Movie Reviews
Titles starting with T
Top Secret!
I must have seen well over a thousand comedy films in my life, from clever, understated British Ealing movies to the Three Stooges. I’ve seen a lot of bad ones, and a lot of mediocre ones, and quite a few really good ones. I figure I’m ahead of the game if I get a dozen chuckles and a handful of guffaws in a movie. But the list of films where I literally laughed until my sides hurt is ... Read more »
Topaz
Hitchcock should have stuck to suspense and given the spy stories a pass. With this and with Torn Curtain before it, he never really seemed to have a handle on the material. It’s adapted from a novel by Leon Uris, and concerns spies from America (John Forsythe, the only real “name” in the cast) and France in the days leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s ... Read more »
Topaze
This is not the sort of part I associate with John Barrymore, the most respected actor of his day, both on stage and on screen. But then, I haven’t really seen all that many of his pictures. He was known as The Great Profile, a devilishly handsome man, and usually the romantic lead, at least early in his career. The best performance by him that I have seen was the hilariously clever Read more »
Topkapi
I love caper movies, where a group set out to pull off an impossible robbery, and this one by Jules Dassin is the granddaddy of them all. (I’m going to term Rififi—also by Dassin—as the great-granddaddy.) The heist is built up to step-by-step, and it is ingenious. More recent films may be more intricate and done with more technical ... Read more »
Topper
I’ve tried several times to read the comic fantasy and satirical novels of Thorne Smith, without success. The sensibility is so much of another age that I just can’t understand. Dressing for dinner, butlers and maids, it just doesn’t work on the printed page. But it does in the movies, especially in this one. I first saw it when I was very young, and the story of two ... Read more »
Topper (Second Review)
I first came to the weird world of Thorne Smith’s Topper by way of the television series that was spun off from this movie. There was something strangely attractive to me about people who could vanish and re-appear at will. I was a faithful viewer. The movie is much superior. There were two sequels, but neither of them had the star power of Constance Bennett (who ... Read more »
Topper Returns
Then as now, sequels are usually a bad idea. This is one of those times. Just a pale shadow of the wit of Topper, this movie bumbles along as a strictly by-the-numbers grind. Abbott & Costello or the Three Stooges would have been right at home in this plot and haunted house setting. Joan Blondell is no match for Constance Bennett, and they couldn’t persuade Cary Grant to show up ... Read more »
Torah! Torah! Torah!
The heartrending story of three Hawaiian Hasidic Hebrew (3H) boys whose talmudic studies are interrupted by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We follow the Jaunty Jews as they form their own kosher unit of the Marines and battle their way from island to island (but never on Shabat!) on their way to a showdown over Tokyo Bay, where … wait a minute. That was a typo up there. Sorry. Let’s ... Read more »
Torch Song Trilogy
Harvey Fierstein was out way back when, before it was okay to be out, because it was usually a career killer. He didn’t give a shit. Being gay and swish was and is so much a part of him that toning his act down would probably have killed him. (Is swish a non-PC word now? It means acting in an exaggeratedly feminine way, and I don’t see it as insulting. Back in ... Read more »
Torn Curtain
I feel that The Birds was the last really great film—a film that shocked you right out of your socks—that Alfred Hitchcock made (though Frenzy was damn good). This is not a put-down; this film is good, too, just not up to the standards of those masterpieces of the 1950s. And it’s showing its age in some ways. ... Read more »