Married to The Mob (1988)

Posted on January 29, 2026 by 4 Star Films

Although he’s not always easy to pin down across his oeuvre, Jonathan Demme’s collaboration with Tak Fujimoto in Married to the Mob elicits a visual style that can most easily be married with their work together in Something Wild. It feels free and easy yet still deeply empathetic through those trademark POV close-ups. In fact, it takes the gangster motif of Ray Liotta from the previous film a bit further.

One of the virtues of Married to the Mob is how it never takes itself too seriously, and it’s this awareness that makes it a pleasure to be a part of. Demme had some kinship with Martin Scorsese, and it’s like he’s readily exploring the other director’s usual milieu without totally giving himself over to the gratuitous nature of it all. Despite an opening hit on a train, plenty of gunplay, and the general immersion in the mob world, he’s not going to fully succumb to it.

Scorsese is fascinated by the dichotomy of the sacred and profane he found in his own boyhood community. However, Demme’s not about to make Mean Streets or even Goodfellas. Instead, he focuses his energies on someone who, in the predominantly patriarchal world, would normally be pushed to the periphery. It seems entirely fitting that he would focus on a mob wife (Michelle Pfeiffer), married into the organization while growing increasingly disillusioned with the lifestyle.

Her husband is one of the local kingpin’s cronies. Their son has been conning all the local kids in their affluent neighborhood out of their pocket change. There are firearms in the junk drawer, and furniture purloined from who knows where. Her husband’s satisfied with the bottom line. She has a conscience and desires a better life for her boy. It all goes back to the influence of one man: His name is Tony the Tiger.

Dean Stockwell, the journeyman who began as a child actor in Classic Hollywood and then famously ran in circles with Dennis Hopper during the counterculture era, left the industry behind only to come back quite spectacularly.

Paris, Texas, Blue Velvet, and even Quantum Leap are hard to forget, and yet, added to the list, you must include Tony the Tiger in Married to The Mob. He’s having so much fun relishing the part of a heavy, and it radiates out of him.

There’s hardly a need to go into the particulars because we’re all familiar with the archetype, and yet when he finally shows up in the movie, there’s something inimitable about him. It’s not what he is but how he does it that matters most.

He has a weakness for pretty girls. He’ll even kill for them, going so far as to knock off a rival. He’s ruthless, and in the same breath, he has a certain moral code of conduct. He believes in family and taking care of those who are loyal to him. Perhaps even those whom he’s hurt. After Angela’s husband is killed, he vows to take care of the man’s grieving widow, although his reach is a bit more hands-on than she would like.

When she gets up and leaves her present life behind, selling all their worldly possessions, and relocating her son to a much humbler neighborhood, it gives the movie something more. This is where it becomes a hybrid rom-com, and Matthew Modine and Michelle Pfeiffer stir up their chemistry.

They meet in an elevator in a grungy apartment building. He’s keeping surveillance on her, and she’s trying to get away from the mob. This is the subtext. She has the forthright honesty to ask him out on a date, and he accepts. It’s easy to suspect his motives, and yet there’s a sense he’s game and obviously smitten once he gets to know her.

This isn’t a rehash of Notorious, where the agent falls in love with the girl even as he belittles her reputation. It’s a lot more innocent and humane than that (although they are still bugging her apartment). We know he must fess up eventually.

Of course, it must hit some inflection point in their relationship. His superior gets involved, she finds out who he really is, and Tony is on the run after an attempt on his life. He carts Angela off to Miami for a weekend as he does his best to dodge his own jealous wife.

Everything must inevitably go wrong for him, but thankfully, it’s just as much about the comedy as it is hammering home the crime drama. Demme never allows us to lose affection for any of these characters, really.

If there’s any mild complaint, it’s only that the movie resolves itself quite easily. But again, it’s not looking to be The Departed. This point of view is not of interest, and so in its send-up, we get something that’s tonally so different and rather endearing.

With each subsequent film I watch of Demme, I’ve been increasingly smitten. Because you start with something like Silence of The Lambs only to feel out the rest of his filmography to find so many countless gems. These are movies with eccentricities, comic verve, wildly phenomenal soundtracks, and an eye for characters (and actors) who would often be disregarded by other directors. Michelle Pfeiffer’s Angela and then Dean Stockwell feel like a case and point in this movie.

4/5 Stars

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

Posted on January 27, 2026 by 4 Star Films

Back to the Future is a film I have deep reservoirs of affection for, and I know it’s far from a landmark statement — I’m hardly in the minority. However, I will say that as I began to watch Peggy Sue Got Married, I slowly became attuned to its world and the unfolding premise. There seemed to be some very basic similarities.

Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) attends her 25th high school reunion with her daughter (Helen Hunt), reconnecting with old friends even as she rues her relationship with her husband and high school sweetheart (Nicolas Cage). She’s christened the evening’s queen of the class and faints from the excitement. As she drifts away, she wakes up, and it’s 1960 again. No DeLorean or Libyan terrorist necessary. She opens her eyes, and she’s there.

Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner’s screenplay utilizes some of the same time-tested tropes from Back to the Future, like uncanny knowledge that feels sentient to those living in the past, even as it’s common knowledge to those in the future, be it the Moon landing or pantyhose (or Calvin Klein for that matter). These breed rampant cultural miscommunications — the kind you get in these fish-out-of-water stories — engendered by messing with time. Peggy even bemoans the fact that she’s a walking anachronism.

The beauty of the picture is how it becomes something else entirely as it gets beyond these cursory elements to bring us something different — a far more pensive meditation. It’s not bombastic with Zemeckis’s flair for Sci-Fi or Christopher Lloyd’s out-of-this-world performance as Doc Brown. There aren’t the same ticking clocks or steadily increasing stakes that Marty must race against to save his parents (and his entire family’s existence). It’s not about that.

Kathleen Turner’s Peggy also has a poise and foresight Marty McFly was never supposed to have. Yes, they both go from the future into the past, but what a difference their life of experience makes.

Even the mechanisms of the time travel itself feel less important and mostly immaterial. We get beyond them quite quickly to focus on something more. Peggy marvels at seeing her parents as they used to be, as she remembers them when she was younger, and cherishes reconnecting with her baby sister (Sofia Coppola) as time has yet to sour their relationship.

At school, her whole outlook is different, too. Yes, she’s not prepared to redo her academics in the classroom, but her values are more intrinsic, and her social outlook is much more sincere. She’s cast off the insecurity we all have at that age to see the landscape with much greater lucidity.

She befriends the outcasts (one’s a nerd and a future billionaire); it’s not because she wants to capitalize on his future success, but because she knows he will believe her crazy reality. The other is a free spirit who scoffs at the literature they’re inculcated with in textbooks, instead nourishing himself on the self-expression of Jack Kerouac. It’s creative fodder for his own poetry as he seems to embody the dreams she never managed to pursue.

Also, she fosters an alternate relationship with her high school sweetheart: the man she married out of high school and ultimately divorced. She recognizes and even appreciates new contours to his character she was never prepared to notice before, just as she comes to forgive his flaws.

The casting as a whole might feel tighter than Back to the Future (which even famously included Michael J. Fox as an eleventh-hour replacement). There are so many faces who show up and give the right essence to the roles, whether it’s a young Jim Carrey, a very young Sofia Coppola, or Barbara Harris and Don Murray.

I will say, I’m not sure if Nic Cage’s characterization is to the benefit of the movie. His voice, his whining, almost petulant nature. He’s aged with makeup to near-comic proportions. And even this and his connection to the director (Coppola is his uncle) lend themselves to a kind of rapport. Because what is he supposed to be if not a mixed-up, angsty, regretful high schooler? Somehow, even this has less of the winking humor of Back to the Future. Miscast or not, it has an alternate level of sincerity.

And of course, there’s the instance when Peggy meets her grandparents. Leon Ames and Maureen O’Sullivan are impeccable. It’s such a pleasure to watch them because, being an Old Hollywood aficionado, they’ve been offered to me in so many films of yore. But the very rhythm of Peggy Sue visiting her grandparents is such a meaningful and cathartic one. It’s as if she’s somehow reclaiming these moments she always wished to have back, even as she willfully shares her out-of-body experience and gains a rapt and receptive audience in her elders.

In their eyes, she’s not crazy. It’s as if any skepticism has evaporated with time, and all that’s left over is a heavy dose of wonder and congeniality. True, I was a bit weirded out by her grandpa’s lodge, even as Bruce Dern’s secret society in Smile unnerved me. Here, it still manages to fit into the time travel narrative even as it lacks the level of import of Hill Valley’s clock tower. Again, that’s hardly the point.

When Peggy returns to her present, back to her daughter, her estranged husband, and everything else, whether through dreams or some other uncanny supernatural force, she has changed. This is what matters. It’s not butterfly effects or space-time continuums or quantum mechanics or anything like that. I can hardly speak to any of these. The movie speaks to what is universal: It’s the gift of getting to redirect your life, saying “I love you” to those you wish you had more time with, and reclaiming the mistakes gnawing at you. It feels like the most serendipitous type of science fiction.

When you have the likes of The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, or even The Conversation to your name, Peggy Sue Got Married is never going to enter into the conversation of Coppola’s best films. It’s mostly subdued and full of the joy and jubilation of a different time. But Coppola actually examines some fairly profound themes.

What’s more, although Kathleen Turner is mostly pigeonholed as a siren or a beauty, she’s quite good in a role that’s not flashy, and yet allows her to offer up a performance with subtle aplomb. It’s easy for these types of period movies (or movies from the ’80s in general) to feel like pastiche — mostly inane and made thoroughly for consumption. Even Back to the Future is ’80s Hollywood at its very best.

