Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

A mother and her five sons move to Milan from the poor South, where the family disintegrates after the amorous encounter of the eldest Simone with the prostitute Nadia. In this amazing film the brothers seem to stand for different moral and ambitious aspects of the post-war generation of Italian men. Simone, the oldest, has success the quickest but he is hindered by his own recklessness and his inability to understand his or other's emotions. Rocco is a romantic and nostalgic dreamer, trying to uphold his image of the family. Vincenzo is forced to marry due to pregnancy – and quickly is left out of the story after the event. Ciro stands for the ambitious, but still underachieving worker that becomes a mechanic and has something of a career. Only the youngest, Luca, still has his paths open and I assumed that the film concludes with him having to find his own way, trying to decide which of his brothers should be his role model. One scene touched me more than o...

The pocket pool hustler Fast Eddie tries to win against the king of billards: Minnesota Fats, but his blind ambition and hubris makes him lose. He manages to overcome his faults but pays a high price. Newman was impressive in the film, but the performances of Piper and Scott took the cake. Her vulnerable, strangely undetermined Sarah, confronted by the unscrupulous and straight-talking Bird was fascinating to watch. The way Piper delivered her lines was amazing, especially the love scene. I felt I could almost touch her constant wavering of opinions. Newman left me strangely cold, it's hard to pinpoint why - maybe he should have been established more ruthless in the beginning of the picture. There was a highly surrealist element in the script: the incessant drinking. The characters easily downed a load of bottles of Bourbon and who knows what during the first big match at Ames. Everybody seems to be drinking gallons of booze throughout the picture, yet they seem only ...

The has-been columnist Eddie is hired by a boxing racketeer as a press agent, to jumpstart an Argentinian boxer's career through fixed fights. But Eddie gets into a dilemma when he realizes that the boxers are treated like cattle by the racketeers and one opponent dies. Bogart and Steiger are the highlights of this films - Steiger steals the show in the scenes where he tries to convince Eddie, Eddie's wife or Toro the boxer by being the impassioned salesman. His delivery makes his arguments sound somewhat honest, even though his character has just cooked them up on the fly. Why the wife is still in the story I didn't understand. I didn't feel her arguments were persuasive and generally the encounters between her and Eddie felt cold and casual. She represents some moral force, but so does Art - Eddie's assistant from the old days, now a TV celebrity - in a much more convincing way. The two characters could have been melted into one to heighten Eddie'...

An ambitious night-club hustler tries to make it big by setting up his own wrestling show. But his incessant cheating and the ruling mob make his plans fall apart. Only his faithful girl stays at his side. Widmark plays a very convincing small-timer, and he gets to show off - at one or two moments he's quite over the top, but still enjoyable. He manages to keep the character likeable, somewhere in between childish naivete and ruthless egomaniac. His character, Fabian, runs into trouble with pretty much everyone in a pretty small universe of the London underworld. Favorite scenes: The wrestling match between the two brutes is amazing to watch, especially knowing that whatever the outcome might be, Fabian would have had it. Another great scene is the exchange between Fabian and the night club owner that he tried to con out of money. (Actually, he is the only one, Fabian didn't con) - Best use of a drumkit in a scene, ever. Good script to look at.