In a lonely old house way out in the country, the middle of nowhere, three women (representing the three stages of women?) get together to sort things out...only the unseen fourth member of the group rattles around menacingly behind the walls and out of sight. Should we fear whoever it is...or what? An interesting presentation of a primordial reality.
Joel McCrea leads this 1940 effort as a Yank reporter sent to get a feel for the precipitous European situation just prior to abrupt Nazi incursions - our eyes overseas as it were. It's a thin disguise for this real-time call for real American wartime involvement as Hitchcock uses his previous residency over there to lend an authentic European taste to the very-close-to-propaganda proceedings. The English players outright steal this from McCrea; Herbert Marshall, George Sanders, Edmund Gwenn, leaving McCrea to look like a bumbling newbie for most of this, only handsome, which might be why this film is often overlooked. And Hitch comes loaded for big bear, plenty of action sequences even for the most jaded modern viewer. Highly recommended, if only for the plane crash sequence at the end, but there's more than that here.
Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck are the big guns in this oater about love and redemption. He's a bandit, see, so she won't have him in spite of their lifelong yearning for one another. Will he give up his crooked ways for her love, for their decency? For some reason or the other all the actors sound like actors reading the script at first, stilted, flat, dull...maybe it's bad direction. But by the final third it doesn't seem quite so bad.
Simply an out-and-out classic, we follow the life of a guy (John Dall) who is fascinated with guns, which is okay - until he meets his better half (Peggy Cummins). Both actors look and seem like that "perfectly nice couple who live next door", but together they spark like dynamite, leading to a action-packed, cross-country chase that's sure to excite. Highly recommended.
Interestingly enough, this one from 1950 features an undercurrent all too prevalent in these modern times of a divided country. A small town is the scene in this heavily nostalgic play on "the good ol' days", designed to appeal to a longing for "simpler times", a place where most folks are just getting by, everybody knows everybody and events all go by pretty slowly. But a epidemic brings sad times ~ as well as a bitter argument between the town doctor and the local preacher. Which is the best way, science and new thinking versus tradition? The resolution is well-played, sympathetic and even if a bit slow, not completely unbelievable. Not bad.
