Movie Reviews
Sunset Story
There’s a place in Los Angeles called Sunset Hall, which bills itself as a “Home for Free-thinking Elders.” It’s filled with aging communists, socialists, wobblies, and other lefties. These are people who have been involved in progressive causes all their lives, and the house is a good place, about as good as a place where you go to die can be. Some of them are far beyond radicalism, like ... Read more »
Sunset Boulevard
Still just as good as the first time I saw it. If All About Eve hadn’t come out in the same year it certainly would have won Best Picture. I don’t have a lot to add to the thousands of essays that have been written about it. Look some of them up, see the movie again, marvel at Billy Wilder’s audacity at even making it, and at Gloria ... Read more »
Sunrise at Campobello
A lot of the discussion at the IMDb was about Greer Garson’s teeth. No kidding. She’s wearing a dental appliance that makes her slightly buck-toothed, like Eleanor Roosevelt actually was. Most seemed to think it made her grotesque. What idiots. It would take a lot more than that to make the fabulous Greer look bad. And let’s face it, though Eleanor was a great woman, about the nicest thing ... Read more »
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
I was looking at the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest American Films, and this was the only one I had never seen. It was made in Hollywood by F.W. Murnau at the tail end of the silent era. Murnau is most famous for Nosferatu, but I personally prefer another film from his German period, The Last Laugh. I have mixed ... Read more »
The Sundowners
Shot in Australia, and one of the chief reasons to see this is the locations, the photography, and the insight into the lives of the sheep drovers there. The story is unsurprising but well-told. There is a good, scary forest fire, and a pretty funny sheep-shearing contest. Robert Mitchum is relatively un-macho. His Aussie accent is terrible. Deborah Kerr’s is much better, though I doubt ... Read more »
A Summer in Genoa
A woman dies in a car accident, leaving a husband and pre-teen and teenage daughters. Hoping that a change of scene will get them past the grief, the father (Colin Firth) takes them to Genoa, where he will teach and they will learn Italian and take piano lessons. Genoa has beautiful beaches full of beautiful boys for the teenager, lovely churches and architecture for the younger girl, ... Read more »
Summer Hours
Three children and their families are spending some time at the country house of their mother, whose uncle was a famous painter. The house is full of his possessions, unchanged since his death: many sentimental items and some of great value, including two Corots. End of Act One. She dies, and they gather again to discuss what to do with the estate. One son wants to keep the house and ... Read more »
Sullivan’s Travels
John L. Sullivan is a Hollywood director who makes $4000 per week. (The average yearly wage in 1941 was around $1500.) He makes comedies, like Ants in Your Pants of 1939, but he yearns to make a serious movie. He wants to film a book about hard times and poverty and other important things, called O Brother, Where Art Thou? by Sinclair ... Read more »
Sugar
Here’s an unusual little sports movie. You know the old plot of the poor boy who works his way up to the big leagues and wins the World Series in the seventh game by hitting a homer in the bottom of the ninth? This ain’t that movie. We get a look at the farm system in places like the Dominican Republic, where the aspiring ballplayers are not mistreated in any way, but groomed rather like ... Read more »
Suddenly
This is the film Frank Sinatra did right after his supporting Oscar-winning role in From Here to Eternity, and it announced that that film was not a fluke, that he could do more than sing and dance, as in On the Town and Anchors Aweigh. He is wonderfully menacing here, as a gangster who has contracted to kill ... Read more »