FredMacmurray Tagged Articles at Cinematical
RvB's After Images: Remember The Night (1940)
Filed under: Classics », Comedy », Romance », Paramount », After Image »
Jette's very good column the other day called Remember the Night one of the seven Christmas movies you haven't ever seen. Jette caught it on TV once and hadn't watched it since. This 1940 romantic comedy is another one of those films that reminds you why you'd better not ditch your VHS player yet. If you want to see this (and, oh, you will want to see this, if you're a Preston Sturges fan), you have three options: one is to buy a grey-market DVD, something anyone with a search engine and a credit card can do. Another is to get one of the few VHS copies available off Amazon for $50 (excuse me, $49.99). The last, and cheapest, is to live in an urban area with a good specialty video store--such as Silver Screen in the Berkeley area suburb of El Cerrito.
If the last is the case, it's worth checking today to see if someone hasn't rented it out yet. Remember the Night is an unknown classic of the holiday, stressing romance, comedy and -- most important on Christmas -- hope and rebirth. The American cinema's most versatile actress, Barbara Stanwyck plays a character study for screenwriter Sturges' later The Lady Eve. Here she's a larcenous woman who turns out to be essentially no worse than the people around her.
Film Forum's Noir Fest: Pushover
Filed under: Thrillers », Noir », Mystery & Suspense », Other Festivals »
"Introducing Kim Novak." What else do you need to know? After a short stint as "Miss Deepfreeze," a spokeswoman-character for a refrigerator company, the 21-year old aspiring actress and future Vertigo ice goddess was snatched up by Harry Cohn and immediately plunked down in a starring role in 1954's Pushover. The film, which was screened last week as part of Film Forum's ongoing B-Noir festival, is best described as a re-imagining of the popular Double Indemnity story. In the original, Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck conspired to defraud an insurance company. Their ace in the hole was that MacMurray was an insurance man himself, and thought he could game the system. In Pushover, MacMurray and Novak conspire to double-cross a thief who's just knocked over a bank. Their ace in the hole is that MacMurray is a bank robbery detective, and thinks he can game the system. Novak plays the bank robber's girlfriend, tucked away in a posh apartment and waiting patiently for her man to breeze back into town. MacMurray and his partner Rick (Phil Carey) watch her every move from a stakeout nest in a motel across the street. Rick is initially skeptical that the bank robber would take the chance of coming back into town with all that money, just to pick up his girlfriend. Then he raises his binoculars and looks across the way at Novak for the first time: "Yep, he'll show up."
Jeremy Renner Wants To Be An Avenger
Directors We Love: Jim Jarmusch
Indie Roundup: 'Sweetgrass,' 'Clarkworld,' 'Broken Embraces'
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Watch: Famous 'Matrix' Scene Re-Created with LEGOs
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