper's son, Bluntschli had no reason to be involved in war and it is in this absurdity that Shaw questions patriotic sentiments. Shaw explores the whole concept of war and the military from both sides of the struggle and in the end shows that the feelings in both camps are not that different.<br /><br />The dialog and sarcasm used towards the common notions of life are entangled with a gentle assurance of the movement of the story towards a fairytale ending. The end where all characters are rendered happy and lovers change and love shifts is what underlines the essence of this drama as a comedy. This is a movie that sustains its image of possessing a universal appeal and is still appropriate today when the concepts of war and patriotism and love and marriage have changed dramatically. Shaw's "Arms and the Man" should maintain its relevance as long as there is love and war.
1pos
'Arms and the Man' is one of Shaw's funniest plays if handled correctly, and this production does a good enough job. Helena Bonham-Carter, pre-film stardom, is Raina, the daughter of a military family, who has a peacock of a fiancé (Patrick Ryecart), and who shelters a soldier from the enemy (Pip Torrens) during a raid on the town.<br /><br />Full of colour and energy, this production rips along at a good pace, and if Bonham-Carter and Patsy Kensit as the maid are outshone a bit by the rest of the cast, they still hold their ground. Kika Markham and Dinsdale Landen as the parents are delightful, and the whole play is generally a happy one.<br /><br />Highly recommended.
1pos
This could be difficult to for some people to get into, being used to Hollywood production styles. The directing is uninspired, apparently simply a filming of the stage set-up, and the audio quality is bad here and there (the rustling of people's clothes occasionally competes with their voices, etc.).<br /><br />My friends and I started watching without knowing what to expect, and the first scene almost put us off. It seemed very stagy and cheesy. Then we picked up on the tone of the content, and really started to enjoy ourselves.<br /><br />It is very funny, despite some corniness. Definitely give it a chance if you appreciate great dialog. Also, Helena Bonham Carter is adorable, of course.
1pos
The movie has very much the feel of a play right from the start - I think it would make a better play than a movie because the set and dramatization make a movie version seem a bit too artificial. But, still, it's carried out fairly well, and the story & especially the dialogue are interesting. They've taken the dialogue pretty much exactly as is from the actual play. Perhaps it's a good introduction to Shaw's plays.<br /><br />The main character Raina has her head in the clouds & and a flair for the dramatic, and Helena Bonham Carter's acting does a good job here. Her fiancé, Serges, is a bit too cartoonish when he is really supposed to be an extremely handsome dashing figure. Her parents are entertaining enough.
1pos
One of my favorite films for a number of years was "Last Action Hero"; unfortunately, Arnold Schwarznegger decided to spoil my fun by becoming a corrupt scumbag politician; so now I can't bear any film he may had a hand in.<br /><br />The Adventures of Jake Speed actually toys with some themes similar to those in Last...Hero; so I was pleased to find it on DVD, so I could watch these themes played out so well.<br /><br />Despite the "plot-within-the-plot" involving white slavery during an African nation's civil war, this is not an action movie. The plot that the "plot-within-a-plot" is within, is actually about a question that the film has no intention to resolve: Is Jake Speed a real person that is helping the heroine save her sister from the white-slave trader; or is he actually a fictional character (which means that the heroine has somehow entered the universe that really only exists in a series of pulp novels)? I suggest that this is not all that clearly defined in the film, and that Wayne Crawford and Andrew Lane are perfectly aware of this. The film thus becomes a presentation of what audiences may want from such a fictional "adventure-story" universe. That's actually a rich theme, the potential heaviness of which is lightened by the film's amiable and campy sense of humor.<br /><br />There are weaknesses to the film - primarily it's cinematography, which makes the film look like a TV show. And the pacing does sag on occasion.<br /><br />But I really like these characters, and I enjoy the adventure they live, however silly. And I just find fascinating the idea that this adventure is actually taking place in a novel.<br /><br />Holds up under multiple viewings -m good show!
1pos
<br /><br />The first thing I have to say is that I own Jake Speed. I've seen it at least 10 times. This movie is one of the most fun movies ever made. The film begins with Margaret (Karen Kopins) trying to find her sister. Her sister was kidnapped in Paris and the family has heard nothing. Along comes Jake Speed (Wayne Crawford), telling her exactly where her sister is and making an offer to find her. Jake Speed is a hero. He doesn't work for money because he just wants to help and have a good adventure. His partner (Dennis Christopher) follows him around and writes their adventures into novels. This film is a great adventure. It's hilarious, it's action-packed, it's just great. I guess it's a cult film with a very small cult following. Crawford is perfect as Jake Speed and throws out some one-liners that you'll never forget. Kopins and Christopher are also good as the girl and the sidekick, respectively. John Hurt, the guy who's stomach blew up in Alien, plays the devilish, pervertish villian which just adds to the fun. In many ways, this film is similar to Indiana Jones, in some ways it's similar to James Bond films. Maybe it should have been called Indiana Bond but whatever it's title is, it's a very enjoyable film.
1pos
This film is harmless escapist fun. Something the recent Tomb Raider film lacked. I can't wait to get the DVD. How can people give this a low score and still go and see Titanic without a guilty conscience I do not know. Anything with Karen Kopins in her underwear has got to rate an extra point or two!
1pos
"Jake Speed" is a fine movie with a wonderful message. It has its flaws of course. At times it's a little slow. It introduces its villain too far into the story. It's action is paced at the rate of a snail's heartbeat. It has a Z-grade cast (Although I've always admired the work of Karen Kopins, who has the straight-laced good looks of Sandra Bullock).<br /><br />But with all this going against it, "Jake Speed" really is inspiring, thanks to a charming script by Wayne Crawford(who plays the title role) and Andrew Lane.<br /><br />Why do I find it so inspiring? Because it says to me "Hey, why not try to be a good person."<br /><br />The story is essentially a "stranger in a strange land" premise, that is good-and-heroic Jake Speed is placed in the real world where bad things happen to good people. Jake is more than a Boy Scout. He's more than a knight in shining armor. Jake Speed is the patron saint of optimism in a dirty, mean and evil world.<br /><br />It's because of this that "Jake Speed" really needed to be a hit. It has a great message that should have gotten out to Hollywood and then to the rest of the world.<br /><br />Imagine a movie industry that really pushed itself to portray good and decent people. I'm not saying that we should be watching the Waltons in every theater at the cineplex, but that it would be nice if more movies such as "Jake Speed" would get a chance. ("Due South," a TV show about a Canadian Mountie, is a good comparison of what can be done to brighten up American entertainment.)<br /><br />Sure, "Jake Speed" has violence, blood and guns, but the overall message is that if you try hard enough to be a good person, you'll beat the forces of evil every time. 10/14/99
1pos
I enjoyed this movie as a kid when it came out, and to this day still do. A simple story involving the search for a kidnapped girl and an adventurer literally straight out of paperback lore. It has actors that were more recognizable back in the day. This shouldn't keep the viewer from giving it a whirl. Wayne Crawford stars as the main character Jake Speed. Sure, it might bite from certain elements of Romancing the Stone, and Indiana Jones. But this movie is done well enough to keep it out of the cellar. I am surprised not too many people know about it. It must have been overshadowed by other movies in the theaters back in '86. I watched it back then on cable TV. It might be hard to find since it's out of print on both VHS and DVD. I managed to get a DVD from ebay at less than 8 bucks! Cool flick.
1pos
Most people (36) gave this movie a 10 and those who don't are being too critical or maybe expected something else. This is one of my favorite movies from the 80's, it grows on you, and has it all. I just got it on DVD and 20 years later it still does not disappoint, having plenty of action, drama, romance, and even comedy. Add to that the great car chases, automatic weapon shootouts and lots of stuff blowing up and you have a fun, edge of your seat experience! You will even be humming or whistling the main theme song for days after seeing this. <br /><br />You can watch this movie with your wife/gf and you will both enjoy it lots. The premise is that of a paperback book hero, like Doc. Savage, really existing and helping people fight evil so he can write the story is almost true to life here. The actor Jake Speed is also a director, producer and writer of many films. In THIS film Jake Speed (the character) is an Indiana Jones adventurer type, he usually uses his head to get out of sticky situations but will sometimes resorts to brute firepower (yay!,and sheer dumb luck too!). Keep an eye out for his one "James Bond" hi-tech equipment, the ultimate road warrior SUV dropping out of the sky.<br /><br />The heroine is the very beautiful young love interest from the early Jim Carey vampire movie "Once Bitten" and here she is a little older and still a knockout even compared to her teenage blonde little sister.<br /><br />The bad guys are "real bad" men and are the worst lowlife villainous scum you love to hate. The ending is just perfect and can stand alone or invite a sequel, sadly never made - but you can just imagine what would happen next!<br /><br />You have to see this movie just because it will entertain and amuse you and that's worth the price of a ticket.
1pos
Ever wonder where the ideas for romance novels and other paper back released come from? According to 'Jake Speed' they are based on real people, living out the adventures they write about and publish. This movie is quality family entertainment, moderate amounts of violence, and skimpy clothes at the worst. The language is is also not a problem, and the jokes are funny at all levels. This is a 'Austin Powers' look at 'Indian Jones', without the over-the-top antics of Michael Myers. I highly recommend this film for kids in the 10 to 15 range.
1pos
I know the film snobs are snorting. But if you're looking for a surprisingly fun ride through the B-movie jungle, try "Jake Speed".<br /><br />A little thin at times, but its one-liners and the location more then make up for this. John Hurt(God love him), seems to be having fun doing his role as the ultra evil white slaver. The nemesis of Crawfords, Jake Speed. He adds a dimension to the film that only a pro like Hurt could provide. Crawford and Dennis Christopher( Jakes sidekick) are a good team,although you do wonder why they both put up with each other.However ,together both Crawford and Christopher portray a team that is just so much fun that, if you can get over yourself for a moment, you may find yourself acting like a kid again at the situations and the inherent suspense they provide.The delicious Karen Kopins does a great job as the damsel in distress that is more concerned about the motives of her rescuer then her tormentor.<br /><br />I have yet to find a movie that is as much fun without getting preachy,or bogging down the movie by trying too hard. Not every movie has to be the latest "Citizen Kane". And trust me,Wells was an original. So lets remember that sometimes, movies are for fun.Not social commentary or attempting to sway an audience politically. But just for the sheer fun of being alive and living in a time when our hero's live in a celluloid dimension.
1pos
Jake Speed (1986) was an amusing parody of Indiana Jones and other adventurer films that were popular during the eighties. Wayne Crawford stars as Jake Speed, an adventurer who's always battling evil doers wherever he goes. With his assistant Desmond Floyd (Dennis Christopher) they globe trot looking for some action (and some decent story lines). The duo meet a young woman named Margaret (Karen Kopins) who's sister has been kidnapped by an evil white slaver trader (John Hurt). Can she find and convince Jake and Desmond to help her rescue her sibling?<br /><br />A sappy and cheesy film that doesn't pretend to be something that it's not. I have to give this one a recommendation. That's if you enjoy movies that like to have fun and for those who don't take everything at face value.<br /><br />Recommended.
1pos
Jake Speed is a film that lacks one thing – a charismatic lead. Unfortunately that's something that really taints the entire movie and it's a shame because at heart it is an enjoyable action movie with a witty enough script and an interesting, if derivative, premise. Although it's genesis probably can be traced back to the success of the Indiana Jones trilogy – the film actually plays a little more like 'Romancing the Stone' albeit in reverse. It's not an author of romantic adventure fiction being led on an adventure by a character very much like one of her creations it is an adventure fiction character (who happens to chronicle his own adventures) leading an ordinary woman on one of his adventures.<br /><br />When a young woman goes missing in Paris, her sister Margaret (played by the appealing Karin Kopins) gets embroiled with pulp hero Jake Speed (Wayne Crawford) and his sidekick Dennis (Dennis Christopher) who both turn out to be real and very flawed individuals in an adventure that takes them into the heart of a civil war torn African state and ultimately into the clutches of two brothers the deliciously evil Sid (John Hurt) and his ridiculously camp sibling Maurice (Roy London). That's the plot – it's not labyrinthine and it's not complicated but the story that it tells doesn't require great depth.<br /><br />The action sequences are appealing to begin with and it's certainly true that the heroic trio are put through their paces (whether caught in battles between government and rebel forces or being dropped into a pit full of lions) and there are certainly some quite funny lines. However the film does seem to struggle to find an ending and unfortunately the action sequences that are quite appealing to begin with go nowhere and ultimately become a bit bland and irksome. This, however, may not have been such an issue if it was possible to like Jake Speed but due to Wayne Crawford's performance it becomes harder to really care what happens. Now I don't know if he was stretching himself a little thin as he was also the producer and writer of the movie or whether he's simply not a good actor (as I haven't seen him in much else) but he never really convinces as a roguish mixture of Doc Savage, Indiana Jones and Jack Colton.<br /><br />This is a shame because most of the other characters play their roles well – Karen Kopins is funny and convincing and her character shares some nice banter with Jake (unfortunately it never convinces). Dennis Christopher is perfect as the archetypal sidekick and John Hurt plays the part with camp relish – almost as if he were in a sixties episode of Batman. He strides about his few scenes growling in a ridiculous cockney accent putting in a performance that almost belongs in another film. Sid is no Moriarty (he is presented as Jake's nemesis from a number of his previous adventures / books) but he is always fun to watch.<br /><br />Jake Speed tries to channel the same fun B movie spirit as 'Night of the Comet' (a film produced by Crawford a few years beforehand) and almost succeeds but misses – which is a shame because Jake would have been good to watch in a few more adventures and may have been served better by a television series.<br /><br />I would recommend this out of curiosity appeal but ultimately it leaves a bitter taste because most of the elements were there to make something genuinely good.
