Guilty PleasuresAnatomy of a Murder, 1959, Otto Preminger, U.S.
Or, for that matter almost any other Preminger movie you’d care to name. His style was claustrophobic—lots of people jammed into tight spaces—and he had a sour view of people’s infinite capacity for duplicitous behavior. But he was a master of dank melodramatics (see also Advise and Consent, Whirlpool, Where the Sidewalk Ends) and most of his pictures ended on a forgiving note. Perhaps he was obliging the studio’s demand for happy endings. Or maybe that touch of Austrian sentimentality that he never quite eradicated from his haughty, cultivated personality. Whatever. In any case, this is a brilliantly cast, bitingly cynical courtroom drama
Next: Gun Crazy, 1949, Joseph H. Lewis, U.S.
Guilty PleasuresGun Crazy, 1949, Joseph H. Lewis, U.S.
A handsome young couple (John Dall and Peggy Ann Cummins) meet at a carnival, where they engage in a sharp-shooting contest. It’s love at first (gun) sight. And soon they’re off on a crime spree, which ends tragically. Written under a pseudonym by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo and well-directed by the expert B picture craftsman, Joseph E. Lewis, this is, to be sure, a Bonnie and Clyde precursor. But it is as crisp, no nonsense melodrama, and as a pioneering study of America’s curious passion for the sleek, shiny beauty of death-dealing objects, that it retains its hold on us, 56 years after it slipped on to the bottom of the bills in our long-lost (and sorely missed) neighborhood theaters.
Next: The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957, Jack Arnold, U.S.