| MovieSteve

The Long Night

2026-02-20 by Steve

The Long Night is a remake of Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Lève hoping to do for American audiences what Carné’s film had done for the French – wow them. It was a flop, in spite of having a good cast, a fine director and top flight technical team. In case anyone wanted to make a direct comparison, before it came out RKO took the precaution of buying up all the prints of Carné’s film and destroying them. Luckily, not absolutely all of them, so now we can enjoy the Carné original and watch it alongside the remake to work out what went wrong. I’ll just say it here – timidity is the … Read more

Blues in the Night

2025-11-10 by Steve

A jazzy, noirish take on the “getting the band together” drama, Blues in the Night benefits from crisp images and snappy dialogue. On the downside, everyone in it is about ten years too old for their role, there is quite a lot of “hep cat daddio” slang to digest and the racial politics are a mess. But if you can take the rough with the smooth, it’s bright and well paced, with a good plot, interesting acting and even a few good tunes – look on it as a semi-musical, maybe. It’s also the film that convinced Elia Kazan to pack in acting and take up directing. He says he was convinced he … Read more

Sorry, Wrong Number

2022-11-012022-03-22 by Steve

Sorry, Wrong Number, made in 1948, is a superbly melodramatic drama taking the brittle, “dangerous dame” image of its star, Barbara Stanwyck, for a protracted ride. Four years earlier Stanwyck had starred in Double Indemnity as the manipulative minx persuading poor schmuck Ed McMurray to kill her husband, and here she is in Sorry, Wrong Number as a victim, a bed-ridden rich woman who, on a crossed line while telephoning, overhears two men discussing a murder they’re going to commit later that night. The servants have been given the night off, her husband is away, but Leona Stevenson (Stanwyck) isn’t initially that worried. But as the night progresses and as she makes and … Read more