Reviews

This low-budget MGM crime flick is surprisingly entertaining. The best way to enjoy it is to suspend what you know about today's film-making and settle into a more innocent time when plots—like the movies themselves—were in black and white, when characters were labeled good or bad, when dialog was crisply effective (though artificial) and when even the deadliest dramas ended with wedding bells. One thing that separates "Kid Glove Killer" from similar films of the 1930s and '40s is the fact that its protagonist, Gordon McKay (Van Heflin) is not only a cop. He's in charge of a police crime laboratory. With the aid of his assistant, Jane Mitchell (Marsha Hunt), McKay solves murders and rids the city of corruption by using a microscope, a spectrograph and other tools that—mutatis mutandis—will be used again in crime-scene-investigation stories for decades to come, up to and including the current "CSI" television series. McKay scrapes beneath fingernails, vacuums people's hair and analyzes fibers to get trace evidence that will nail the crooks. The fact that you know all along who the crooks are doesn't spoil the fun—it's that kind of movie. Embedded in the investigation is a love triangle whose outcome is so obvious that you can go for popcorn without missing a beat. The acting is above par. Van Heflin's performance is adept if unspectacular. (That same year Heflin won a best-supporting-actor Oscar for "Johnny Eager.") Lee Bowman is suavely manipulative as a power-seeker. Marsha Hunt makes what she can of a role that has her wearing a lab coat one minute and an evening gown the next. In those days, of course, it was a Hollywood cliché that a professional woman would slog away at her job only till she could junk it in favor of marriage. This movie observes the cliché, but there is a hint of feminism in the fact that Jane Mitchell—whom everyone calls simply "Mitchell"—works as a chemist, a job more often held by men. Notable among supporting players are John Litel as a crime boss and Eddie Quillan as a victimized citizen. If you look fast, you can see Ava Gardner and Robert Blake in uncredited bit parts. This was Fred Zinnemann's first feature film, and he keeps the whole thing moving to a time clock. The bare-bones production and its repeated use of the same interior sets are not major drawbacks. "Kid Glove Killer" was never intended to be pâté de foie gras. It's a ham sandwich. Pass the mustard.

If all our relationships are like the ones in this film, we might as well give up. In "Your Friends and Neighbors" we are introduced to a group of upwardly mobile urbanites who run around a lot but haven't learned how to play well with others. Frustrated desire and strained hopefulness shove the characters around as if some socio-sexual Grinch were gumming up their lives. Watching this movie, you may be tempted to ask if this is the way the world turns or if it is merely the way writer-director Neil LaBute likes to pretend it turns. Produced with an abundance of cool, the film strikes an odd balance between surface and structure. By using a naturalistic veneer, LaBute invites us to accept the characters as if they had been lifted straight from the apartment next door. "Wow," we might say, "So this is real life as it is lived by real people in today's world!" Beneath the surface, however, things look different. If you peel back the actors' performances, you may find yourself staring at some carefully skewed scaffolding. You may even conclude that this picture is more the product of the director's artful calculations than of keen observation into the way people live. Of course there's nothing wrong with a director's offering a vision. Most good directors do. And if you like LaBute's work, you probably won't notice him just off-screen, fussing with his blueprints. An example: an important clue to verisimilitude in fiction is the way characters speak. Here they are presented as intelligent young professionals, yet they turn out to be astonishingly inarticulate types who say things like "I just…I don't know what to say…I mean…it just makes me feel…even if you…because…" After a while this dialog comes off like an acting-class exercise, and while the fractured syntax may be central to LaBute's approach, it can get tedious. One exception stands out: Midway through the film, the stutter-speech is interrupted by a remarkable monologue delivered by Jason Patric. Except for this burst of eloquence, however, we find ourselves listening to people who struggle to express themselves as they stumble through days and nights trying and failing to connect with others who are similarly afflicted. (That's the whole point, you say? Well…I mean…it's just…yeah…right.) There are places in this movie where a certain amount of cuteness can be forgiven—as when a patch of dialog recurs several times in the mouths of different characters—and there are other clever touches here and there. But the best reason for watching "Your Friends and Neighbors" is not the director's vision (assuming he has one) but the performances. The six principal actors make the most of their roles, and it is fun to watch a frenetically unfulfilled Ben Stiller, a romantically perplexed Amy Brenneman, a terminally self-satisfied Jason Patric, a mad but sad Catherine Keener, a well-meaning but clueless Aaron Eckhart and an attractively vapid Nastassja Kinsky wander through a maze that—unfortunately for their characters—leads nowhere.