1pos
Quite simply the best reality show ever made. The first two seasons (the only ones that matter) are on Hulu. I challenge anyone to watch the first three episodes of season 1 and not like it. I guarantee you will finish watching the season. Then I guarantee that you will watch season 2. <br /><br />Other quick reasons to watch it: 1. Anderson Cooper is hilarious 2. The locations in Europe are awesome 3. The games are mentally challenging 4. It's very interactive 5. In one episode a player responds to another player's desperate, "I'm trying as hard as I can!" with an equally desperate, "Not necessarily." <br /><br />Can you figure out...Who Is The Mole?
1pos
Honestly, this is the best reality show anyone has ever come up with. In order to win the money you have to actually be INTELLIGENT. Not only that you've got to be brave, athletic, cunning, etc. It actually requires skill. Not like some lame-ass shows that are on these days. And yet, they only have two seasons of it! Bull..they need to bring this show back!! <br /><br />Although, they'll have a hard time pulling Anderson Cooper away from CNN. He was great.<br /><br />But seriously, it was an amazing show. You never knew who would be going when. And it was so much fun trying to figure out the mole yourself! It was a show you could actually play yourself if you wanted to!<br /><br />BRING BACK THE MOLE!!!! BRING BACK THE MOLE!!!!
1pos
I think a great many viewers missed entirely the fact that this is obviously a parody of western films.<br /><br />This is not a bad movie - it is a clever tongue in cheek take on westerns. I don't believe this film was taking itself seriously for a moment.<br /><br />What makes this film even more unique is the fact it is centered around 4 strong, beautiful women, two of which are black, one Asian, and a Mexican/Hispanic character.<br /><br />These aren't your usual western women--they're tough--they can draw fast and shoot straight.<br /><br />They're so tough even the bartender is shaking when he pours their whiskey.<br /><br />The plot which moves this story along is typical of westerns--in the vein of "you shot my brother--so I'm gonna get you!" Only in this western, a woman's sister has been shot and she's out for vengeance on the gang who did it.<br /><br />So she goes and rounds up her old cronies from her bank robbing days.<br /><br />One of them, Maria, is not really all that interested in avenging Rachel's sister, but she is motived by the fact there's gold and jewelry hidden in the town where they're headed.<br /><br />There are a couple of scenes that don't quite make sense, not that they interfere that much, they can be ignored, but I wondered why they were there. So the film could use a little tightening, but over all, this is a well made film that has failed to find an audience that recognized what it is.<br /><br />My only disappointment was that the only lesbian in the film is a villain--of the "heroines", one is obviously straight, the others sexual orientations are never disclosed.<br /><br />7 Stars
1pos
The Gang of Roses. "Every rose has its thorns."<br /><br />A mix of old western and hip hop, blended perfectly together. The clothing styles, the scenery, and the plot are all suited to what the director wanted. <br /><br />Plot - in five years, they robbed twenty-seven banks and then vanished without a trace. Now, a small western town is under siege, and one of the first victims is Rachel's sister. The Rose Gang is ready to ride again. And this time it's personal.<br /><br />Rachel (Michael Calhoun), Chastity (Lil' Kim), Maria (Lisaraye), Zang Li (Marie Matiko) and Kim (Stacey Dash), five gunslinging women who split up after five years of riding together. When Rachel's sister is killed, she ends up rounding up her friends once again and riding on a trail of vengeance. <br /><br />A good, muck around version of western. (If you've seen Bad Girls, well this is a little bit better in the ways of the female characters).<br /><br />I gave it 10/10 because the characters, plot and scenery made it for me.
1pos
I disagree with previous comment about this movie. I think it was cute and fun and it carried a good message for young girls like my daughter. You don't have to dress like a cheap hooker to be cool. You can be smart and pretty and classy all at once.<br /><br />I think the cast was good and the story was fine for the target audience. All-in-all my wife, daughter (10) and I each thought it was a good movie. I certainly recommend it. It also has encouraged my daughter to start reading the original Nancy Drew mysteries which I am sure she will love much as I loved the Hardy Boys. <br /><br />It was a struggle to get her to sleep tonight because she wanted to start reading right away. I can't think of a better outcome for that movie than rekindling interest in that classic series.
1pos
I'm a 53 year-old college professor. I went with my wife and 12 year old daughter. We all enjoyed the movie. The film is original, witty, fast-paced and totally charming. The plot was easy enough for a 10 year old to follow, but twisty enough to keep an adult interested. I thought Emma Roberts did a superb job and the rest of the cast was just fine. My only criticism is that the Los Angeles sets were not as interesting as they should have been. They were functional, but nothing stood out. On the other hand, make-up, costume, lighting, cinematography, editing and directing were excellent. Altogether, I thought it was a totally enjoyable experience. I am disappointed that the professional critics (almost all adult males) savagely attacked the film. Apparently, they have something against films that portray strong, intelligent and independent young women. Their writings reveal more about their own sexist natures than anything about this wonderful family film. I recommend it strongly to every child and every parent.
1pos
I really enjoyed this movie. I am a single dad with a 17 year old daughter who is smart, athletic and talented. I WISH my girl applied herself so well to solving crimes and helping others! So for me, perhaps this is PG level Fantasyland. I read many Nancy Drew books in my teen years, long, long ago. Sure THIS character was ably played by Emma Roberts but did NOT resemble the Nancy Drew I recall from the books. That is due to script, not the acting.<br /><br />Emma is an adorable teen, playing a self-confident, industrious and proud character with good manners and good taste. She is not caught up in the trendy competitiveness around her. There are some weaknesses in the Plot, aside from not resembling the Nancy Drew of the Books, and trying to figure out what decade we're in. (like, what is that CAR, Anyway?) <br /><br />I read the IMDb overview before seeing the film, as I was researching Rachael Leigh Cook from other movies. This is not one of Her best roles, but I will continue looking for more of her films. Rachael was too old to play this lead, but does a fine job as the grown-up orphan central to the mystery.<br /><br />I am very disappointed in other reviews written here. Some expect perfect connection with the books, some expect more credible situations or adult action film. I got what I expected! Good entertainment well targeted to young teen girls, And their Fathers who want good kids with high standards of conduct and achievement. This is a Teen PG Movie, not James Bond! Which would YOU Want for a Role Model for YOUR Teenaged Daughter?
1pos
I have read over 100 of the Nancy Drew books, and if you are not bright enough to catch on yet, Nancy Drew the movie was of a YOUNGER Nancy Drew, not the 18-year-old that doesn't go to school that all of the books are about. This was when she was sixteen. So naturally, she would of not as been as smart as the one in the book considering she is only in the 10th grade. Other than that, I thought the movie was very cute. It was clean and appropriate for everyone. It was funny at times. I thought Emma Roberts did a great job. She was articulate, in character, and cute. I liked the awkwardness that Nancy and Ned had around each other because they obviously were not old enough to be in a serious relationship like they have in the books. It was a cute, PG movie that I throughly enjoyed because I, unlike most people my age, enjoy movies without sex, drugs, or profanity.
1pos
OK heres what I say: <br /><br />The movie was excellent. I am a huge Nancy fan and I have read all 1-56 original books and I went on to read more. I am now on 96. Beware of villains giving this movie a lower grade than it should have. All clues point to a wonderful movie! I loved the whole thing. So what Nancy is in current time. She is still old fashioned like she is in the books! People who haven't read more than 5 books are complaining about the view of Nancy. I have read all of them and I think Emma is perfect and that Nancy was perfect. I found parts of the movie spooky. I loved the exciting car chases and get aways. I loved the clues. I solved the mystery myself! It was really wonderful. I suggest you go see it since people who have been complaining know nothing of A what a good movie is and B about Nancy Drew. Go see it. It may not be Oscar worthy but its really a good movie.
1pos
It's a refreshing breath of air when a movie actually gives you a story line with a beginning, a middle, and a end, a nice, clever mystery, with an appealing heroine for all ages, who wins us over with her wit and charm. Andrew Fleming's film is indeed a modern marvel, a comeback to the good old reliable storytelling that was the norm in Hollywood. He puts away the over-reliance on special effects that now passes for entertainment and gives us a terrific film, with a very capable young actress, and a talented supporting cast.<br /><br />The film is based on the old books, but it has been given updated enough to put in this century; however, the props might be different, the heart still is a good mystery, and there is clever one here, one that ties the traditions of the old and the nuances of contemporary youth. Emma Roberts is an old fashioned girl, who believes in good behavior and respect for others; details that are sorely missing from today's films. She is still good enough to get boys' attentions but she also knows how present poise and self respect. She earns her medals by working hard and is not afraid to show a little guile when it is needed to achieve her goals.<br /><br />While taking a vacation to California, our heroine is drawn into the mystery of a Hollywood actress who was the victim of foul play; suddenly she is "visited" by her ghost and this sets off a series of events that might solve the mystery or result in something dreadful for herself. What makes the movie quite entertaining is the little details, as she discovers that her customary world is nothing compared to the California scene, and this is well presented, without resorting to unnecessary vulgar language or anything graphic or overtly sexual. Eventually, the director has enough control to make it all very palatable to all types of audiences, from the young ones to the adults in the audience. It is a movie that deserves to be seen, appreciated, and enjoyed, a film that is rare and delicate, and it's not afraid to be classified as fun! Five Stars
1pos
Usually I don't really like Emma Roberts so much, but after watching Nancy Drew it kind of changed my mind. The actors in the movies made the whole thing exciting and funny. Most of the time when you watch a mystery movie you can solve it before the middle of the show, but in this movie it's like you are actually there. The clues have to all fit together until you can finally understand the whole crime. I am still amazed how she found it out. The whole movie was really clever and the people who watched it with me loved the movie too. The clothes were my favorite part of the movie, it was so cute. I don't think there will be another movie like this until the sequel comes out. I give it a nine because the popular girls didn't really seem to have the part just right, but they still make me laugh. It was a really great movie and a great mystery. I definitely recommend watching it.
1pos
I came to Nancy Drew expecting the worst...because of everyone else's bad reviews. I thought: Even though I don't read the books, that doesn't look anything like the Nancy Drew I've heard of. But I was wrong. Sure, it wasn't a carbon copy of the books, but when you make a movie out of something, you have to modify it to become big-screen entertainment. The plot was enjoyable and thrilling with a lot of actual scares and I thought that Emma Roberts was really believable in her own way of portraying this classic character. There were several funny moments and on the contrary of many statements, at no point in this film does Nancy come off as a ditz. She was intelligent, conservative, polite and genuine. One thing this movie also did well was balance the whole thing out with a mix of comedy, romance, suspense and heartfelt moments. I loved this movie. What a flick, what a flick! And if you are wise and decide to trust me and go see this, be prepared for some SCARY as heck moments because I was, like, freaking out! Go see it or be a bum-bum and just let other people decide what you think of this movie for you...a mistake I almost made. I love it, I wanna own this movie! I love Emma Roberts now, too. She's like a mini-Bree Van De Kamp from DH. Love it, love it.
1pos
Look, if I were interested in a Nancy Drew book, what I would do is pick up a book and read it. I'm not. Ever since I can remember I read people trashing movies because it wasn't like the book. I'm sorry - in the digital age we can no longer watch movies on flip books, however I'm sure you can still find a few short silent films in book form. When Lord of the Rings came out, people complained. When the third one won an Oscar - "The book was better." When I watched To Kill a Mockingbird, "the book was better." Now a bunch of people are upset, yet again, because Nancy Drew wasn't like the book. I'm not saying Nancy Drew is going to win any Oscars - if anything it'll be one of those Nickelodeon Blimps or Kids Choice Awards. I'm saying give film a break. It's film, not paper. As a movie, I found Nancy Drew quite enjoyable - featuring cameos from Bruce Willis and Adam Goldberg (The Hebrew Hammer) and supporting roles featuring Tate Donovan (Jimmy Cooper on the O.C.) and Rachel Leigh Cook (She's All That). This is the first time I've seen Emma Roberts in a movie and, frankly, I enjoy her work more than most of Julia and of Eric's; her character stays consistent throughout the film and reacts well with conflict. A lighthearted movie in the spirit of Harriet the Spy is nice now and again.<br /><br />I give it ten stars because I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, would love to see it again, and will probably buy it upon DVD release.
1pos
Taking old collection of stories poses a challenge for the production team, how can this classic character be brought up to date and make it interesting enough to capture a new audience while stirring memories from her former audience. In my opinion, their mission was accomplished. A must see for young children, pre-teens, teens, and their parents. OK there are a couple scary moments that are resolved in short order, but parents with young children should sit tight, the movie moves on to better things. I am going to go with those astute user reviewers who point out that Emma Roberts provides us with a positive role model for young women, not syrupy about it either. Nancy balances her femininity with career minded sleuthing skills. A lot to like in here, laughs, doesn't take itself too seriously, a real mystery to solve (one you can figure out yourself as an added bonus, and likable characters. Nancy Drew even makes a good date movie in my opinion.
1pos
This is one great movie! I have played all the Nancy Drew games and have read the books, and I never expected the movie to be so exciting and funny! If you never heard of Nancy Drew, read the first book (Secret of the Old Clock) so you can kinda' get used to Nancy, then you can watch the movie, because in the movie, they don't really introduce the characters' names fast. ;) My whole family enjoyed it and the plot was extremely interesting. This is an ultimate come-back from the previous Nancy Drew movies, which the Nancy Drew actor didn't seem to match. This movie is much like Alex Rider: Stormbreaker. It's so cool! Nancy Drew lovers, you must watch this!
