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

Movies

T-Meter	Title \| Year	Review
95%	The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)	David Lean's direction is spectacular and, in a good sense, large-scale; his handling of the grand climax, though it involves one over-strained coincidence, is superb. - The Spectator EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 15, 2019
80%	Tea and Sympathy (1957)	The only two dramatic moments in the play have been so expanded, made so explicit, that they lose their impact. - The Spectator EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 15, 2019
83%	Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957)	J. Lee Thompson's direction has a few documentary-style cliches about it, but provides a good, empty space, most of the time, for Miss Mitchell's virtuosity to shine in. - The Spectator EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 15, 2019
79%	Gigi (1958)	Colette's tale about the training of a schoolgirl cocotte blown up into a full-scale musical, starts things oil with a bang. - The Spectator EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 15, 2019
93%	The Horse's Mouth (1958)	A vigorous, inconclusive film -- for what could it possibly conclude? I feel pretty thankful for its inconclusions. - The Spectator EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 15, 2019
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
83%	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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
92%	Masculin Feminin (1966)	As always with Godard, one argues and, dissents. But the film fascinates even where it repels. - The Spectator EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
No Score Yet	Drango (1957)	A chilly little film, but impressive. - The Spectator EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 20, 2018
86%	Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)	The best value in nonsense for a very long time. - The Spectator EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2018
71%	Separate Tables (1958)	It seems the perfect vehicle for social realism; but somehow it is not real. - The Spectator EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2018
92%	I Want to Live! (1958)	Not for fun and hardly for werewolves. - The Spectator EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2018
67%	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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2018
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 EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2018
65%	Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)	I found Suddenly, Last Summer hollow, unproductive, unalive, and above all stagey, not cinematic. - The Spectator EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 19, 2018

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