Isabel Quigly
Isabel Quigly's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer when
published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
The Spectator
| Publications: | The Spectator |
Movie Reviews Only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
| No Score Yet | The Forty-First (1958) |
Few films have used nature as eloquently to echo, illustrate, and heighten passion; for this it uses mostly the sea, in every mood, at every pitch, and the almost infinite variety of ways the tide can come in. ‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| No Score Yet | He Who Must Die (1957) |
There are old lessons and modern ones in the story; old allegory and some as up-to-date as modern politics. The book had innumerable themes that the film version, cannot pursue and unravel too far; but it sticks pretty faithfully, in fact and in spirit.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 80% | The Bigamist (1953) |
A splendid, heartless, virtuoso's performance it is again, larger than life and larger, too, than the film in which it finds itself.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| No Score Yet | When Comedy Was King (1960) |
Yet another of these hundred-years-hence social historian's documents, with almost as much fun for the Freudians as the nuns have to offer.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 67% | Conspiracy of Hearts (1960) |
It's the sort of film where in a crisis nuns roll their eyes skywards and slowly murmur, with clasped hands, things like : 'Sweet Jesus, have mercy.' ‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| No Score Yet | The Battle of the Sexes (1959) |
Charles Crichton has directed a neat and highly enjoyable film, with some brilliant timing in its attempted murder scene and the sort of scorings-off that will appeal to everyone. ‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 86% | The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) |
Vivid colour and close-ups reached the lowest level to which we were obliged to crawl; but to protest against such films, in these days of the boom in horror, is like trying to put out lightning with a candle-snuffer.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 100% | King Creole (1958) |
As the mostextreme example of a contemporary idol, Mr. Presley is pretty fascinating, and though you may be put off at first by his pale. puffy, bruised-looking babyish face.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| No Score Yet | Sea Fury (1958) |
A worthy and at moments exciting little British film, with that rather characteristic 'B' picture air about it of so many of our home products, abouttug-men and their rivalries in love and in work.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| No Score Yet | The Rebel (1961) |
With his utterly uncomical-looking face and figure, his air of anguished muddle-headed energy. Hancock suggests all sorts of alarming possibilities in everyday life, chasms of frightful surprise directly under our feet if only we knew it.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| No Score Yet | Pepe (1960) |
The film Pepe which is draped round his rather ineffective personality, is an expensive, tasteless and dreary romp.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| No Score Yet | Käre John (Dear John) (1964) |
Lindgren has a clean, fast, unexplanatory style that goes well with seashore and sun, and manages to suggest warmth without sentimentality.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| No Score Yet | The Reward (1965) |
Five men are on the track of a sixth with fifty thousand dollars on his head: with deserts, thirst, deluges, illness, vultures, shootings, lost horses, and a plot so tangled it seems hopeless trying to unravel it.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| No Score Yet | The Hunters (1958) |
Thrilling air combats, a good performance from Robert Wagner as a young stinker-hero, but long, tedious patches in between.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 97% | Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) |
Superbly acted, and following the Kazan-inspired happy ending third act written as a rather reluctant postscript, rather than the original original, it is a photographed stage play and we remain outside, in the audience.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 80% | The Sundowners (1960) |
An extremely attractive view of Australian life in a story about a drover who re fuses to settle down and his wife and son who want to.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| No Score Yet | Une Vie (End of Desire) (One Life) (1958) |
It is 'style' in a vacuum, pure style and little else, a film addressed so exclusively to the eyesight that you would think it aimed at an audience all eyes and no more, since there seems no appeal to the whole personality, to mind, heart, spirit.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 86% | The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965) |
A brilliant screenplay crisp, muted, funny, never pushing its points, and acting of the unobtrusively perfect sort you aren't asked to notice. Goes a long way towards bolstering this excitement. ‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 92% | A Child Is Waiting (1963) |
A Child is Waiting takes the tough line that love, however devoted, isn't enough, may indeed be harmful if it's not allied with respect for the handicapped child as a person, a person with duties and responsibilities to others and a person's social place.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 29% | Lady L (1965) |
Gary and Ustinov fail to be bogged down by the story's inherent banalities because they are quite outside it and its limitations.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| No Score Yet | Postava k Podpírání (Joseph Kilian) (1963) |
An even shorter, much more workaday nightmare, inevitably labelled 'Kafkaesque,' involving cats and vanishing shops in an atmosphere of placid realism: coolly brilliant, though for my taste a little too consciously so.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 80% | Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci) (1964) |
The technique is the jaggedly familiar one of cuts to fantasy and memories; the result painful but pitiful, with something new to say about the inhumanity, not of official fiends, but of everyday old men out on a spree.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 92% | Help! (1965) |
In colour, and with plenty of exotic backgrounds, Help! is a joke-thriller, a send-up of thrillers, Bond ones especially, funnier and prettier than the other but not moving and personal as the other was.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 95% | Masculin Feminin (1966) |