1pos
I took my 10-year-old daughter to see Nancy Drew over the weekend and found myself thoroughly entertained. First off, it was clean, and I mean by my standards. The majority of kids' movies today are full of crude toilet humor and gross-out jokes to elicit cheap laughter from the pre-teen crowd. Nancy Drew is smarter than that, however, and the humor is subtle and clever.<br /><br />The title role is played with a refreshing vivaciousness by Emma Roberts, who is perky and polite without ever becoming annoying. Unlike The Brady Bunch Movie, where the anachronistic characters are jeered and ridiculed, Nancy's style is treated with respect and dignity. It's a great moment when the LA "style-conscious" girls with their Paris Hilton streetwalker attire are dismissed by the boutique owner, while Nancy, in her penny loafers and homemade Butterick pattern dress, is embraced. This movie shuns the we-need-to-enlighten-this-wholesome-girl tack so many Hollywood movies take. Nancy remains true to herself and her values throughout.<br /><br />The mystery is just tense enough at times to be engaging. There were several suspenseful moments where my daughter nervously grabbed my arm, but there were no gratuitous shock scenes. It's all based on tension and mood and is a lot of fun. The supporting cast is good, particularly Marshall Bell as the creepy caretaker. There are some great cameos by Eddie Jemison, Chris Kattan and Bruce Willis and many moments that will make adults smile.<br /><br />This film deserves better ratings than some have given it. Not only was I glad not to be dragged to yet another computer animated film where talking animals burp and pass gas all over the place, but I was also very entertained. Had I been there without a child, I still would've enjoyed the movie. This is one DVD that will have my daughter's name on it under the Christmas tree.
1pos
I'm probably one of the biggest Nancy Drew fans out there. I've read every book three times over and I've played a lot of the Nancy drew games. I Loved this movie. It kept you entertained the whole time you watched it. I went with about 10 of my friends and everyone LOVED it. There were three woman sitting behind us who appeared to be in their late 30's to early 40's and I asked them how they liked it, they said they loved it! So you see it will be an entertainment to all ages. You just have to give it a chance. And it teaches a lesson too, just be yourself even if everyone around you is exactly alike. So overall, this move was great. I'm going to see it a second time now! So stop bashing it please. Its a really good movie!
1pos
I really enjoyed this movie. Most of the reviews have been bad, but most critics think a movie should be like an idea drama. This movie has a little bit of drama, but the rest is just clean fun and very entertaining. Forget about Julia Roberts being a Pretty Woman, Emma Roberts is a beautiful young lady and there is more to her than just that. Emma was so much fun to watch in the role of Nancy Drew. It is good to see a new face. I believe she will go far.<br /><br />Nancy Drew may not be based upon the books, but the story is still good. There is also a good blend of other character actors and supporting actors like Pat Carroll, Barry Bostwick, Rachel Leigh Cook and Chris Kattan - not credited. I'm surprised Disney did not release this movie. Some people may not like this movie because it does not contain sex, violence, and cursing. This is a good family film which is rare in this day in time. So take your family, see this movie and judge for your self how good it is. I can't wait for the sequel.
1pos
I really liked this movie! Even though it wasn't anything like any of the books it still the that classic Nancy Drew style. I had been seeing a lot of advertisements for this movie and since I was really into the Nancy Drew books I had really high expectations for this movie and they most definitely met those expectations. Pretty much all of the characters were exactly how I pictured them from reading the books. I am really happy that I saw this movie. All of the actors and actresses really acted like they acted like in the book series. Ever since I saw this movie I have wanted to read every single Nancy Drew book there is out there. All of the actors and actresses really got into their characters and it definitely showed when the aired this movie on the big screen. It definitely seemed like all of the actors and actresses were really in the positions that the characters were in I most definitely give this movie a 10 out of 10.
1pos
I read all of Nancy Drew as a preteen and collect the books as a grown-up. I loved the effect used at the end (and a little bit at the beginning) of the movie where line drawings in the style of the books morphed into scenes from the movie. It was a neat way of pointing out connections between situations in the movie and the books. For example, the scenes with the Oriental antiques dealer were very reminiscent of many scenarios I remember from the books. I thought Ned was perfectly cast, and Emma Roberts was a wonderful 21st century interpretation of Nancy Drew. (Just like the picture of Betty Crocker, she keeps up with the times!)
1pos
Although well past the target audience, I've always had a soft spot for YA fiction, so, I was naturally intrigued by the return of Nancy Drew to the screen.<br /><br />This is not a bad film. The central mystery involving a long dead actress is presented in straightforward simplistic terms with dashes of jeopardy for the young sleuth. Nancy and her friends never take the threats seriously, so young audience members will not be upset.<br /><br />What I really appreciated from the story was the final results were rather serious and meaningful and Nancy seemed to understand and grow from the experience.<br /><br />Emma Roberts is great as Nancy Drew and hopefully we'll see her again in another mystery.
1pos
As a grownup in my mid-40s, I am not even close to any of "Nancy Drew"'s key demographics, but I was pleasantly surprised by the film this afternoon; so, I could tell, were the pair of sixtyish silver-haired ladies down the row from me. The older man who left the theater just ahead of me specifically praised the film to the 20-ish female usher (who said she'd seen the film the previous evening and quite liked it).<br /><br />More to the point, however: In the row just ahead of me, there were nine -- count them, nine -- ten-year-old girls lined up next to each other, passing popcorn and hot dogs and candy back and forth and giggling through the previews.<br /><br />Once the film began, they promptly settled down to watch....<br /><br />....and didn't so much as peep till the closing credits began to roll.<br /><br />This is not a perfect film; it doesn't quite pay off its high school subplots, it's not quite confident enough of its own tone, and its thugs are just a hair too far over toward critically inept at times. But the adaptation of the source material is essentially respectful, the plot hangs together fairly well, and it treads deftly between the sins of excessive cheesiness and excessive modernization. Last but not least, Emma Roberts carries the movie with startling grace -- Josh Flitter's superb timing notwithstanding, this is Roberts' movie, and she pulls it off beautifully. Her Nancy Drew is very much the direct ancestor of Kristen Bell's Veronica Mars, and the film is also a lineal descendant of Jodie Foster's early and underrated "Candleshoe".<br /><br />In today's marketplace, it's a rarity: a family movie that respects its viewers' intelligence. As such, it won't be to everyone's taste -- but for what it is, it is the best movie of its kind in decades.
1pos
To be honest, I had to go see this movie backwards, didn't expect that much, but hey, I was not deceived, I had a good time.<br /><br />I would say this movie is way a fresh breeze, despite some facts that they tried to modernize Nancy Drew, but this made me remember these youth movies of the 60-70s from Europe and Quebec, where they manage to have children getting interacting with adults. In this case, a 16 year-old teenager tries to do justice by trying to solve a mystery concerning the death of an actress who died 25 years ago. Anyway, as her dad had business in Hollywood, why not rent a home with a mystery behind doors ? Well, at least Emma Roberts does a great job here. Kinda like the chubby kid, who at first is naively brought to support his sister's pranks to Nancy, but at the end, found Nancy quite cool enough to stick with her, even with her matters...<br /><br />Rest of the supporting cast is great, and was happy to see Rachael Leigh Cook in a different role this time: a single mother (she did it in Family Rescue, but this time, she plays a mature woman...) Anyway, don't dump this, it is fun !
1pos
If my expectations weren't exceeded, they were certainly met. "Nancy Drew" works both as a mystery and a comedy. It pays homage to the books it was based on and spoofs them at the same time. The movie starts with a close-up on a book shelf and an animated credit sequence resembling illustrations from the books. It then begins lampooning the books immediately. Writer/director Andrew Fleming seems to realize the idea of a teenage girl regularly breaking up crime rings in a small town is ridiculous, so he doesn't treat the idea religiously. He pokes fun at Nancy Drew's ability to do anything, such as ace every class in school, know which baked treat is perfect for converting any enemy to her side, make a bird house with twelve flying buttresses, and even perform an emergency tracheotomy at a party. Nancy'd always be in perfect style, if she were living in the wholesome 1950's instead of present day L.A. And she carries around a "sleuth kit" complete with fingerprinting dust, flashlight, compass, and magnifying glass. Preposterous, of course, but I seem to remember the Hardy Boys' access at any given moment to CSI equipment being a little too convenient as well. And if the perky pipsqueak private eye is a little younger than her literary counterpart, it's just more comedic exaggeration on the movie's part.<br /><br />The mystery of the movie is handled more seriously. Nancy and her lawyer father move from their small town to Los Angeles, where Nancy digs into a cold case involving the murder of a Hollywood movie star who lived in her new house decades ago. Nancy searches for clues in some pretty practical ways, such as surfing websites like Google and this one and watching old videotapes of the victim's movies. When she does something more out of the ordinary, you have to admire the girl's resourcefulness. Emma Roberts, an undeniably cute kid, plays the pint-sized amateur sleuth beautifully. She makes the too-perfect girl completely lovable, if not completely realistic. Tate Donovan is also great as the too-perfect girl's father, Carson Drew. He's an ideal father figure without being unrealistically perfect, and he shows reasonable concern for his daughter as she gets into danger. Less likable is Max Thierot's take on Ned Nickerson, Nancy's boyfriend. I much preferred George O'Hanlon Jr.'s portrayal in the 1970's TV series starring Pamela Sue Martin as Nancy Drew, in which Ned was a gawky, awkward kid with a little crush on Nancy. The character of Corky (Josh Flitty), a twelve-year old with a crush on Nancy, is much less annoying than Max Thierot's Ned. Amy Bruckner and Kay Panabaker seem appropriately cast as Nancy's gal pals Bess and George, but they only make brief cameos at the beginning of the film.<br /><br />Speaking of cameos, Chris Kattan (SNL), Eddie Jemison ("Ocean's 13"), and Bruce Willis all make surprise guest appearances, which just proves you never can guess which movie Bruce Willis will pop up in next.<br /><br />The movie does fail to live up to some potential. It's mentioned early on that the Drews' new house is heavily booby-trapped, but Nancy and her father are done with tripping over booby traps a few minutes after that. Also, Nancy describes the cold case she's about to investigate as a murder taking place at an extravagant party, which should yield plenty of potential murderers, but she only encounter a handful of suspects. And while there's some moments of real suspense during Nancy's adventures, the solution to the case comes out of nowhere, and in the end all possible plot threads are tied up too conveniently and who-cares-who-done-it. Ralph Sall's score adds to the movie's suspense, but the contemporary teenybopper songs woven into the soundtrack are lame. Still, I really enjoyed this film, and while the movie is aimed primarily at tween girls, people of any age and gender can enjoy it.
1pos
I really enjoyed this movie. It succeeded in doing something that few movies do now; it provided family values while entertaining me. Nancy Drew is a heroine for all generations and a role model for young girls to look up to. The little girls I was with throughly enjoyed the movie and kept talking about Nancy as we walked out of the theater. The movie has relatively few problems for families and I don't think parents will get bored sitting in the theater. No, it won't win an Oscar and it did not showcase magnificent special effects or even provide a horribly spooky mystery, but it entertained me and it stood true to the the spirit of the books. I would definitely recommend this movie to anybody with a young girl (she will love it!) or any fan of the books. You will not be disappointed.
1pos
The kids I took to this movie loved it (four children, ages 9 to 12 years; they would have given it 10 stars). Emma Roberts was adorable in the title role. (Expect to see more of this next-generation Roberts in the future.) After being over exposed to the likes of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton, it was refreshing to see a girl who didn't look like she worked the streets. Also enjoyed seeing a supporting cast that included Tate Donovan, Rachel Leigh Cook, Barry Bostwick, and Monica Parker (with a cameo by Bruce Willis). Final takeaway: Cute film.<br /><br />(Note: I did not read the book series, so my comments are based on the merits of the film alone.)
1pos
Let's face it; Nancy Drew was never great literature. It is in the same category as babysitter club, magic tree house, Goosebumps, ABC Mysteries. In fact, it was one of the original formula stories. Nancy is perfect, pretty, thoughtful, "nice", has no internal conflicts ever! and never changes. Ned is pretty much the same. The movie was true to that style and I have to say, I liked it. It will never be a great movie, but it had a that same nostalgic flavor that the books held. It had just the right amount of suspense for my children (8 and 10.) There was almost no offensive language. I liked the push for more conservative dress.<br /><br />Corky was a bit of an annoyance. He was a little out of place on a high school campus. I never quite got why he was there in the first place.
1pos
This was a great movie! Even though there was only about 15 people including myself there it was great! My friend and I laughed a lot. My mom even enjoyed it. There was two middle aged women there and a mid 20 year old there and they seemed to enjoy it. I love the part where Corky and Ned are like both liking Nancy and stuff its cute lol. And when she gets her roadster and Ned is there. Yeah This was a great movie even thought people underestimated it lol. Go See it i bet you'll enjoy it!! I really enjoyed it and so did my friend. <br /><br />People were so tough on this movie and they hadn't even seen it. I bet next time they will give the movie and actresses a chance. They all did a great job in my opinion. But if you have young kids its still appropriate. I will probably take my 7 year old niece to watch it too.
1pos
I had heard this movie was good from a lot of my friends that saw it, and they all said it was amazing, so I had very high expectations- and Nancy Drew exceeded those high expectations! It had funny parts, it kept me entertained with the action and all the dudes trying to kill her, and Emma Roberts was amazing as Nancy Drew. The rest of the cast was very good, also. I would definitely recommend this movie!! <br /><br />Nancy: "I wonder why those guys were trying to kill us?!" Corky: "Yeah, I was wondering that too. Actually, it's kinda creeping me out!"<br /><br />Nancy: "I hate when people try to kill me. It's so rude!"<br /><br />~Nancy Drew
1pos
I have to say that this was not very exciting but talk about fashion and weird ways to solve a mystery. A little too simple, Nancy Drew (Emma Roberts) uses IMDb... that's fantastic! I really liked about that part of the movie...<br /><br />Corky (Josh Flitter) is however extremely hilarious... and Ned Nickerson (Max Thieriot) seemed really hopeless... he should have been more angry with her for how she has treated him...<br /><br />Alright, this movie is tour and fashion in disguise. Anyhow, I recommend this movie, just for summer fun. Encore Nancy, just for fun. More teen spy movies by Emma Roberts.. Spymate... remember? She's becoming good at this tricky detective work.
