Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

The shy and clumsy daughter of a rich doctor is wooed by a beautiful young man for marriage. The story took quite a while to unfold for me. It starts very slow and paces along until the moment that Havilland's character is denied the union by her father. I really liked the interpretation of the father, and his harsh judgement of his daughter that breaks out of him, once he loses composition and humor was quite gripping. Also de Havilland's performance left quite an impression - her growing coldness and her initial disgust at her own cruelty towards her father were the highlights for me. Apart from that the film kept a lot of the theater-like qualities and felt a little heavily staged at one point or another. It relied on effective but very few visual clues about the interior feelings of the characters, and I would have loved to see more of this.

A police mole tries to befriend a crazy mother-dependent gangster after a brutal train robbery. I did find the evolution of the plot not very convincing as Cagney's character goes from extremely suspicious and brutal to a very trusting guy (at least towards his new cell mate - the police informer). Everything is explained, and the death of Cagney's mother might add vulnerability to his situation but it still felt a little bit conceived to me. The actors themselves were extremely interesting to watch, I especially liked the mother. Another thing that caught my attention was the brutality of the main gangster and how it was dealt with on the screen. It got past censorship more or less uncut I guess, but the events had a very "modern violence" feel to them. The scene with the hot steam in the beginning was very interesting as it led even more depth to the ruthlessness of the gangster, serving little else. Also the showdown with the explosions was quite impressive...

A betrayed remote family member of the Duke of Asgoyne murders his way to the top of the inheritance succession. An extremely amusing story - the comedy comes a lot from the comedic variations on the same kind of difficult action (ie killing the next relative in line) - watching the actors was a delight and some of the impersonations of Alec Guiness were jaw-dropping, especially the old priest, slightly senile and the "fool of the family". The open ending helped me to keep the tension and fresh in memory. There seems to have been a different ending in the US, which I haven't seen, but was supposed to give "moral" closure, as crime was not allow to pay back then.