Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

A shoplifter ends up spending christmas eve with the district attorney and - obviously - falling in love with him. My favorite scene is definitively when the car ends up on the meadow and a cow sticks her head into the car, trying to lick Barbara Stanwyck. Cows are funny creatures, as people have known long before Preston Sturges, but they still work - at least for me. Quite possibly it is their balancing on the tightrope between curiosity and fear, combined with their large, brown eyes that makes them so relentlessly funny. Maybe a character like that might prove interesting. The film as a whole didn't work so good for me, although it has some very funny scenes: the scene with the small town judge/sheriff and some of the exchanges of the couple. It gets a bit too sentimental at the actual xmas ceremony and fails to pick up over that. I did like the ending which was kept at least slightly ambiguous: will he still be there when she comes out? A script analysis would maybe st...

A man has a car breakdown in his hometown and visits the love of his youth, just to stir up a whole lot of murderous trouble. Although an accident sets the story in motion it is the back story that unfolds during the telling of this noir that makes the dire ending  unavoidable. Maybe slightly different from the classical Chandler noir in terms that the protagonist somehow gets away - although not exactly in a good way. Although some of the scenes felt a bit stagey here and there the film was quite gripping and managed to let me dive into the corrupt world that seems to permeate most of the district, fabulously represented by Kirk Douglas, whose weak nature makes him the perfect nature for a cynic and alcoholic official with a grasp of power.