1pos
I think part of the reason this movie was made...and is aimed at us gamers who actually play all the Nancy Drew PC games. There's been a lot of movies lately based on video games, and I think this in one of them.<br /><br />So this movie does not follow any book. But it does follow parts of the games. I buy and play every Nancy Drew games as soon as it comes out. And the games are from HerInteractive and are for "girls who aren't afraid of a mouse!" And some of these games actually won Parents' Choice Gold Awards. They are not only fun but you can actually learn a thing or two while playing.<br /><br />I took two of my step children with me to go see it and they loved it! The 10 yr. old had started playing her first Nancy Drew game a day before I took her to see the movie, and she was having so much fun playing the game I thought she would enjoy the movie as well. And I was right...she not only loved this movie but couldn't wait to get home to finish her first game and start another one.<br /><br />My other step daughter is only 7 and she also loved the movie but she is still a little to young too play the games yet, but she enjoys watching her sister play at times just to see what's going on.<br /><br />The games are based for children 10 yrs and older. All the games usually get pretty descent reviews and are classified as adventure games. For more information on the games just check out HerInterative Nancy Drew games. So personally I thought the movie was pretty good and I will buy it when it comes out on DVD.
1pos
I really liked this movie...it was cute. I enjoyed it, but if you didn't, that is your fault. Emma Roberts played a good Nancy Drew, even though she isn't quite like the books. The old fashion outfits are weird when you see them in modern times, but she looks good on them. To me, the rich girls didn't have outfits that made them look rich. I mean, it looks like they got all the clothes -blindfolded- at a garage sale and just decided to put it on all together. All of the outfits were tacky, especially when they wore the penny loafers with their regular outfits. I do not want to make the movie look bad, because it definitely wasn't! Just go to the theater and watch it!!! You will enjoy it!
1pos
I last read a Nancy Drew book about 20 years ago, so much of my memory of the fictional character is probably faulty. From what I gathered, the books were introduced to me at an era when teenage sleuths were popular to children growing up at the time (for my case, the 80s and early 90s), with Hardy Boys, Famous Five, and of course, "Carolyn Keene"'s Nancy Drew amongst the more famous ones. I still remember those hardcover books with very dated cover illustrations, usually quite heavy (for a kid) to lug around, and the thickness of the book perhaps attributed to the fact that the words are printed in large fonts.<br /><br />Well, the character has been given some updates along the way, as I recall my sister's subsequent Nancy Drew books becoming less thick, of softcover, with updated and a more chic Nancy illustrated on the cover. I can't remember if those stories were the same as the old hardcover ones, but I guess these books, being ghostwritten, have their fair share of updating itself for the times.<br /><br />In this Warner Brothers release of Nancy Drew, the character no doubt gets its update to suit the times, but somehow the writers Andrew Fleming and Tiffany Paulsen maintained her 50s- ish small town sensibilities, thereby retaining some charm and flavour that erm, folks like me, would appreciate. Her fashion sense, her prim and properness, even some quirky little behaviour traits that makes her, well, Nancy Drew.<br /><br />Her family background remains more or less the same, living with her single parent father Carson Drew (Tate Donovan), who is moving his daughter and himself to the big city for a better job opportunity, and to wean his daughter off sleuthing in the town of River Heights. Mom is but a distant memory, and the housemaid makes a cameo. But what made Nancy Drew work, is the casting of Emma Roberts in the lead role. Niece of her famous aunt Julia, she too possess that sprightly demeanour, that unmistakable red hair and that megawatt smile. Her Nancy Drew, while in the beginning does seem to rub you the wrong way, actually will grow on you. And in almost what I thought could be a discarded scene from Pretty Woman, it had the characters walk into a classy shop with almost opposite reactions.<br /><br />While Dad Carson Drew tries hard to bring Nancy out of her sleuthing environment and to assimilate into normal teenage life, trust Nancy to find themselves living in a house whose owner, a Hollywood type has been, was found murdered under suspicious circumstances. Mystery solving is her comfort food when she finds herself an outcast of the local fraternity, and not before long we're whisked off along with her on her big screen adventure.<br /><br />There's nothing too Black Dahlia about the crime and mystery, and instead it's a pretty straightforward piece for Nancy to solve, in between befriending Corky (Josh Flitter) a chubby friend from school, and pacifying jealous boyfriend Ned (Max Thieriot), while hiding the truth of her extra curriculum activities from her dad. The story's laced with cheesy fun and an oldie sentimentality which charms, and together, it becomes somewhat scooby-doo like. With minimal violence and no big bag gunfights or explosions, this is seriously a genre which is labelled clearly with "chick flick" alert.<br /><br />I guess the movie will generate a new generation of fans, rekindle the memories of old ones, and probably, just probably, might spark a new fashion trend of sporting penny loafers.
1pos
I was forced to see this because a) I have an 11 year-old girl and b) we had shown her the Bonita Granville Nacy Drew movies from the 1930s, which she thoroughly enjoyed. Personally, I didn't think it was as humorous as the 1930s flicks, but on the other hand, it wasn't the nauseating piece of intelligence-insulting fluff I feared it would be. It was an inoffensive, mildly entertaining movie. Although I'm pleased that they didn't try to "upgrade" Nancy to 21st Century "hipness" (Veronica Mars holds the title as the Modern Nancy Drew), I do think that they made her a little too bland, that they didn't do enough to develop Nancy Drew - the movie could have been titled "Jane Doe, Girl Detective". I have to blame the script: I think each actor did a good job with what they had to work with. I liked Emma Roberts in this role, but they gave her a made-for-TV, not theatrical release, script...
1pos
I saw this Documentary at the Cannes Film Festival, in a small 200-seat Cinema at the top of the main building at the Cannes Film Festival.<br /><br />I absolutely was into it. I love the mix of awesomely made fictional scenes. It is amazing set-design. The scenes look really like they were filmed in 1920ies or 1930ies.<br /><br />And the music is so nice.<br /><br />I rate this experience 9/10.<br /><br />* spoilers ahead *<br /><br />The Documentary tells about awesome Blues-men, with black-and-white old-looking scenes of the black man playing the guitar and singing. It is really amazing. But this also mixes in new bands and that is maybe one thing I might dislike in this Documentary. It is the too abundant use of links to modern rock-bands playing those Blues songs in a modern way. I didn't really appreciate their trashed way of playing such awesome Blues songs. This is the same kind of un-perfect musical taste I found when watching Wim Wenders Buena Vista Social Club.<br /><br />The Documentary was such a standing-ovation at this first screening in the little cinema, that the next day this Documentary was shown for everyone and normal tourists on the beach of the Croisette at the open-air cinema. Though the sand, the quality of the projection and the bad quality of the sound probably made it a difficult experience to enjoy for the thousands of people who were sitting in the sand that night.
1pos
If you like "Othello," you'll love this flick since half the movie revolves around the stage production of the play.<br /><br />The film has a great cast with Signe Hasso and Shelley Winters as the women in Colman's life while Edmond O'Brien plays the enterprising press agent.<br /><br />A couple of the supporting players I particularly liked were Millard Mitchell as the grizzled reporter who finds an angle and Joe Sawyer, the 1940's answer to Drew Carey, who plays the cop on the case.<br /><br />Great raw moments in this one with noir realism throughout.
1pos
Ronald Colman plays a famous Broadway actor who has begun to lose his mind and sense of identity. After years of playing a wide range of parts, he can't remember who he exactly is--who are his roles and who is the self. And, much more serious, he begins to see and hear his play even in regular everyday life. So, since he's currently playing in "Othello", he begins to act jealous and suspicious--just like the title character. Ultimately, it leads him to the depths of insanity and murder.<br /><br />I saw this film years ago and liked it. I just saw it again and loved it. Now perhaps some of my enthusiasm is because I have always liked Ronald Colman and this is a great triumph for him--and for which he earned the Best Actor Oscar. And, looking at the competition that year (Gregory Peck for GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT, John Garfield for BODY AND SOUL, William Powell for LIFE WITH FATHER and Michael Redgrave for MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA), I think Colman was a very good choice, as he stretched from his usual comfort zone and did a much more demanding role.<br /><br />Now I noticed that one reviewer hated this film because they hated Shakespeare--and this took up about half their review talking about their dislike for him. However, this film isn't really about Shakespeare, and it doesn't matter at all if you dislike Shakespeare. I am no huge fan of Shakespeare, but marveled at the small portions of the play that Colman re-enacted--though, as I said, this is NOT a really movie about Shakespeare. Instead, it's a wonderful portrait of an actor losing his mind and mixing his stage role with reality. It could have been ANY play, though "Othello" was an excellent choice because of the murder scene--which gets acted out for real later in the film.<br /><br />Overall, a very clever film due to a lovely script--with some overtones of Film Noir. Fortunately, the acting was terrific also, as Colman had excellent support from Signe Hasso, Shelly Winters and Edmond O'Brien (who was particularly good--he played his part just right). And, considering the great George Cukor was directing, it's no wonder it's a wonderful film from start to finish.
1pos
When an actor has to play the role of an actor, fictional or factual, the task becomes much more difficult than playing a role. In A Double Life,Ronald Coleman surpassed himself as Anthony John, the tortured double personality. He put into that character all his talent and sincerity. The facial expressions, mannerisms,gait and stance spoke eloquently of what Anthony John was going through while playing Othello on stage. Coleman also did extremely well as a Shakespearean actor in those short scenes as Othello that were part of this gem of a movie. Closups of Coleman's face as Othello tortured by doubts about the fidelity of Desdemona were in themselves scenes worth watching.Add to that, his character's off stage desperation and only someone with Coleman's depth of acting perception can achieve. It was like watching Spenser Tracy as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, except this double role was much more profound and poignant. Shelly Winters looked so sweet, vulnerable and gorgeous at the same time and added her talent to the movie. It is believed that Ronald Coleman liked his role in this film above all others he played and went on to win the Oscar for Best Actor in 1947. I would see this movie repeatedly and never feel bored.
1pos
Colman's performance is aided by the brilliantly written script. The gargantuan Hollywood studios in the 30's and 40's were able to copy some of the German expressionistic film elements and incorporate them into Hollywood films. very good use of shadows and light and silhouette. i really liked the scene where colman turns off the light in his dressing room near the beginning of the film, and he starts reciting Othello while his face becomes instantly dark and evil. already the viewer sees the text and the drama of Shakespeare getting a hold of "Tony" and off he goes on his journey of doom. i also enjoyed the dramatic death scene within the play, when he becomes overwrought with emotion and accidentally strangles his costar a little too hard for her to bear. her pleadings "tony stop you're hurting me" are chilling and suspenseful. you just don't know if he is going to go over the top and kill her at any moment. the cat and mouse chase to reveal the killer was nicely added 2/3rds of the way through the film to add some faster pacing and to also add to the narrative element of the film. Masterful work from George Cukor. He's such as skillful director. Excellent film. Too bad they don't make 'em like they used to...
1pos
George Cukor directs a brooding and cynical classic. The distinctive Ronald Coleman is at his best in this piece of Noir about an actor who loses himself in his roles. The acclaimed Anthony John(Colman)has driven his wife Brita(Signe Hasso)away with his highly fueled temper and erratic behavior. But the two manage to continue working together to please their audiences. Things begin to change as John is becoming bored with his career; he reluctantly agrees to play Othello. He gets deep into character as a jealous and murderous man. He begins walking a thin line between illusion and reality and ends up confusing his role with his own life and eventually kills his mistress(Shelley Winters),but has no memory of the dastardly deed.<br /><br />Colman seems faultless in this role. Winters is very impressive as the young woman determined to get away from her squalid life. Also in the cast: Edmond O'Brien, Ray Collins, Joe Sawyer and Whit Bissell.
1pos
A fondly-remembered melodrama – thanks chiefly to Ronald Colman's fine Oscar-winning central performance – about an oft-treated theme: the nature of acting and how it can overtake one's perception of reality. In this case, we have a well-known thespian tackling Shakespeare's "Othello", so that the film's last third delves effectively into the thriller genre – with press agent Edmond O'Brien (who happens to really be besotted with Colman's co-star and ex-wife Signe Hasso) 'investigating' the actor's possible involvement in the Desdemona-like strangling of a celebrity-seeking waitress (a very slim Shelley Winters). The theatrical/New York atmosphere of the immediate post-war era is vividly captured by the husband-and-wife screen writing team of Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon and legendary "actor's director" George Cukor (all of whom were recognized by the Academy with nominations); incidentally, the film nabbed a second Oscar for Miklos Rozsa's eclectic score. Colman, forever the suave leading man blessed besides with a velvety voice, does well enough by Shakespeare – gaining conviction the farther his character slips into obsessive jealousy, a murderous rage and, eventually, paranoia; however, he is not let down by a supporting cast which also includes director Ray Collins, reporter Millard Mitchell, detective Joe Sawyer and coroner Whit Bissell. Though the mid-section is a bit strained, the film makes up for any deficiencies with a remarkably-handled Expressionist denouement.
