Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

A lawyer falls in love with the woman he is supposed to defend in a murder case. This highly entertaining movie was not as consistent story-wise as some of the other of Hitchcock's movies that I've seen. There is still a bit of Freudian over-interpretation in some of the actions that the characters did. But nevertheless, I enjoyed it - I would have loved to see more of Laughton's performance, him being one of my favorite actors in films from that time. (Especially in This Land is Mine, a Renoir film, unfortunately forgotten by and large). I wanted to look a bit at Hitchcock's camera work in one scene. Peck has been traveling to his client's home to investigate and encounters the mysterious "gardener" and personal butler of the deceased for the first time. But the gardener has been avoiding the lawyer and suddenly shows up at his hotel room during a stormy night. The camera is quite mobile in this scene and it is fascinating to watch how the image...

An abstract animation by the painter Oskar Fischinger. There is an amazing amount of visual and graphic concepts explored in this film. For me this basically represents a treasure of ideas, many of which I felt were developped beautifully to maturity, even though the result only occupies a couple of seconds in the complete film. In my opinion it also represents a beautiful sample of the color palette in use at the time, obviously strongly influenced by the photographic and filmic processes that were applied to create the film.

An underground rebel is wounded during a heist and tries to evade the manhunt in Belfast. The story is of a steady decline towards the unsurprising end of terrible consequences. James Mason is quite astonishing as the soft-spoken hero, whom you just cannot imagine of doing anything as bad as scaring a child, let alone a robbery. Obviously, he does both in the film and much more. His endless odyssey which is much less about him than the various Belfastian characters towards him and - although explicitly denied by the filmmaker in a bizarre opening title card - ultimately about the struggle for independence in Northern Ireland (or any similar situation) There were two or three moments in the film that didn't hold up for me as well as they should, but the crazy painter and his bizarre co-inhabitant made it all up - a bold selection of outright frightening men from the fringes of society. There is no need to decipher the symbolism (payoff might be even bigger) - it's simply e...

 A reckless murderer seduces a naive heiress when her adopted sister falls for his brutal charms and tries to manipulate him. Although the plot is a bit convoluted - and I have indeed forgotten most of it - the characters were extremely memorable in all their bold and rottenness. I enjoyed Tiereney and Trevor both equally, and they both had it coming, I guess. Although there is the happy ending obligatoire I felt that there was a silent agreement between director and the audience (me) that it was just tagged on to comply with some unseen movie force - it's not real and the story actually sinks into an ocean of evil and the bad triumph. Esther Howard, Walther Slezak, and Elisha Cook are just as enjoyable in the smaller roles and those details make the film much more enjoyable as it is already. As I was not really too familiar with Tierney it was amusing to learn that he mostly played variations on this role up to Tarantino's Reservoir dogs. Worth re-watching if just for...

A group of nuns opens up a new convent at the edge of a mountain abyss and are confronted with their past and needs. The setup on this one is quite straightforward: The extraordinary location of the old palace where the nun set in at the edge of the steep decline is also a place where all the subdued emotions come floating to the surface. The film focuses on the development of two or maybe three of the nuns, even when all of them are affected. Kathleen Byrons presence is enormous and even made better by the marvelous use of colors (as in all the Powell/Pressburger pictures I've seen so far) - the pictures of the abyss are breathtaking, and the clashes of cultures was beautifully played out. The film might have been a bit too short for the number of issues it explores. The love relation between the prince and the beggar woman was a bit too much on the surface and I also would have liked to know more about Dean's back story. His character was extremely interesting but his...

A detective is hired by a shady rich man to find his girlfriend and falls in love with her. The story felt very much like a blueprint for the typical film-noir. The detective falls for the girl he's trying to hunt or pin down and goes to all sorts of lengths to protect her from perceived evil. The first part of the film is a pretty long flashback but then it continues in story present, which was quite surprising for me. A lot of important decisions hinge on being at the right place at the right time (ie wrong) and there are one or two moments where I felt that randomness did overtake a bit. Mitchum and Douglas are incredibly impressive, the other characters are not completely one-dimensional but the film is simply too short to give them a lot of time to delve into character. Especially Greer should have gotten more screen time to get more evil out of her character, I felt.