Gail Russell

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

The Unseen

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Close up of Gail Russell

Either a hopeless genre mishmash or a brilliant psychological thriller gone a bit wrong – probably both – 1945’s The Unseen was sold as a follow-up of sorts to the spooky thriller from the previous year, The Uninvited. In fact they have little to do with each other beyond the same director (Lewis Allen), one actor (Gail Russell) and that negative “Un” modifier. Russell had an “Introducing” credit in The Uninvited but she’s really the star here, though first-billed Joel McCrea would probably have disagreed. She plays a nanny brought in to tame the two children of widower David Fielding (McCrea) after their original nanny, Maxine, is mysteriously suddenly let go. There’s an aspect … Read more

The Uninvited

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Roderick holds Stella in his arms while Pamela looks on

Cosy supernatural horror? There is such a thing and here it is in the shape of 1944’s The Uninvited, a strange mix of the jaunty and the spooky, a dialled-down take on the sort of comic horror that Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard had piloted to box-office glory in The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers. Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey play a brother and sister who happen upon a vast and lovely house on a cliff edge in Cornwall while down from London on holiday. Falling instantly in love with it, they seek out its owner, the starchy Commander Beech, who lets them have it for a song. What’s wrong … Read more

Moonrise

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Danny and Gilly

Having worked pretty consistently for 30 years, director Frank Borzage more or less bowed out with Moonrise in 1948. Ten years later he’d return with a couple of afterthoughts, but in the main this was it, his last picture. He’d been one of the big players of the silent era – when the Oscars were invented in 1927 he won the very first one for Best Director – and this goodbye is in a sense a farewell to all that. It’s also partly intended as a bookend to Sunrise, directed by fellow 1920s Fox director FW Murnau, a lament to a certain style of visual lyricism that disappeared with the dawn of the … Read more