1pos
George Cukor directs this high quality story of suspense in the theatrical world with his usual sensitive but firm touch. Ronald Colman's performance, which earned him an Oscar, still stands up despite a few overwrought moments – it's hard to forget his haunted countenance as he struts aimlessly around social functions and tries to find meaning in his life. There are a number of interesting subtexts and Cukor does an excellent job of making them clear without forcing anything too much. The script by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon is brilliant, mixing the rarified theater world with the seedy world of the streets and comprehensively utilizing elements from Shakespeare's "King Lear" as a reference to both the film's main theme of jealousy and Colman's character's obsession with identity.<br /><br />Several interesting things about this movie – superficially it could be dismissed as too flippant a treatment of the everyday problems of actors. In other words if the art of acting required such complete sublimation of individuality we would soon have a rash of psycho method actors stalking the streets. But I don't really think this story's primary concern is acting or the job/art of acting per se. I think Anthony's struggles represents a broader existential question, a deeply buried uncertainty about identity. There's a key, I feel, in his relationship with his ex-wife Britta (Signe Hasso). He says that he never would have or could have become a good actor without her inspiration. And at another point he explicitly states that his extreme identification with his roles began when he married her. I'm not sure what to make of this but it seems important to me, especially because it's his obsession with her and jealousy of her that ultimately pushes him over the top. Perhaps the implication is that Anthony put himself in danger in the first place by entering into a serious relationship. Marriage implies a "union of the soul" in the traditional conception. It's unusual that the male and female protagonists are divorced at the beginning of the film. It's not completely unprecedented (Hawks' comedy "His Girl Friday" springs to mind, among others), but it is unusual and probably significant, especially in light of the fact that they do not end up resolving their romantic separation. In a way, the film could be implying that jealousy is another form of self-love.
1pos
Ronald Colman gives a terrific performance as a stage actor who really gets into his work. When he plays Othello on the stage he takes on the persona with dire results. Good film with a great supporting cast. Well worth watching.
1pos
This was a very well scripted movie. Great fun if you just want a stupid film. Not great production value (ok, the sound really sucked) but the performance of Danny Masterson more than makes up for it.<br /><br />Watch this movie and laugh out loud!
1pos
Excellent writing and wild cast. The tech is poor but it's obviously very low budget. Looks like they didn't cut the negative but had to release on a video output. In any case one of the most inventive comedies I've seen lately. The screenwriter in particular is fine.
1pos
I Caught This Movie On T.V. Last Night And You Know Danny Masterson Was A Pretty Good Actor In The Film, And Its Great To See Him In Something Other Than That 70s Show. The Film Isnt Rated But In My Opinion I Would Rate It (R) Just Because Of The Nudity And Plenty Of Adult Content. But All In All I Loved It, I Thought That Dirt's Wisecracks were pretty funny. Its Just Basically About A Guy Who Has No Job, Girlfriend, Or Money And Eventually Gets A Job As A Private Investigator (more of a messenger really.)He Gets Framed For The Murder Of A Rock Star And The Rock Stars Girlfriend Is One Of The People That Really Need To Help Him Out. I Give It....*** 3 Stars.
1pos
Unlike another user who said this movie sucked (and that Olivia Hussey was terrible), I disagree.<br /><br />This movie was amazing!!!!!! Olivia Hussey is awesome in everything she's in! Yeah she may be older now, because many remember her from Romeo and Juliet, but she's wonderful! <br /><br />This story line may be used quite often, but it's a unique movie and I'll fight back on anyone who disagrees! I enjoyed this movie just as much as I have any other Olivia Hussey movie. Olivia's "my girl" and I love her work.<br /><br />I saw this for the first time on Saturday (4/14/07) and fell in love with it. Not only because's it's an Olivia movie, but because of it's unique story line and wonderful direction.
1pos
so yes it is quite nostalgic watching the 1st episode because this is the one episode i definitely remembered. i enjoy watching the first season and yes compared to the action packed shows we have now this show seems lame. but frankly i like the "less violent" part of the show and the story line has more substance than the new ones now. I thought it interesting that Belisario's Airwolf and JAG have similar theme - the lead actor (Hawke and Harm) both are looking for an MIA relative (brother, father). wonder if Robert Belisario's personal life mimics these 2 shows' theme.<br /><br />Question - does anyone have pictures of Hawke's cabin. I love that cabin (kinda like a dream cabin of mine) and that is one of the scenes i remember about Airwolf.
1pos
Airwolf The Movie, A variation on the original 2 part pilot, Yet the movie although shorter, does contain extra footage Unseen in the 2 hour pilot The pilot is much more of a pilot than the movie Where as a pilot movie is normally the same (2 parter combined) But the movie is actually a different edit with extras here and cuts there.<br /><br />Worth a look, even if you have the season 1 DVD set, I'd still pick up a copy of the "movie" It's still in some shops like virgin, Woolworths and the likes of mixed media stores, although it generally needs ordering, But it saves needing to buy online (as many of us still don't do or trust online shopping) but if you look around airwolfs in stores<br /><br />Airwolf was truly 1 of the 80's most under rated shows.<br /><br />A full size Airwolf is currently being re-built for a Helicopter Museum :) Info and work in progress pictures are over at http://Airwolf.org Also with Airwolf Mods for Flashpoint and Flight Sim Games It seams she's finally here to stay :)
1pos
I used to watch this show when I was a little girl. Although I don't remember much about it, I must say that it was a pretty good show. Also, I don't think I've seen every episode. However, if you ask me, it was still a good show. I vaguely remember the theme song. Everyone was ideally cast, the costume design was great. The performances were top-grade, too. I just hope some network brings this series back one day so that I'll be able to see every episode. Before I wrap this up, I'd like to say that I'll always remember this show in my memory forever, even though I don't think I've seen every episode. Now, in conclusion, when and if this show is ever brought back on the air, I hope that you catch it one day before it goes off the air for good.
1pos
One of my favorite shows in the 80's. After the first season, it started going downhill when they decided to add Jean Bruce Scott to the cast. Deborah Pratt was wonderful and it was fun watching her and Ernest Borgnine's character go at it with each other. The last episode she appeared in was one of my favorites for in the second season. Unfortunately during those days, blacks did not last long on television shows. Some of the episodes in the second season where okay but the third season it was more about the human characters than Airwolf and it was not shown until almost at the end of the show. When it went to USA, it was disgusting!!!
1pos
As a young teenager at the time, Airwolf was compulsory viewing for a generation who wanted their "Cowboys and Indians" to have amazing gadgets and whizz-bang explosions.<br /><br />In many ways, the show was essentially Knight Rider in the skies: similar comic-book technology, a central character who was essentially a loner, and echoing the concept of one man making a difference.<br /><br />But in other, important ways, it was thematically very different from Knight Rider, Street Hawk, The A-Team and other action shows of the time. For one thing, the premise of the series is built not on a desire to help those in need, but by Stringfellow Hawke's possession of Airwolf for essentially selfish reasons (as leverage to try to find his MIA brother, St John). And then there is the dark edge provided by basing the series firmly in an 80s Cold War context, complete with Soviet espionage and Central American dictators, not to mention the enemy within. Sure, The A-Team constantly referred back to Vietnam and the team's status as fugitives, but it was generally done with a light touch and was rarely central to the plot itself. With Airwolf, the intrigue was key to the tone and direction of the show - although this was (ill-advisedly) diluted as the series went on.<br /><br />With hindsight, the Cold War setting clearly dates the series, many of the stories are creaky and contrived, and much of what Airwolf does is clearly implausible even with today's technology. But that's really not the point. Airwolf was rip-roaring fun, it tried to tell interesting stories without relying solely on the big action sequences, and it didn't sugar-coat everything by miraculously ensuring nobody died. Sometimes it failed, but often it succeeded admirably - and on a TV budget to boot.<br /><br />For UK readers, DMAX (Sky channel 155) have just started (Jan 2008) daily re-runs of Airwolf. Set your Sky+ box for this blast from the past - we may even get the re-tooled, re-cast (and sadly vastly inferior) fourth season, which to my knowledge has never previously been shown in the UK.
1pos
Perhaps the most gripping and intelligent of crooked cop movies is Otto Preminger's 'Where the Sidewalks Ends,' from a really excellent script by Ben Hecht based on the novel 'Night Cry' by Frank Rosenberg...<br /><br />Dana Andrews is the honest, tough New York policeman, always in trouble with his superiors because he likes his own strong-arm methods as much as he detests crooks... When he hit someone, his knuckles hurt... And the man he wants to hit is a smooth villain (Gary Merrill) who points up the title. 'Why are you always trying to push me in the gutter?' he asks Andrews. 'I have as much right on the sidewalk as you.'<br /><br />Dana Andrew's obsession and neurosis are implanted in his hidden, painful discovery that he is the son of a thief... His deep hatred of criminals led him to use their own illegal methods to destroy them, and the pursuit of justice became spoiled in private vendetta...<br /><br />By a twist of irony unique to the film itself, Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney of 'Laura' are united once more, and Andrews now seems to be playing the same detective a few years later, but no longer the romantic, beaten down by his job, by the cheap crooks... This time, he goes too far, and accidentally kills a suspect... The killing is accidental, the victim worthless, yet it is a crime that he knows can break him or send him to jail...<br /><br />Using his knowledge of police procedure, he covers up his part in the crime, plants false clues, and tries to implicate a gang leader, but cannot avoid investigating the case himself... The double tension of following the larger case through to its conclusion without implicating himself in the murder, is beautifully maintained and the final solution is both logical, satisfying, and in no way a compromise...<br /><br />The film is one of the best detective films of the 50's, with curious moral values, also one of Preminger's best... <br /><br />Preminger uses a powerful storytelling technique, projecting pretentious camera angles and peculiar touches of the bizarre in order to externalize his suspense in realism...
1pos
We're a long way from LAURA. Once again Otto Preminger directs, Dana Andrews stars as a police detective named Mark, and Gene Tierney is the beautiful woman who haunts him, but nothing else about WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS resembles everyone's favorite sophisticated murder mystery. Instead of deliciously quotable dialogue we get gritty, harrowing realism. While the earlier film took place in the ritzy upper echelons of New York society, here we're in the low-rent district of dark streets, hoodlums, cheap restaurants and crummy flats. Tierney, gorgeous as ever, now works as a department-store mannequin and lives in Washington Heights (the neighborhood of the "doll" who once got a fox fur out of LAURA's Mark McPherson). This time Andrews is Mark Dixon, an older, sadder, more troubled version of the cool cop in a trench coat. <br /><br />WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS belongs to a sub-genre of noir, movies about police brutality focusing on cops who can't control their violent impulses. Like Kirk Douglas's character in DETECTIVE STORY, Dixon owes his seething contempt for crooks to his father's criminal past. Where Douglas is self-righteous and blind to his own faults, Andrews is burdened by repressed guilt and self-loathing. He accidentally kills a suspect and covers up his actions with an attempt to throw suspicion on a slimy gangster (Gary Merrill) whom he has been vainly pursuing for years. Instead, a kindly cab driver is suspected because he's the father of the dead man's estranged and mistreated wife Morgan (Gene Tierney). Dixon, falling in love with the wife of the man he killed, tries desperately to save her father without giving himself away. <br /><br />Among noir protagonists, Dana Andrews had this distinction: he was incapable of appearing unintelligent. Even when playing an average Joe, as he usually did, he always comes across as unusually sensitive and perceptive; more than that, his air of being too thoughtful for his own comfort gives him that haunted--and haunting--quality that was his essence as an actor. He played ordinary guys, cops and soldiers, but always with a tragic undercurrent of seeing and knowing too much. His conscientious heroes are marked by exhaustion, guilt, the inability ever to "lighten up." No other actor could have expressed so well the bottled-up anger, the slow-burning pain, the agonized intelligence of Mark Dixon. He also has a muted tenderness, a muffled warmth and even wry humor that make him heartbreaking. This comes out when he takes Morgan to a restaurant where he's a regular, and for the first time we see this cold, brutal man trading mock insults with the waitress, whose sarcasm can't hide her affection and concern for him. When Dixon asks his partner for money to get a lawyer for Morgan's father, he supplies it even though they recently argued and Dixon threw a punch at him. There are no words about loyalty or knowing he's a good guy deep down, but we see it all in the man's anguished silence and his wife's resignation as she hands over some jewelry to pawn. Dixon's goodness comes across through other people's reactions to him as much as through Andrews's deeply moving performance. <br /><br />Though Dana Andrews was a minor star, he may be the quintessential forties man. He goes through some movies hardly ever taking off his overcoat; with that boxy, mid-century silhouette, further fortified by the fedora, the glass of bourbon, the cigarette he doesn't take out of his mouth when he talks, he looks imprisoned in the masculine ideal of toughness and impassivity. While many noirs romanticize the two-fisted tough guy, WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS offers an unflinching portrait of the reality behind the façade, a gripping and melancholy exploration of the roots and consequences of violence.<br /><br />Andrews was sadly underrated in his own time (he was the only one of the three protagonists in THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES not nominated for an Academy Award, though his low-key performance is far more compelling than Frederic March's hammy, Oscar-winning drunk). Fortunately, Andrews appeared in some films that ensured his immortality, and now at last this little-known film, which contains his best performance, can be seen as part of the marvelous Fox Film Noir set. This series, including a number of never before released titles (such as NIGHTMARE ALLEY and THIEVES' HIGHWAY), suggests that Twentieth-Century-Fox may have had the finest record of all the major studios when it came to film noir.
