Showing posts with label Patricia Neal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Patricia Neal. Show all posts

The Fountainhead (1949)

The Fountainhead (1949) is an Ayn Rand adaptation and scripted hyper-melodramatic didactic economics and social science charged pre-post modern pre-relativist objetivist and more than just a little film noir tinged melodrama of rags to riches UnAmercian Dream-style semi-speculative cross class dedication to art and architectural and individualistic vision unromantic romance set-up with its no promises and no obligations ultar-objectivist marriages alternate reality white suprematic media manipulation and propagandist anarcho-capitalist post-communist anti-communist media demagogue public opinion forming artisitic vindication of terrorism in the name of individualism impotent platonic-erotic love triangle drama directed by King Vidor and starring Patricia Neal, Gary Cooper, Raymond Massey, Kent Smith, Henry Hull, Moroni Olsen und Ray Collins, yah, Ray Collins is in this film produced by Henry Blanke.

Diplomatic Courier (1952)

Diplomatic Courier (1952) is a Henry Hathaway Cold War espionage in post-war Europe screwball-adjacent drama romance chase military police procedural thriller, with Tyrone Power, Patricia Neal, Hildegard Knef, Stephen McNally, Karl Malden and special spot appearances from Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin, and a further dynamic and fun extra cross dress appearance

As for screwball, there is a certain sure pedigree of connecting dramatic matter which links the screw of the ball and its previous decades of filmatics and is indicated in Diplomatic Courier (1952), highlighted and brought to our attention when Tyrone Power describes Patricia Neal across a Trieste café bar table as 'screwey'. 

The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)

The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) is the quintessential high quality high concept high tension classic Hollywood 1950's science-fiction presentation.

The nascent and sudden re-invention of the science fiction film in the 1950s does inevitably draw on film noir style when need be.

And although the themes are of a universal and global nature, not quite the subjective and local tendency in film noir, there are still film techniques and themes aplenty which crossover between the film noir of its day and the science fiction.

Directed by Robert Wise The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) is spritely, earnest, playful, philosophical, funny, serious and has distinct Bernhard Hermann music, as well as the most irresistible use of the theremin in film history.

The Breaking Point (1950)

The Breaking Point (1950) is a swell of a smart film noir drama that falls sweetly across the boundary between 1040s and 1950s cinema.

The movie stars John Garfield, who plays the otherwise moral captain of a charter boat who becomes financially strapped and is drawn into illegal activities in order to keep up payments on his boat.

Across the varieties of film noir, there are many flavours, and this includes the tragic drama that has elements of film noir, as here in The Breaking Point.

Although not complex, the story is interesting because of the realism brought to the characters, an exchange made in favour of dropping the more familiar and fantastical elements of film noir.

One of the most common themes and juxtapositions in film noir, is made between domestic life and the life of crime, or at least the life 'out there' in the city of danger.