Sam Jaffe

Les Espions aka The Spies

by
Gérard Séty as Dr Malic

Alfred Hitchcock and Henri-Georges Clouzot spent the 1950s casting directorial glances of mutual admiration at each other. Les Espions (The Spies in English) is Clouzot’s most overt homage to one of Hitchcock’s amused thrillers… and he gets it completely wrong. A non-thrilling thriller crossed with a non-funny comedy is the result. Gérard Séty plays the Hitchcockian innocent abroad, a shrink running a struggling private psychiatric clinic who is asked by an American agent to hide a spy on the run in return for a big wedge of cash. The Americans have chosen this place, it seems, because no one will think to look for an escaped spy in an asylum. Also, as a … Read more

The Asphalt Jungle

by
Doll (Jean Hagen) and Dix (Sterling Hayden)

“Trash,” was MGM boss Louis B Mayer’s verdict on The Asphalt Jungle when he saw it in 1950. “Ugly people doing nasty things,” he added, possibly unhappy that John Huston had borrowed from the glamour-dodging European neorealists to make what’s now considered to be one of the pre-eminent films of the 1950s. Does Mayer have a point? Not from this end of the telescope. If nothing else, Huston has been proven right by the passage of time and the respect of countless other directors. You can see plenty of The Asphalt Jungle in the work of Quentin Tarantino, for instance. It’s a heist movie, a heist-gone-wrong movie in fact, and so there’s nothing … Read more