The multi-talented Carl Reiner blows the crime-drama genre wide open in this film, but the results are nowhere near as funny as intended. A handful of clever gags are interspersed with tons of leaden jokes. This over-the-top takeoff on movies like "Fatal Attraction," "Basic Instinct" and numerous B movies tries much too hard. It announces its intentions with tough-guy voice-over narration delivered by the main character, Ned Ravine (Armand Assante), who is a lawyer/cop and an intended murder victim. Kate Nelligan is his cheating wife, and Christopher McDonald is her auto mechanic/insurance salesman/lover. These two hatch a murder scheme loosely based on the one in "Double Indemnity," and they quote (and misquote) lines spoken by Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in that classic 1944 film, but to no avail. Slapstick vies with verbal gymnastics and Hollywood in-jokes as David O'Malley's script lurches from one silly situation to another in an effort to get audiences rolling in the aisles. Maybe some audiences do roll, but unless you find bouquets flushed down toilets the height of hilarity, you probably won't. The sad thing is that this picture has an excellent cast—including Sean Young as a film-noir temptress and James Remar as a maniacal goon—and features cameos by Eartha Kitt, Tony Randall, Rosie O'Donnell and the director himself, who appears standing at a urinal. Reiner has done many good things on television over the years, and it's possible some of the hi-inks in this movie might work in a sketch. Here, unfortunately, the old pro steps up to the plate and swings mightily but whiffs. It's a strikeout, leaving several fine runners on base.

The first two movies teaming Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were based on novels by heavyweight authors Ernest Hemingway ("To Have and Have Not") and Raymond Chandler ("The Big Sleep"). This third match-up, from 1947, is a film-noir venture based on a novel called "Dark Passage" by a lesser-known American writer named David Goodis. A glance at the book shows that it is packed with noir ingredients: homicide, double-dealing, revenge, two mysterious women—one virtuous and one deadly—and another element that often turned up in crime fiction of the day, plastic surgery. Here the main character, Vincent Parry (Bogart), is a man who has been wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. He escapes from San Quentin and is taken in tow by a beautiful woman named Irene Jansen (Bacall) who appears out of nowhere to give him shelter and help clear his name while he recovers from surgery intended to disguise his identity. Naturally they fall in love. Most of what happens during the film's 106 minutes is hooey, but it is entertaining hooey. The Warner Brothers production, with screenplay and direction by Delmer Daves, invites us to ignore the story's implausibility and enjoy an exciting ride. While some film critics have called "Dark Passage" a failure, I would be somewhat more charitable. The story is far-fetched, but many of its weaknesses are redeemed by the presence of the two stars. Bogart and Bacall work so well together that I wouldn't mind watching them do a dog-food commercial. There is a dog (substitute the B-word) in this movie—a character named Madge Rapf. She is played by Agnes Moorehead, who turns her supporting role into a tour-de-force. Bruce Bennett plays Bob, Irene's ex-boyfriend; and Tom D'Andrea, Clifton Young and Houseley Stevenson are admirable in small but important roles. A song called "Too Marvelous for Words" is heard throughout the film, but it doesn't function as well as the title song in "Laura" or—how could it?—"As Time Goes By" in "Casablanca." "Dark Passage" takes place mostly in San Francisco and is shot mainly at night, enabling art director Charles H. Clarke and cinematographer Tom Hickox to create a mood that is by turns menacing and hair-raising. At the end the setting switches abruptly to South America, where Vincent is again on the lam. A short scene reunites the lovers, and the screen glows with sentiment as a nightclub band plays "Too Marvelous for Words," but Goodis did not include this scene in his book. His novel ends with Vincent asking Irene to join him south of the border at a future date, and the reader is left wondering if she actually will. More about David Goodis: he belonged to that unhappy breed of writers who have early success and then descend into alcoholism or some other mode of self-destruction. After "Dark Passage"—his second novel—Goodis's life gradually deteriorated, but he published 16 more suspense novels before dying in 1967 at the age of 50. In 1960 his "Down There" was transformed by director François Truffaut into a film called "Shoot the Piano Player."

