Robert Aldrich

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte

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Bette Davis screaming

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte tries to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle that was What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. And fails. It’s not even a valiant fail, instead director Robert Aldrich and co mount a cynical re-run at the same basic idea – two vintage dames doing battle most foul – but this time around the recipe lacks one essential ingredient. Joan Crawford. Bette Davis is, though, the other half of the duelling duo who’d made Baby Jane‘s Grand Dame Guignol (as these things full of superannuated Hollywood monsters are known) so memorable. Crawford walked off the production of this follow-up claiming to be ill. Eventually the insurers demanded she be let go. Or that’s how … Read more

The Big Knife

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Ida Lupino and Jack Palance

1955’s The Big Knife is where a lot of people turn when they fancy another wallow in the filth and corruption of showbiz and have already done In a Lonely Place or The Sweet Smell of Success. The line-up looks promising. It’s based on a play by Clifford Odetts, who co-wrote the screenplay for In a Lonely Place with Ernest Lehman. It’s directed by Robert Aldrich, who liked to hang around in dark corners (Kiss Me Deadly, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane) and the director of photography is Ernest Laszlo, a master of dramatic lighting (Stalag 17, While the City Sleeps, Inherit the Wind). The cast is promising too. What you need … Read more

Kiss Me Deadly

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Velda and Mike get close

Here’s Kiss Me Deadly, the American film that gave birth to the French New Wave, or so said both Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, so that’s a claim made with some authority. It starts with a terrified woman flagging down a car containing private eye Mike Hammer and ends with another woman who opens a box containing nuclear material and bursts instantly into flames. In between one of the most abjectly nihilistic of the noirs, with not a smidgeon of light relief, not a smile, very little in the way of social nicety, and a detective who takes on a case not because he’s crusading for justice but rather, we sense, because there’s … Read more

Kiss Me Deadly

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review kissmedeadly poster

Critics continue to argue over whether this is the best film noir ever made but all seem united on one point – Kiss Me Deadly is the best adaptation of one of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels. Now 50 years old, the film opens with a scene that still packs a punch – cynical private eye Mike Hammer picks up a girl hitchhiker who is wearing only a mac. Within minutes his car has been run off the road and a brutal gang is torturing the girl before killing her. The stage is set for Hammer, one of cinema’s great anti-heroes, to become avenging angel, visiting bad men in places high and low … Read more