Lew Ayres

Holiday

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Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn face to face

Screwball but not particularly comedy, in spite of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn’s presence, Holiday is too serious a business to be unserious about, and there aren’t really any jokes in it. But Grant bashes through it as if it were in the key of fun, and he drags everyone and everything along in his wake. He even throws in a backflip or two here in there, to remind us he got his start in showbiz as a tumbler. Grant plays Johnny Case, a normal, everyday guy who’s worked his way up to a decent job in finance. Johnny has met and fallen for Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), unaware that she’s from a … Read more

The Dark Mirror

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Dr Elliott holds Ruth… or is it Terry?

I asked Gemini, Google’s AI thingie, what the best “abnormal psychology” film noir was, pretty certain it would say The Dark Mirror. It did. Along with In a Lonely Place and Night of the Hunter, a couple of other suggestions. In the halls of appreciation of old movies those last two get plenty of love, but for some reason 1946’s The Dark Mirror seems to have fallen by the wayside a bit. Which is unfair for all sorts of reasons. The plot is a cracker, for starters. A doctor has been murdered but the woman placed at the scene of the crime has a watertight alibi. She was elsewhere, and several witnesses can … Read more

All Quiet on the Western Front

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Lew Ayres and Louis Wolheim

If Netflix’s 2022 remake of All Quiet on the Western Front has done anything it’s revived interest in this 1930 original, a film more people have heard about than seen but which has been influential on generations of film-makers. It’s obvious that Kubrick borrowed heavily from it for the trench sequences in Paths of Glory, and Steven Spielberg has acknowledged its influence on Saving Private Ryan. And what a beast it is, a marvel of technical brilliance, directed with almost insane virtuosity by Lewis Milestone, who’d already made a name for himself by 1930 and would go on to direct for decades to come – he directed the original Ocean’s Eleven in 1960, for … Read more