Showing posts with label Robert Taylor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Taylor. Show all posts

Conspirator (1949)

Conspirator (1949) is a double agent British espionage and early Cold War Soviet versus England romance and intrigue anti-USSR propaganda spy thriller starring Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Taylor, Honor Blackman and Robert Flemyng, in a Victor Saville directed tale of female belittlement and abuse in the honourable name of spying for the Soviets, while protecting the integrity of the Brits.

Round it thusly spins, not so fast, but with a fairly interesting admixture of fog and domesticity, with some cold and lonely English wetland landscapes to break up the misery.

Undercurrent (1946)

Undercurrent (1946) is a paranoid women lousy husband drama woman's picture-style essential woman's picture film noir story of riches, jealousy, egregious abuses of domestic trust, and all out manic equine-based murder plot around a mystery Mitchum-alike sibling and significant and pressing hunky love interest in a rough leather jacket.

Undercurrent starts with normality, suburbia in the snow, the very surface that film noir was about to break, when 1946 spilled into the century and sped the future on with its weirdismal messaging about the martyrdom and murderdoom of wifely women.

Devil's Doorway (1950)

Devil's Doorway (1950) is a returning veteran race relations injustice on the range and one man against the system social commentary action adventure wild western movie with film noir leanings, and one that is significantly and surprisingly better than its black face or whatever and inappropriate Native American portrayals this represents, which are not well done and which might be off-putting for any modern kinda film observers.

For example, Native Americans have never and would never refer to themselves as 'Indians', as they do here, even a patent absurdity in 1950.

Anthony Mann’s Devil’s Doorway (1950) is a significant yet underappreciated western film that offers a haunting portrayal of racial discrimination in the American West. 

The Bribe (1949)

The Bribe (1949) is a classic exotic lousy husband post-war Central American murder mystery cop film noir with Ava Gardner, Robert Taylor, Vincent Price and Charles Laughton, in a kind of noir-by-numbers take on many staples of the style, combing noirish elementata in a perfect combination late forties thriller.

There is a lot to see, not the least of it is Robert Taylor and Vincent price, sitting together and looking so kinda similar that it is not just eerie, but a sign that things are going to be a lot of fun. 

Party Girl (1958)

Party Girl (1958) is a brassy blast of 50s technicolor dance and jealous showgirl murder misogyny film noir.

Directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Robert Taylor, Cyd Charisse and Lee J. Cobb, and filmed in CinemaScope, Party Girl celebrates like few other mediocre classics, the gazing male and the prancing half naked female, along with such blasts of wowed brass instruments the sound of those fat horns lingers painfully after the fact.

The movie we are talking about describes a perspective often portrayed in media and art that tends to objectify and depict women from a particular viewpoint. 

This perspective often emphasizes certain physical attributes or characteristics of women, positioning them as objects of desire rather than fully realized individuals. 

High Wall (1947)

High Wall (1947) is a wife-murder mystery amnesia psychiatric PTSD ex-serviceman prison noir starring Audrey Totter, Robert Taylor and Herbert Marshall.

From its exciting opening sequence in which ex-mercenary flyer Steven Kenet (Robert Taylor) crashes his car into a river, trying to cover the evident strangulation murder of his wife with a suicide, to its traversing of the prison system for the criminally insane, up until its drug-induced truth-finding denouement, High Wall is exciting, fantastic, serious, dopey and features a proper film noir evil villain, a cool-blooded bad-doer who commits the most callous killings  — in order to save his chances at career promotion within the business of religious book publishing.

Johnny Eager (1941)

Johnny Eager (1941) is a delightful and fast-moving early period classic film noir, starring Robert Taylor and Lana Turner as two compromised and heartless individuals working against their better natures as they slide fatefully into separate dooms.

Directed by Mervin LeRoy and also starring Van Heflin and Paul Stewart, Johnny Eager is a cynical entertainment showing criminal hubris as only the gangster films of the era can.

Lana Turner plays her role almost without anyone appreciating her full star power, and she is certainly no femme fatale, but rather a femme who is fated, almost lost between two worlds, represented by the gangster she falls in with in the form of Johnny Eager —  and her stepfather, who is the District Attorney who imprisoned him.