As always with Godard, one argues and, dissents. But the film fascinates even where it repels.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| No Score Yet | Too Hot to Handle (1961) |
Everything about it is as squalid as its subject, but the real nastiness is in its hypocrisy, the suddenly high moral tone it takes at moments.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 96% | From Russia With Love (1964) |
The pace fast and furious and the invention, I suppose, inventive in the sense that a new nonsense always follows hard on the heels of an old nonsense and blow follows blow in crunching virtuosity of method. ‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| No Score Yet | Drango (1957) |
A chilly little film, but impressive.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 88% | Funny Face (1957) |
The film fairly bursts with charm, the Gershwin songs are lively, Paris is as photogenic as ever and the existentialists are grubby to the life.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| No Score Yet | Invitation to the Dance (1956) |
Never an enthusiast for filmed ballet, which, for all its theoretical possibilities, in practice always seems to confuse two mediums, I am enough of an enthusiast for Gene Kelly to watch a programme of his ballets.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 92% | Oklahoma! (1955) |
There is something to be said for those horrible continental intervals in the middle of films, with advertisements and lights up and other interruptions : at least in the case of long, familiar, exuberant and therefore exhausting musicals. ‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 17% | The Oscar (1966) |
A film of such outsize awfulness as The Oscar is at least in a jolly tradition and in a few years, who knows, may turn up as an affectionately remembered classic of the purple-patch school.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 20, 2018
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| 86% | Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) |
The best value in nonsense for a very long time. ‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| No Score Yet | Too Many Crooks (1959) |
A British comedy that starts promisingly and soon fades into school charades on a wet Sunday‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 71% | Separate Tables (1958) |
It seems the perfect vehicle for social realism; but somehow it is not real.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 92% | I Want to Live! (1958) |
Not for fun and hardly for werewolves.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 93% | The Nun's Story (1959) |
It makes no judgements: it is a serious effort to show us a moral and mental discipline, and it strikes me as authentic. ‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 96% | Peeping Tom (1960) |
Peeping Tom didn't make me want to streak out of the cinema shrieking, as Franju's film did at times; it gives me the creeps in retrospect, in my heart and mind more than in my eyes.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 25% | The Pride and the Passion (1957) |
The Pride and the Passion might have been, and should have been, something very much better than it is. It ought to have been at least exciting, which it isn't. The fault lies mainly with three things: the script, Cary Grant, and the music.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 100% | The Wind (1928) |
A fine example of the creation of dramatic mood and atmosphere in terms of visuals, and without benefit of sound track.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 55% | Song of the South (1946) |
If the market were there, what a joyous series of ten-minute cartoons on Uncle Remus themes he could have produced! As it is, Song of the South is neither fish, fowl nor good Brer Tarrypin.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 83% | Port of Call (1948) |
A film full of stylish grimaces and embryonic Bergmanisms, for stout-hearted students in search, of something besides entertainment.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 92% | Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli) (1961) |
Here, Visconti has every sort of strong contrast -Italy's two nations, the north and the south, industry and the land, simplicity and sophistication.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 73% | Cheyenne Autumn (1964) |
It is one of those incredible, intensely cinematic journeys, where everything from panoramic to infinitesimal, from fording a river to creeping thorough undergrowth is visually exciting and where excitement and sympathy go together.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 100% | The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups) (1959) |
This beautiful, tough and some- times funny film is a lesson (by implication) in love : here's what it does, being without it.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 65% | Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) |
I found Suddenly, Last Summer hollow, unproductive, unalive, and above all stagey, not cinematic.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| No Score Yet | The Journey (1959) |
A glimpse of what might be understanding of the present Soviet mentality and some of that supra-ideological commodity, the Russian charm.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| No Score Yet | The Gift of Love (1958) |
The story of The Gift of Love would strain any- one, child or adult, fey or solid; as indeed it strains Lauren Bacall, an intelligent actress with a rather squashed gift for irony.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 18, 2018
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| 0% | A Farewell To Arms (1957) |
This attempt to make the audience feel what the lovers were feeling failed because even to the least experienced in love it was plainly an artificial and external alteration.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 18, 2018
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| 89% | Barabbas (1961) |
One might be likelier to forgive this if the film's declared intentions were less high-minded.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 18, 2018
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| No Score Yet | The Young Doctors (1961) |
It's too rich, too plummy a mixture for artistic translation, and although some genius might make us take to heart the agonies and excitements, in the ordinary way they simply provide an enjoyable off-reality, realism at a suspect level.‐ The Spectator
Read More | Posted Jul 18, 2018
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