1pos
In Where The Sidewalk Ends, Otto Preminger reunites Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, surely in hopes of recapturing the magic of his Laura. But they're wildly dissimilar films, set in different strata of New York (not to mention at opposite poles of the noir universe). A fine mist of the Gothic hovers over the upscale Manhattan of Laura, with its erotic obsession and faint whiff of necrophilia; Where The Sidewalk Ends is pure urban soot and grit befouling a town of basement apartments, steam rooms and parking garages.<br /><br />But it's every bit as fine a movie as its revered forerunner, and dyed-in-the-wool noir (Laura, by contrast, one of the clutch of films from 1944 which the French first dubbed `noir,' was still very much a sophisticated murder mystery). Daylight enters only on very temporary sufferance, and director of photography Joseph LaShelle makes the most of the alleys and brownstones, the docks and the El. This is quintessential big-city - specifically Big Apple - noir, like several others from the bumper crop of 1950, like Side Street and Sleeping City and The Tattooed Stranger and Edge of Doom.<br /><br />As the movie opens, police detective Dana Andrews is on the carpet for his brutal ways, particularly his vendetta towards crime boss Gary Merrill (whom we learn was set up in business by Andrews' ne'er-do-well father). When an out-of-towner is stabbed to death at a floating crap game operated by Merrill, the hair-trigger Andrews roughs up a witness, causing him a fatal crack to the skull (exacerbated by a steel plate installed in the veteran's head). Realizing that his job's already on the line, Andrews dumps the body in the river after making it look like the suspect had taken a powder.<br /><br />Of course, that's far from an end to it. The corpse is discovered, his estranged wife turns out to be Tierney, and all the evidence starts to turn toward her father (Tom Tully), a hack driver who happened not only to have been cruising the same mean streets the night of the murder but to have ample reason to want his abusive son-in-law dead. But the embittered loner Andrews finds in Tierney a summons to his better nature; he tries to exonerate her father while still keeping his own involvement in the whole sordid business a secret....<br /><br />Not so epigrammatic as Laura, the script for Where The Sidewalk Ends (by Ben Hecht) shows a pungency of its own (in a second dressing-down, his superior tells Andrews, `Look at you - all bunged up like a barrelhouse fag').<br /><br />But while Laura spread its attention over half a dozen characters, here Andrews is all but the sole focus (even Tierney's role is far less central than her half-spectral Laura). And Andrews may never have excelled his performance here. It's tight-lipped and taciturn, but never more eloquent than when his face is silently registering the anguish to which his own obstinacy has brought him. He's a pent-up sufferer who can find release only through the safety-valve of violence (he even lashes out against his loyal partner, Bert Freed). To be sure, he finds too swift a road to redemption though the agency of his beautiful co-star. But that was the style of the times, and a sweetened-up ending does little to undermine this New York story of violence, corruption and urban entanglements.
1pos
Elegance and class are not always the first words that come to mind when folks (at least folks who might do such a thing) sit around and talk about film noir. <br /><br />Yet some of the best films of the genre, "Out of the Past," "The Killers," "In A Lonely Place," "Night and the City," manage a level of sleek sophistication that elevates them beyond a moody catch phrase and its connotations of foreboding shadows, fedoras, and femme-fatales. <br /><br />"Where the Sidewalk Ends," a fairly difficult to find film -- the only copy in perhaps the best stocked video store in Manhattan was a rough bootleg from the AMC cable channel -- belongs in a category with these classics.<br /><br />From the moment the black cloud of opening credits pass, a curtain is drawing around rogue loner detective Marc Dixon's crumbling world, and as the moments pass, it inches ever closer, threatening suffocation. <br /><br />Sure, he's that familiar "cop with a dark past", but Dana Andrews gives Dixon a bleak stare and troubled intensity that makes you as uncomfortable as he seems. And yeah, he's been smacking around suspects for too long, and the newly promoted chief (Karl Malden, in a typically robust and commanding outing) is warning him "for the last time." <br /><br />Yet Dixon hates these thugs too much to stop now. And boy didn't they had have it coming? <br /><br />"Hoods, dusters, mugs, gutter nickel-rats" he spits when that tough nut of a boss demotes him and rolls out all of the complaints the bureau has been receiving about Dixon's right hook. The advice is for him to cool off for his own good. But instead he takes matters into his own hands. <br /><br />And what a world of trouble he finds when he relies on his instincts, and falls back on a nature that may or may not have been passed down from a generation before. <br /><br />Right away he's in deep with the cops, the syndicate, his own partner. Dixon's questionable involvement in a murder "investigation" threatens his job, makes him wonder whether he is simply as base as those he has sworn to bring in. Like Bogart in "Lonely Place," can he "escape what he is?"<br /><br />When he has nowhere else to turn, he discovers that he has virtually doomed his unexpected relationship with a seraphic beauty (the marvelous Gene Tierney) who seems as if she can turn his barren bachelor's existence into something worth coming home to. <br /><br />The pacing of this superb film is taut and gripping. The group of writers that contributed to the production polished the script to a high gloss -- the dialogue is snappy without disintegrating into dated parody fodder, passionate without becoming melodramatic or sappy. <br /><br />And all of this top-notch direction and acting isn't too slick or buffed to loosen the film's emotional hold. Gene Tierney's angelic, soft-focus beauty is used to great effect. She shows herself to be an actress of considerable range, and her gentle, kind nature is as boundless here as is her psychosis in "Leave Her to Heaven." The scenes between Tierney and Andrews's Dixon grow more intense and touching the closer he seems to self-destruction. <br /><br />Near the end of his rope, cut, bruised, and exhausted Dixon summarizes his lot: "Innocent people can get into terrible jams, too,.." he says. "One false move and you're in over your head." <br /><br />Perhaps what makes this film so totally compelling is the sense that things could go wildly wrong for almost anyone -- especially for someone who is trying so hard to do right -- with one slight shift in the wind, one wrong decision or punch, or, most frighteningly, due to factors you have no control over. Noir has always reflected the darkest fears, brought them to the surface. "Where the Sidewalk Ends" does so in a realistic fashion. <br /><br />(One nit-pick of an aside: This otherwise sterling film has a glaringly poor dub of a blonde model that wouldn't seem out of place on Mystery Science Theater. How very odd.) <br /><br />But Noir fans -- heck, ANY movie fans -- who haven't seen this one are in for a terrific treat.
1pos
At first glance, it would seem natural to compare Where the Sidewalk Ends with Laura. Both have noirish qualities, both were directed by Otto Preminger, and both star Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney. But that's where most of the comparisons end. Laura dealt with posh, sophisticated people with means who just happen to find themselves mixed-up in a murder. Where the Sidewalk Ends is set in a completely different strata. These are people with barely two nickels to rub together who are more accustomed to seeing the underbelly of society than going to fancy dress parties. Where the Sidewalk ends is a gritty film filled with desperate people who solve their problems with their fists or some other weapon. Small-time hoods are a dime-a-dozen and cops routinely beat confessions out of the crooks. Getting caught-up in a murder investigation seems as natural as breathing.<br /><br />While I haven't seen his entire body of work, based on what I have seen, Dana Andrews gives one of his best performances as the beat-down cop, Det. Sgt. Mark Dixon. He's the kind of cop who is used to roughing up the local hoods if it gets him information or a confession. One night, he goes too far and accidentally kills a man. He does his best to cover it up. But things get complicated when he falls for the dead man's wife, Morgan Taylor (Tierney), whose father becomes suspect number one in the murder case. As Morgan's father means the world to her, Dixon's got to do what he can to clear the old man without implicating himself.<br /><br />Technically, Where the Sidewalk Ends is outstanding. Besides the terrific performance from Andrews, the movie features the always delightful Tierney. She has a quality that can make even the bleakest of moments seem brighter. The rest of the cast is just as solid with Tom Tully as the wrongly accused father being a real standout. Beyond the acting, the direction, sets, lighting, and cinematography are all top-notch. Overall, it's an amazingly well made film.<br /><br />If I have one complaint (and admittedly it's a very, very minor quibble) it's that Tierney is almost too perfect for the role and her surroundings. It's a little difficult to believe that a woman like that could find herself mixed-up with some of these unsavory characters. It's not really her fault, it's just the way Tierney comes across. She seems a little too beautiful, polished, and delicate for the part. But, her gentle, kind, trusting nature add a sense of needed realism to her portrayal.
1pos
Otto Preminger's Dana Andrews cycle of films noirs are among the (largely) unsung jewels of the genre. Because they lack paranoia, misogyny or hysteria, they may have seemed out of place at the time, but the clear-eyed imagery, the complex play with identity, masculinity and representation, the subversion of traditional psychological tenets, the austere, geometrical style all seem startlingly modern today, and very similar to Melville. The lucid ironies of this film are so loaded, brutal and ironic that the 'happy' ending is one of the cruellest in Hollywood history. Brilliant on the level of entertaining thriller as well, tense, and packed with double-edged dialogue.
1pos
I'm a big fan of fan of film noir, and this film by Otto Preminger easily stands as one of the best that I've seen! Preminger has reunited two of his stars from the hit 'Laura' - Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, for an entirely different sort of crime film. Laura was based around love, and this film is based around hate; as we watch police detective Mark Dixon, a copper already suffering scrutiny from his superiors for his heavy handed tactics, accidentally kill a suspect and try to pin the murder on a known criminal; a man by the name of Tommy Scalisi. The plot is brilliantly worked, and Preminger excellently balances several plot points; but it all comes back down to the main moral implication surrounding our main character. The fact that the film is set in the criminal underground means that the plot is given an excellent base to work from, and director Otto Preminger expertly captures the sleazier side of life by showing the main characters gambling, beating one another (and their women), shooting and more - and this also helps to offset the film from the earlier 'Laura', which was very much set in upper class society.<br /><br />The role of Mark Dixon gives Dana Andrews one of the most interesting parts of his career. Here, we have a character that is difficult to like as he's so cold - but the fact that we can understand his motives ensures that he's easy to sympathise with, and that allows the audience the ability to plug into his plight. The character development is well timed, and as we've follows this character and his motivations throughout the film; everything makes sense by the end. His co-star is the beautiful Gene Tierney, who isn't given as much to do in this film as she was in Laura; a film that made Tierney its linchpin. She does well with what she's got, however, and the lead duo's chemistry is excellent and Tierney helps to complete every scene she's in. I can't say that this is a better film than the earlier Laura; that's a hard act to follow, but this film certainly fits into the film noir formula better than Preminger's earlier film. The film also makes a good comparison piece for Laura; as just about everything in this film is opposite to the 1944 movie, yet it's all strangely familiar. Highly recommended to all!
1pos
WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS deserves to be a better known film directed by Otto Preminger, the man who gave the world LAURA. And this time, he's got the same co-stars: DANA ANDREWS and GENE TIERNEY. It must be said that Tierney here is under-used in what amounts to more of a supporting role while the spotlight goes to Andrews.<br /><br />He plays a tough, hardened cop used to dealing with a bunch of thugs in too vigorous a way until one night he accidentally kills a man in the process of arresting him. When suspicion falls on a cab driver (TOM TULLY), he goes along with the investigation into the murder but starts to feel guilt because he's in love with the cabbie's daughter (GENE TIERNEY). Tierney, by the way, looks a little too elegant for the girl she's playing here and doesn't seem to fit into the squalid background elements of the story.<br /><br />The story takes a grim turn as the investigation goes deeper and it's discovered that the murdered man had a silver plate in his head from his service as a war hero. By the end, it turns into a morality tale with Andrews developing a conscience over his crime.<br /><br />It's fascinating as film noir with capable performances from a strong supporting cast. A good entry in the field of noir, forcefully directed by Preminger and nicely played by Andrews and Tierney, despite the slight miscasting of her character.
1pos
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)<br /><br />Where One Ends, Another Begins<br /><br />This is a prototypical film noir, and as such, pretty flawless, from both style and content points of view. The photography and night settings are first rate (cinematographer Joseph LaShelle lets the drama ooze in scene after scene), and the close-ups on faces pure expressionism. I can watch this kind of film for the visuals alone, even when the actors struggle and the plot stinks. <br /><br />But the acting is first rate here, and the plot features what I consider the core of most noir films, the alienated male lead (representing the many men returning home to a changed United States after the war and feeling lost themselves). In fact, not only is Dana Andrews really convincing as the troubled, loner detective, he has a small but important counterpart in the film, the lead female's (first) husband, an decorated ex-GI fallen onto hard times and booze. The fact the one man kills the other might be of monumental significance, overall-- the regular guy struggling through his inner problems to success while the medal-wearing soldier slips into an accidental death with a silver plate in his head. The woman transitions from one to the other--we assume they marry and have children as suggested earlier in the movie. Even if this is pushing an interpretation onto it after the fact, we can still see the path of one man with some psychological baggage careening through a crisis to the highest kind of moral order--turning himself in for a small crime just at the point he has actually gotten away with it.<br /><br />This movie belongs to Andrews. He plays a far more restrained and moving type than Kirk Douglas plays in a similar role in William Wyler's Detective Story made just one year later, and Andrews certainly is less theatrical. You could easily see both movies side by side for a textbook compare and contrast session. The fact that Andrews as Detective Dixon is morally struggling through it all, and Douglas as Detective McLeod is not, might explain why one man gets his girl and the other doesn't. Gene Tierney pulls off a hugely sympathetic, demurring, and ultimately conventional and "pretty" type of woman--not just a cardboard desirable, but someone you want Dixon to actually marry. <br /><br />The criminal plot is really secondary to the main drama, but is effective enough in its play with types and clichés. The bit parts are kept snappy, the small details (like the portable craps table) nice touches, far from the character actors or the glamour of gambling in Casablanca. But then, Curtiz's great movie is iconic even in the details--it makes no effort to be subtle and real and penetrating, but instead is sweeping and memorable and inspiring. They come at opposite ends of the war, and represent opposite possibilities for their leading men. Bogart is beginning his active duty, Dixon, and the man Dixon has killed, are all through. Through, thoroughly, but not washed up.<br /><br />It's no accident that many, possibly most, film noirs have what you would call "happy" endings. The man overcomes his adversaries and transforms his inner self, and the moviegoer, then and now, understands just how beautiful that must feel.
