Edward G Robinson

Night Has a Thousand Eyes

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Edward G Robinson, John Lund and Gail Russell publicity shot

If it’s a really good Edward G Robinson performance you’re looking for, can I suggest Night Has a Thousand Eyes, a knotty little potboiler elevated by Robinson. Out of gangster mode he was a versatile actor who could bring home the goods in all sorts of roles. Here he’s a stage magician who gets spooked when the phoney predictions he offers audiences start coming true. So spooked that he gives it all up and flees, away from the woman he loves – a premonition has told him she’ll die if he stays – and away from the best friend who will become stinking rich by investing in oil, another fulfilment of John Triton’s … Read more

Key Largo

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Nora and Frank

If you liked Humphrey Bogart’s cynical romantic Rick in Casablanca, Key Largo gives you another go around the track with him. And if you liked the dynamite pairing of Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep or Dark Passage, they get another outing too, in the last of the films they’d make together. He plays a major back from the war and in the sweltering Florida Keys on a courtesy visit to the father of one of his men, who died in the Italian campaign. But when Major Frank McCloud gets to the hotel owned by James Temple (Lionel Barrymore), he discovers that it’s been taken over by … Read more

The Stranger

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Mr Wilson with Mary

The Stranger is an entertaining enough noirish thriller but the real fun comes from watching it as a contest between a maverick director and a studio that wanted their hireling to turn out Hollywood product rather than a grand auteurish statement. The director is Orson Welles and the year is 1946. Welles was at a low ebb. He hadn’t been let near a feature film on his own for four years. 1941’s Citizen Kane had flopped and the follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, had gone so far over schedule and over budget that the studio had taken it off Welles, cut an hour and reshot whole chunks of it. It also bombed. Future generations … Read more

Scarlet Street

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Kitty and Chris

There’s a “strike while the iron is hot” aspect to 1945’s Scarlet Street, a quick follow-up to 1944’s The Woman in the Window which reunited the three key cast members – Joan Bennett, Edward G Robinson and Dan Duryea – with director Fritz Lang and the ace cinematographer Milton Krasner. That was noir and so is this, a remake of Jean Renoir’s 1931 film La Chienne (literally, The Bitch). Renoir didn’t like Lang’s remake and nor, later on, would he like Human Desire, Lang’s remake of his La Bête Humaine. Edward G Robinson was also in the Renoir camp. He didn’t like working on Scarlet Steet much, considering it too similar to The Woman … Read more

The Woman in the Window

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Alice and the professor meet

Not to be confused with the 2021 movie of the same name, 1944’s The Woman in the Window is the second of three film noirs Fritz Lang made with Joan Bennett and the first of two he’d make with Edward G Robinson. It’s a queer beast – noir with a plot trick picked up from The Wizard of Oz, a trick used so brilliantly it rescues what looks like a film that’s gone weirdly off the rails. Robinson plays the tweedy psychology professor called Richard, Dick to his friends – Sigmund Freud bubbles around beneath the surface of this plot and that name is no accident – who, while admiring a portrait of a … Read more