This is the sort of movie where a character's behavior is best explained by saying "the plot requires it." A Warner Brothers entry at the height of the film-noir era, "Nora Prentiss" was a box-office success and a boost for Ann Sheridan's career. Today, however, it looks like a parody of its own genre. The main problem is the script, which director Vincent Sherman and others adapted from a short story by Paul Webster. The unlikely tale proceeds through a series of melodramatic twists and turns involving a married San Francisco physician named Dr. Richard Talbot (Kent Smith) and the title character, a stunning nightclub singer (Sheridan). Melodrama, of course, always under girds film noir, but when audiences watch this kind of movie they want to believe—if only for 90 minutes—that the events could really be happening. With this picture, it's a tough job. Making the situation worse is dialog that strains to sound memorable and ends up sounding phony. There are warning signs from the start, with the first five minutes being so heavy with exposition that you want to shout, "Enough! I get the point!" Still, there are some good things to be said about "Nora Prentiss." The central plot gimmick is an interesting one, despite its implausibility. James Wong Howe's cinematography effectively captures the story's shadowy moods. And the alluring Sheridan, as usual, gives a solid performance. But the casting of Kent Smith presents problems. During Smith's time with Warners the studio liked to assign him the role of an earnest wimp involved with a captivating woman (see him opposite Joan Crawford in "The Damned Don't Cry," which Sherman directed three years later). So it's easy to see how producers chose this actor to play the conservative doctor. But Smith lacked charisma, and in this film the audience has to keep reminding itself that the vibrant Nora finds the dull Dr. Richard Talbot fascinating. Why does she, anyway? (The plot requires it.) Why does this worldly but essentially decent woman take up with a repressed family man in the first place? (The plot requires it.) And why does Richard veer off into a tangle of unbelievable actions that grow increasingly grotesque as the film rolls toward its disastrous finale? (The plot…well, you get the idea.) For the rest, there are competent performances by Rosemary DeCamp as Richard's wife, by Bruce Bennett as Richard's partner in a medical practice, and by Robert Alda as Nora's nightclub boss and lover-in-waiting. The musical score is by Franz Waxman.

Better than many of today's children's videos, this little gem of live action plus animation from the '60s deserves to be seen again. The Hanna-Barbera production won an Emmy when NBC first broadcast it in 1967. The principal live characters are played by Bobby Riha, as Jack, and by Gene Kelly as his adult companion. (In the original fairy tale, of course, Jack has no companion, but there are obvious reasons for including a sidekick, who in Kelly's hands becomes the main character.) The giant is a gruff but comically inept animated figure whose voice is provided by Ted Cassidy. A variety of other animated characters appear, including two hilariously weird birds who dance a tango with Kelly. All the dancing, as one might expect, is terrific, with Kelly reprising the sort of dancing-with-animation he pioneered in the 1945 film "Anchors Aweigh." The songs are by the experienced Hollywood team of Sammy Cahn and James Van Heusen. As actor, singer and dancer, young Riha is a satisfying partner for Kelly. The familiar Hanna-Barbera animation may look flat and uninspired to contemporary audiences, but it does its job. Highly recommended.