1pos
Dana Andrews stands "Where the Sidewalk Ends" in this 1950 film that also stars Gene Tierney, Gary Merrill, Karl Malden and Neville Brand. Andrews plays New York City Detective Sgt. Mark Dixon, a cop with a bad temper who has gotten into trouble in the past for beating suspects. When a man is murdered at a gambling club owned by a mobster, Scalise (Merrill), Dixon and his partner go to investigate. Scalise blames the murder on Ken Paine (Stevens), who has now left the club after fighting not only with his wife, Morgan (Tierney) but the victim. Dixon thinks the victim won a lot of money and was killed as a result by the mobster's men. He goes to see Paine and, not realizing he has a plate in his head from the war, knocks him to the floor and inadvertently kills him. Now he must cover up the murder. As a further complication, he falls for Morgan; her father (Ken Tully), who went to Paine's apartment after he saw that Paine had hit his daughter, is arrested for the crime.<br /><br />This is a really terrific, gritty noir with some good performances. The ruggedly handsome and weathered Andrews is convincing as a tough yet nervous detective who has to stay one step ahead of his colleagues. The movie reunites him with his fabulous "Laura" costar, Gene Tierney, and she looks lovely as a model with bad taste in men who apparently is used to being roughed up. Little does she know, she's got another one on her hands. Ken Tully does a terrific job as her father, who protests his innocence despite some damning evidence. Karl Malden is very tough as Dixon's boss.<br /><br />My only problem with this well-directed, fast-moving and absorbing film is the ending. Pure Hollywood and, putting myself in Tierney's place, I doubt I would react the same way. A minor criticism for a film written by Ben Hecht and directed by Otto Preminger. I didn't find it as awe-inspiring as "Laura," but few things in this world are. If you like film noir, this is a must-see.
1pos
Otto Preminger, completing a noir cycle at Twentieth Century Fox, reunited his "Laura" leads for this stark, gritty detective drama. Dana Andrews again portrays a cop, but this time he's hardened, cynical and has been accused of police brutality by his superior - "You don't hate hoods, you liked to beat them up!". Mark Dixon (Andrews) despises criminals, as his own father was a crook. He doesn't want to be "Sandy Dixon's kid" so he became a policeman, but his methods are harsh and hated.<br /><br />One night, investigating a murder, he unknowingly punches a suspect, Ken Paine (Craig Stevens) so hard that it kills him. A shaken Dixon does his best to cover it up, intending to frame a hated thug, Scalise (Gary Merrill) for the crime. However, the blame falls on Paine's father-in-law, Jiggs Taylor (Tom Tully), whose daughter, department store model Morgan Taylor (Tierney) is estranged from her husband but keeps getting drawn into his gambling schemes. Paine had slapped his wife, enraging her father, who did show up at his son-in-law's apartment, but not until Dixon had departed with the body. With no better suspects, Jiggs is arrested and charged.<br /><br />Riddled with guilt, Mark falls for Morgan and offers money for an attorney. He decides to take on Scalise anyway but leaves a letter to be given to the department in the event of his death, confessing everything. In the end, he cannot live with the knowledge with what he has done, and he permits the letter to be read by his superior and by Morgan. Despite all the tragic circumstances, Morgan professes her love for Mark and will wait for him.<br /><br />It was great to find this film on DVD, after so many years of televised obscurity. Eddie Mueller, a film noir historian, provides the commentary and does a good job, but I find his assertion that audiences wouldn't have caught the significance of the casting of the two leads, since "Laura" had been made six years earlier. In that respect, he is mistaken because they had appeared in "The Iron Curtain" two years prior to WTSE and the film was a box-office success.<br /><br />Andrews and Tierney were fabulous together, and Ruth Donnelly is tremendous comic relief as restaurant owner Martha, fanning the flames between the detective and the dame.<br /><br />The night cityscapes give the film an air of menace. Gary Merrill is great as the low-life Scalise, who had a criminal past with Dixon's dad ("Your father liked me," he taunts Mark). Karl Malden and a young Neville Brand are terrific also. And Tom Tully is just touching and funny as Morgan's unjustly accused pop.<br /><br />A watchable film noir with a fantastic cast.
1pos
Ah, noir. My favourite genre. Otto Preminger's follow-up to "Laura" is a film noir set in a postwar New York, where corruption and violence run rampant. It stars Dana Andrews as Sergeant Mark Dixon, a detective whose brutal tactics have landed him in hot water with his superiors. <br /><br />When he accidentally kills a murder suspect, Dixon tries to pin the blame on crime boss Tommy Scalese. Dixon is close to achieving his goal when he becomes involved with the dead man's wife, the beautiful Morgan Taylor. Of course, in typical noir fashion, things quickly go down hill.<br /><br />While the film does nothing interesting camera or narrative wise, it does have a constant tone of dread and gloom. Like most great noirs, it is also wonderfully paced, sucking the viewer in right from the start.<br /><br />Still, like most of Preminger's workmanlike films, it's not something I'd watch again. It lacks the verbal wit of Wilder, the visual flamboyance of Hitchcock or the spatial experimentation of Welles. Like Lang's later work, "Sidewalk" feels very much a "clone" of what a noir should be, instead of something really artistically genuine. <br /><br />Thematically the film is nothing special. It's about a cop who finds himself slowly becoming a criminal. In one scene Dixon explains that his father himself was a small time crook, the film flirting with the notion of predestination, but this one scene is as far as Otto goes, or dares to take his ideas.<br /><br />The camera work is likewise disappointing. There's no intelligence in Otto's camera. No effort is made to assign the camera to anything. It doesn't play with space or architecture or empahsise the step-by-step police procedural. It's just tripod set ups with the occasional dolly in and out. Meaningless, though most people don't care about these things. <br /><br />There is, however, one good shot where our hero is trapped in a car full of gangsters (noir cage) which itself enters a vehicle-lift (another cage) and is taken up into the chief gangster's lair. Like Lynch's "Blue Velvet", Otto retopologizes the film, constantly likens "upstairs" to hell. This works well, but the set design fails to reinforce it. <br /><br />7/10 - Otto seems content to follow the Hawksian mould of what a noir is, rather than toy with the possibilities of where noir can go. Like "Detour", "Night in the City", "Scarlet Street", "In A Lonely Place", "Act of Violence", "Bomberang" and "Johnny Eager", "Where the Sidewalk Ends" is one of those well made second tier film noirs. It's competent and engaging, but lacks that extra special magic.
1pos
Director Otto Preminger reunites with his Laura stars Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in this rough and ready to rumble film noir: Where The Sidewalk Ends. This film is complete with a well-written crime story with interesting characters, unexpected turns, and clever dialogue and an eye-pleasing look with great camera movements and dark and gritty film noir lighting. Dana Andrews stars as Detective Mark Dixon, part mobster and part cop, who has a reputation of being too physically tough with criminals. After one case sees Dixon in search of suspects and answers, he gets far more involved than he wanted. <br /><br />Dana Andrews is terrific in his role - tough and edgy, Andrews' Dixon is ready to knock any and all off their heels if they get on his bad side. He's the perfect film noir anti-hero - he's not very nice all the time, but we still root for him. Gene Tierney does a solid job in her role, as much as it is, being a sweet shoulder for Dixon. There might not be too much to Tierney's role, but she certainly goes above and beyond what others could do with the role, knocking every member of the audience out with her kind smile, gentle manner, and twinkle in her eye. The supporting cast isn't too bad either - Karl Malden being the most memorable, stepping in and giving a good supporting performance as Lieutenant Thomas. Where The Sidewalk Ends is no Laura, but it is a great film noir filled with great characters, story, and picture.
1pos
Otto Preminger's noir classic works almost as a flip-side of LAURA...while that film was glitzy and features the high fa-luting Clifton Webb, this film is a whole lot seamier. Dana Andrews is a less than good cop who accidentally kills a man only to have it potentially pinned on the father of the girl he loves. Preminger keeps things moving at a brisk clip so that lapses in logic are easily overlooked. Andrews is quite fine (a lot less wooden than he's been in the past) and the stunningly beautiful Gene Tierney is stunningly beautiful! Creepy Craig Stevens plays the unlucky victim. WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS is a must see and a terrific companion-piece to Preminger's equally lurid WHIRLPOOL (also starring Tierney).
1pos
A detective (Dana Andrews) with a reputation for violence accidentally kills a suspect in a murder (Craig Stevens) and then tries to cover it up. The Otto Preminger directed film has plenty of atmosphere but the story gets watered down when the dead man's wife (Gene Tierney) falls for Andrews. He was doing fairly well digging himself into and out of a big hole, but she was just too much light at the end of the tunnel for a noir film. Gary Merrill is great as Scalese, a crime boss that Andrews is obsessed with bringing down, and the tension between them gives the film its energy and drive, especially a scene in a bath house with Merrill, Andrews, and Neville Brand, and the night time rendezvous outside of Bellevue Hospital, that sets up what ought to have been the film's conclusion. High marks for atmosphere, Andrews, Merrill, etc... and the general portrayal of the underworld, though the love angle and the simplistic good cop bad cop elements don't help its cause.
1pos
Pretty good film from Preminger; labyrinthine at times, as it explores sets and locales from various angles and perspectives as if it were a nature film on the denizens of the modern city and how they live. In this sense it is visually and spatially satisfying, as its hero, a good cop with a bad temper, gets into very hot water when he accidentally kills a guy with a plate in his head.<br /><br />Dana Andrews plays the lead as if it were Hamlet, and has never been better. The story may be pure melodrama but Andrews gives it weight, and almost raises it to the level of tragedy. As his girl, Gene Tierney is attractive but unremarkable. Gary Merrill makes for a very interesting villain, with his natural warmth providing a nice contrast to Andrews' coolness; his smiling, amiable-seeming bad guy seems to be continually challenging his nemesis by the mere fact of his being emotionally open, as opposed to the tightly wound and moralistic cop who is pursuing him. <br /><br />There are no major surprises in this film, which seems transitional for all concerned. For director Preminger it is a reunion of sorts with his Laura stars, Andrews and Tierney, who were passing their career peaks at around the time the movie was made. The supporting cast,--Merrill, Karl Malden, Neville Brand--are, understandably, more optimistic, as they were all on their way up. Preminger, as serene an observer as ever, lets the events unfold without expressing a strong point of view, as the morally ambiguous ending is somewhat disappointing, for the cat and mouse game between the two antagonists seems larger and more archetypal than any mere movie could contain, much less resolve.<br /><br />
1pos
This is a very well-made film, meticulously directed and with some excellent character acting that at times is deeply moving - for example the scene with the loyal but unsophisticated sidekick cop and his wife. The plot is convincingly worked out and exciting. The gangster character is particularly interesting and plays an almost metaphysical role in the life of the hero. It's made clear that the cops are just as rough and ready as the underworld characters.<br /><br />A couple of slight reservations: I found the ending slightly one-sided as it celebrates the hero's successful integration into the structure of the police and justice system, which collapses the ambiguity of the police characters which has been maintained up to that point. Also I found the lead female character somewhat weak: little more than a catalyst for the salvation of the hero, all she seems to do is weep and swoon as the tough guys battle it out.
1pos
The charm of Otto Preminger's grandiose, visionary film noir is that it has ambiguous intentions, betraying the gloomy essence of the central character, who is still vexed by living in the shadow of his criminal father. Dana Andrews' driven, vindictive cop is shown as an outsider, irrational and destructive, who maybe can change because he might've found a good woman to look after him. The troubled man reclaims himself with his own tangled impression of rectitude. The distressing mood permanently circuited into the latter half of the story by screenwriter Ben Hecht reverberates in Andrews' tense performance as Preminger saturates the film in a relevantly prosaic substance of style. We don't just see and hear the city at night; we feel it because Preminger lets us see and hear even the most peripheral and distant factors of it.<br /><br />Dana Andrews furnishes a complex character unfolded through his streaks of violence and the hatred that always infests him. As the plot develops, he is secretly entangled in situational snares, yet he is renewed by the outward acts that can be seen in the vintage noir protagonist's visceral facial expressions before he executes them.<br /><br />This reflection of a specific phase in the development of the genre is an engrossing, feral and shady film noir that is set in the double-dealing climate of the underworld, where the hero is so estranged that he is always swelling with rage, and even though he loses his rational resistance, occupational principle, and ethical limits, he's still a good cop. Preminger just winks at telling a social-conscience drama about a corrupted community within the sprawling cityscape, rather keeping the thriller riding on Andrews' shoulders as an existential journey of personal ramifications about a man with an Oedipal fixation who is becoming disconnected though with the ever-shrinking influences of the law on his side and an undying perception of right and wrong.<br /><br />The production companies in the early 1950s pussed out on the social-problem picture, and rather made "low-budget, low-risk thrillers" such as this, apparently in an attempt to evade the conniptions of conservative critics and social busybodies. But there is an expressionistic matter-of-factness to Preminger's inimitable approach. He injects each scene with a sense of everyday drama as a backdrop for the plot. Each supporting character must pull their own weight by doing something interesting, but none of them are cartoons or depressing comic reliefs. To him, every character thinks they're the star, as per the straight-from-the-shoulder self-assertion of Karl Malden as a missionary police inspector and a veteran waitress at a lunch counter. It is those who are the stars---Andrews and Gene Tierney, both anguished by their futile attempts to subdue their emotional intensity---who don't want to be.
1pos
New York police detective Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) is a guy who has to deal with his own demons on a daily basis at the same time as coping with the normal ups and downs of everyday life. The strain produced by his internal struggle and his intense hatred of criminals, leads him to make serious errors of judgement and to fail to recognise the need for any code of conduct to be adhered to in his dealings with people on the wrong side of the law. He has a track record of treating suspects and known criminals with gross brutality and this has brought him into conflict with his superior officers who have censured him for the amount of violence he has regularly used. Dixon cannot reconcile these calls for restraint with his own extreme and irrational hatred of all criminals. He is tormented by the fact that his father was a criminal and has been left with a powerful need to live down his father's reputation and to avoid fulfilling the low expectations that many people have of him as a consequence.<br /><br />When a rich Texan is murdered following an evening's gambling run by gangster Tommy Scalise (Gary Merrill), Dixon is assigned to the case. Scalise tells Dixon's superior officer Detective Lieutenant Thomas (Karl Malden) that the victim had been accompanied by Ken Paine (Craig Stevens) and his wife Morgan (Gene Tierney) and that Paine had committed the murder. Dixon goes to Paine's apartment and questions the suspect who is both inebriated and uncooperative and when Paine punches him, Dixon retaliates and Paine collapses and dies. Dixon goes on to dispose of the body in a nearby river. Paine's wife is questioned and after describing what had happened at Scalise's place, adds that her father had gone to Paine's apartment later that night to take issue with him about the fact that she'd returned home with facial bruising. Paine had previously attacked her on a number of occasions and her father, Jiggs Taylor (Tom Tully), had threatened that if it happened again he would beat Paine up. This information leads to Taylor being arrested and charged with murder. Nobody accepts Dixon's explanation that Scalise had killed the Texan and then had Paine killed to eliminate him as a witness.<br /><br />Dixon continues to make various attempts to get Scalise convicted but eventually realises that the only way to successfully achieve his goal is to write a confession about his own role in Paine's death and the cover up. He does this and also records that he is going alone to confront Scalise so that the police can arrest the gangster for Dixon's murder. The confrontation with Scalise and the eventual means by which Dixon achieves his own redemption, provide a tense and fitting conclusion to this gritty thriller.<br /><br />Dana Andrews' strained and preoccupied expressions convey his character's perpetually troubled nature and his anxieties as he deals with a series of misfortunes which include and follow Paine's accidental death. Dixon, however, isn't the only one to experience misfortune as Morgan, a successful model loses her job because of all the trouble surrounding her. Her father, who'd some years earlier been awarded a diploma for assisting the police, unjustly finds himself charged with a crime he did not commit. Ken Paine who'd been a war hero had experienced unemployment and a loss of self esteem which led to alcoholism and wife beating and Scalise who'd been set up in business by Dixon's father also suffers his own misfortunes.<br /><br />"Where The Sidewalk Ends" is a thoroughly engaging tale involving a group of interesting and diverse characters and a main protagonist who is the absolute personification of moral ambiguity.
1pos
'Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)' opens, appropriately, with Dana Andrews' and Gene Tierneys' names inscribed on the sidewalk, as dirty water streams down between the bars of a sewer grate. The sidewalk represents respectability, integrity and morality – only crooks and delinquents walk in the gutter. But even the most honourable of men have a tendency to misstep on occasion, and, when the sidewalk abruptly comes to an end, sometimes it proves impossible to avoid getting one's shoes wet. Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) was born in the gutter, his father a professional criminal, and has spent his entire life clawing his way back onto the sidewalk, perpetually balanced on the edge of the kerb. As a police detective, Dixon wants nothing more than to display the decency and integrity that his father lacked, but he possesses a mean-streak that he can't escape. When his quick temper leaves a murder suspect dead, Dixon finds himself becoming the very father whom he despised, a cheap criminal who'll cheat and lie to cover up his offence.<br /><br />'Where the Sidewalk Ends' was the only film to reunite Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney and director Otto Preminger after the superb 'Laura (1944),' though the two films, as far as noir goes, couldn't be further apart. Whereas the earlier picture had the strong intimacy of a country-house murder tale, this film is more conventional as a gritty urban police drama. Given her ravishingly memorable performance as Laura Hunt, it's unfortunate that here Tierney is grossly underused, occupying the typical niche of the pretty, helpless romantic interest {much as she did that same year in Jules Dassin's 'The Night and the City (1950)'}. Andrews, on the other hand, has rarely been better, exhibiting a toughness and unhinged anger that I hadn't expected of him. Gary Merrill is suitably smug as the crime boss Scalise, but he doesn't seem mean enough for the role, and I think that an actor like Richard Conte (who played Mr. Brown in 'The Big Combo (1955)') would have better suited the character; I hadn't realised this, but Conte appeared just one year earlier in Preminger's 'Whirlpool (1949).'<br /><br />The tension, as Dixon attempts to cover up his accidental crime, is absolutely riveting – certainly among the most suspenseful sequences of its era – though I feel that the situation still wasn't exploited to its full potential. The taxi driver is the only person who could have decisively identified Dixon as the perpetrator, but Preminger hurriedly skims over the moment when he passes Dixon on the stairs. Had the witness been brought in as Dixon was re-enacting his own movements outside the apartment entrance, we could have had some genuine fireworks. And why, for that matter, couldn't the taxi driver's testimony have immediately absolved Jiggs Taylor (Tom Tully) from suspicion of murder? Niggling inconsistencies such as these tarnish an otherwise excellent screenplay from Ben Hecht, who infuses his gritty criminal underworld with hard-hitting cops and wise-cracking felons. Andrews' seething and implosive law-enforcer, tormented by rage and remorse, has rarely been done better, at least the equal of Robert Ryan in Nicholas Ray's 'On Dangerous Ground (1952).'
1pos
This is a great example of a rather simple Film Noir story that is handled exceptionally well--thanks to excellent direction by Otto Preminger as well as some lovely acting performances. Dana Andrews stars as a hot-headed detective who all too often uses his fists instead of his brains. Soon after the film begins, Andrews is being reprimanded for this and is warned that if this continues he'll be off the force. A bit later, while investigating a crime he's attacked by a suspect and Andrews is forced to fight to protect himself. This time he does NOT use excessive force but the assailant is killed. Andrews panics and assumes they won't believe him so he tries to cover up the death--though instead an innocent man is ultimately blamed for the crime.<br /><br />There's a lot more to the film than this--including a plot involving a slimy villain (Gary Merrill) and a love interest for Andrews (Gene Tierney). All in all, this is one of the better examples of the genre--with great gritty dialog, superb lighting and a simple yet very effective story. This is the way Noir was meant to be.
1pos
A Turkish Bath sequence in a film noir located in New York in the 50's, that must be a hint at something ! Something that curiously, in all the previous comments, no one has pointed out , but seems to me essential to the understanding of this movie <br /><br />the Turkish Baths sequence: a back street at night, the entrance of a sleazy sauna, and Scalise wrapped in a sheet, getting his thighs massaged. Steve, the masseur is of the young rough boxer ( Beefcake!) type , and another guy, a bodyguard? finishes dressing up. Dixon obviously hates what he sees there and gets rough right away. We know he has a reputation for roughing up suspects. Good cop but getting out of control easy. Why is it that he hates them so much ? <br /><br />Could it be that he hates himself. This part of himself he inherited from his father ? That dark side that could lead him right at the end of the sidewalk, into the gutter ? What if that dark side lurked within a "closet" ? Remember : whenever Dixon meets Scalise ( 3 times), the guy is lying on a bed, and he only has men around him for company ( the irony of the " Girls" poster pinned up on the wall near his bed !).<br /><br />Scalise acts funny: affected manners, cranking his neck arrogantly, defiant, shoving his inhalator ( poppers ?) into his nostrils each time he talks to Dixon. Dixon, with a vengeance, is bent on pinning down Scalise who seems not to understand : "I never saw a man so full of hate as you. I consider it almost humorous the way you came after me alone. " Four years jumping at me as if I was somebody special! Why? "<br /><br />Because Scalise is someone special indeed : he is the direct inheritor of Dixon's father : " Your father liked me", "Your father set me up in business". He stands as Dixon's criminal brother, his dark side incarnate. And to top it all, he prefers the company of men. Dixon knows it well :" Who killed him (Paine)? You or one of your playmates?" Playmates ! Notice how each time they meet, Dixon manhandles Scalise: he picks the address-book out of his jacket, slaps his face, punches him. Scalise : "I warn you not to touch me! " . Dixon's homophobia is obvious. Or put it different : his unexpressed homosexuality . Dixon, aka Dixon's kid, is the son of a thief. In reaction to this, he decided to become a cop, a good one, but there is something of the criminal in him, a dark side: he is a violent copper, a murderer, a liar. Besides, he is not married, brings "a dizzy blonde" to his familiar eat-out place every now and then, but nothing else. The waitress scoffing says that he doesn't know how to make love to a woman. Dixon has a deep feeling of guilt and hates himself for those reasons." A hood and a mobster like his old man. Blood will tell". Finally, in order to achieve redemption, Dixon decides to sacrifice himself : if he gets his alter ego Scalise to kill him, he will free himself from the guilt and free the girl and her father too.<br /><br />The end of the movie brings us back to the opening sequence : Scalise is pushed in the gutter and Dixon deserves the right to walk the sidewalk and wins the love of the dame. He is straight at last.<br /><br />The unspoken theme of the movie could very well be that of a man who in order to cover his repressed feelings, wants to experience a woman's love ( Jean Douchet)<br /><br />(These notes owe a lot to the film commentary by Jean Douchet in the French DVD edited by CarlottaI
1pos
A hot-headed cop accidentally kills a murder suspect and then covers up the crime, but must deal with a guilty conscience while he tries to solve a murder case. Andrews and Tierney are reunited with director Preminger in a film noir that is as effective as "Laura," their earlier collaboration. Andrews is perfectly cast as the earnest cop, a good guy caught up in unfortunate circumstances. The acting is fine all around, including Malden as a tough police captain and Tully as Tierney's protective father. The screenplay by Hecht, a great and prolific screenwriter, is taut and suspenseful, and Preminger creates a great atmosphere.
1pos
Dana Andrews is one of those actors that I've probably seen in a dozen films, but who has never really registered for me. Often stolid, taciturn, playing the same kinds of roles and looking somewhat like the similarly underrated Glenn Ford, he's an actor that takes some effort to really appreciate; but once you hit the right film....<br /><br />And this is it. Preminger's moody look at New York's underbelly is as dirty and seedy as just about any 50s noir, and Andrews is in his element as too-tough cop Mark Dixon who just doesn't know how to play the game to get ahead: he hates criminals too much to always play by the rules. Early on in the film, he accidentally kills the witness to a murder involving an illegal crap game set up by a mobster who Dixon hates for personal reasons, and he spends the rest of the film trying to cover up his involvement and bring the mobster to his kind of "justice". Along the way he gets involved with the estranged wife of the man he killed (Gene Tierney) and also has to try to get her father off the hook for the murder.<br /><br />Stunningly photographed by Joseph LaShelle, with hard and sparkling dialogue by Ben Hecht and a truly powerful ending with elements of tragedy and found grace in just a minute or two of time, this is another noir for the ages and might be my favorite Preminger film thus far -- it's every bit as good as the more-heralded Laura.
1pos
Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, who were both so memorable in 1944's "Laura, re-teamed for this excellent 1950 film-noir.<br /><br />An embittered policeman, Andrews as Mark, can't get over the fact that his father was a hoodlum who died in a police shootout while trying to break out of jail. As a result of his bitterness, Mark doesn't know when to stop using his hands. It's this inability that leads to the accidental death of a small-time hood.(Craig Stevens)<br /><br />In trying to frame gangster Gary Merrill, Mark unintentionally puts the heat on innocent cab-drive, Tom Tully, who is the father of Gene Tierney, who was separated by Stevens.<br /><br />This is a well-thought out film dealing with the conscience of a basically decent human being.<br /><br />The ending is not exactly upbeat as Mark will have to face the music. At least, he finally admits to what he has done.
1pos
The title sequence shows the credits written on a rain-soaked sidewalk as people trod on it; music is provided by someone whistling Alfred Newman's "Street Scene." Then we meet Det. Sgt. Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews), who always wanted to be something his old man wasn't: a guy on the right side of the law. But he's pretty vicious for a good guy. After several complaints over his roughing people up, his boss, Insp. Nicholas Foley (Robert F. Simon), demotes him. Foley tells him he's a good man, but needs to get his head on straight and be more like Det. Lt. Thomas (Karl Malden), who has just gotten a promotion.<br /><br />Meanwhile, Tommy Scalise (Gary Merrill, in a splendidly slimy performance) has an illegal dice game going and is looking to make a sucker out of the rich Ted Morrison (Harry Von Zell), who was brought in by Ken Paine (Craig Stevens) and his beautiful wife Morgan (Gene Tierney). She figures out too late her husband is using her as a decoy, and Paine strikes her when she refuses to play along. The chivalrous Morrison intervenes but Paine knocks him out cold. That seems to be the worst of it, but later it turns out the guy is dead; and Paine looks guilty.<br /><br />But this won't be Paine's story. Soon Dixon has fallen in love with Morgan—but not before losing his temper again and committing a terrible deed that he tries to cover up. Morgan's father, a tale-spinning taxi driver (Tom Tully), may take the rap for it. It's up to Dixon to try to pin the blame on Scalise.<br /><br />Otto Preminger directs a script credited to Ben Hecht and three others from the novel "Night Cry" by William L. Stuart. This is a solid film noir with excellent performances and all the shadowy photography and murky morality we expect from this genre. It holds up until the brightly lit ending, which looks like something the studio had filmed to appease the censors. Of course, the classic noir directed by Preminger and starring Andrews and Tierney is "Laura." You'll enjoy this, but you can't miss that.
1pos
The fully rounded character of the principal role of this movie, that of the cop torn up by his past and on a path of self-destruction so clear to the viewer, is unique for its time, 1950. <br /><br />Along with the haunting music and the well written plot, the film is a prime example of film noir at its best. Close-ups of Dana's eyes reveal the anguish within, Karl Malden excels as his boss, who brooks no nonsense but also has compassion for those under his command in the precinct. <br /><br />Otto Preminger made this type of movie just about his own. If there is any fault it would be with the breath taking beauty of Gene Tierney who seems oddly out of place with the hardened cop. Their scenes in the cafe, however, are wonderful and ring true. <br /><br />Tom Tully, in the bit part of her father is perfect as is Gary Merrill as the hood. Great lighting and mood setting. The building where the deadly deeds take place highly atmospheric, I love the old woman in the basement. <br /><br />8 out of 10.
1pos