Here it feels like great care is being taken, and there’s a level of reflection and maturity that’s hard to discount. It’s saying something when we follow this woman through time and space, and we pretty much leave that device behind. What’s not lost is her emotional journey.

4/5 Stars

Claudia Cardinale: The Facts of Murder (1959) and Bell’Antonio (1960)

Posted on January 22, 2026 by 4 Star Films

With the passing of Claudia Cardinale in 2025, I took it upon myself to watch some of her movies that I had not seen before. Below, I included capsule reviews of two of her earlier performances:

The Facts of Life (1959)

At first, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the picture. I thought it might be a comedia italiana or maybe a crime picture, but one in the vein of Big Deal on Madonna Street (Claudia Cardinale turned up in that one as well). However, the Facts of Murder feels like a more traditional police procedural, mystery story, albeit told in the Italian milieu.

Two events become crucial to the plot. First, a burglary in broad daylight where the culprit manages to flee the crowded scene without being apprehended. The police are called to investigate

In the midst of their investigation, a body is found, a person now dead next door. As the detective notes, lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place, and yet in this case it has. There’s something rather intriguing about the lead investigator being played by director Pietro Germi (Divorced Italian Style, Seduced and Abandoned).

It took me some time to catch on, but even though it’s not a flashy part, the role does hold the picture together because he must drive the story forward, interacting with all sorts of folks and beginning to decipher what actually occurred.

There are a number of possible suspects, including a doctor cousin (Franco Fabrizi) who, at the very least, is a selfish opportunist. Then there is the spouse of the deceased, who is understandably shaken up and initially sympathetic, though he has the most to gain. There’s also something he’s keeping hidden from the authorities.

Eventually, the police round up the hands that had a part in the theft, but they still have to solve the second part that has eluded them thus far. A film such as this can so often be dominated by the men, and yet there are three performances from the actresses worthy of note

Claudia Cardinale has a fairly small but crucial role as a faithful maid to Eleonora Rossi Drago’s character. And Cristina Gajoni shows up at the end of the picture in a notable part that holds a lot of sway over the story. However, it is the indelible image of Cardinale sprinting down the dirt road after the receding car with tears in her eyes that stays with me.

If her career weren’t so ripe with many memorable films, it could just have easily been a moment she was remembered for. As is, The Facts of Murder was just the beginning of an illustrious career.

4/5 Stars

Bell’Antonio (1960)

My first inclination is that Marcello Mastroianni is technically too old for a role such as this (he purportedly joined mere days before the production started as a favor to the director). Yet, there’s also really no one else to play this role, as it stands as a romantic ideal. Antonio, the title character, is almost a mythic figure in his local community. He comes back to his parents’ home from Rome.

His reputation precedes him with stories of women throwing themselves at him and wives of government ministers left smitten. Whether it’s blown out of proportion or not, we certainly see some evidence of his romantic sway. It’s almost like everyone else wants to prove for themselves if the stories are true, and so they build and play up the mystique. You would think Antonio is the one cultivating his image, but it feels like he wants to be rid of it.

There are these social layers to the movie, also. We witness men in power, and they have a desire for women who know how to trade in their feminine wiles. The film is transposed from a novel set in fascist Italy, and these scenes bear this out the most obviously (it felt reminiscent of scenes in a later picture like The Cremator).

There is the brokering of social transactions even between families like crusty barons or haughty royalty of generations gone by. Initially, Antonio is vehemently opposed to the union, only to receive a picture of the woman his parents have orchestrated for him to marry. He can’t stop looking at it. She’s remarkable!

In her own way, an aura is built around Barbara as well, just like with Antonio. Thankfully, for the sake of the movie, she is portrayed by none other than Claudia Cardinale. They are eventually wed as the social script suggests. However, status and social economy are, again, predicated on virility or at least the projection of it.

The society seems to idolize womanizers even as much as they condone a narrative of men sowing their wild oats. This includes Antonio’s father. And sadly, we see the hypocrisy of the church within these same power structures invested in the letter of the law and not the heart or posture behind it.

The punchline of the movie is the fact that the church will annul the marriage because they haven’t consummated it and gotten pregnant within 12 months. It’s a catastrophe on all fronts! Compared to how they treat infidelity and affairs, it makes one queasy.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the architects of the script, and if it’s not too presumptuous, it’s easy to see him bleed through. The movie feels like a bleak precursor to the likes of Divorce Italian Style and Seduced in Abandoned because there’s no hint of comedy in the same way as those subsequent satires. Everything is done with the sincerest of straight faces. And yet the way it burns is an indictment against the backward mores of the society we see before us.

3.5/5 Stars

Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956)

Posted on December 19, 2025 by 4 Star Films

Dan Dailey has the Texas charm played up a bit as he walks into the Sands Hotel on a first-name basis with everyone. He’s invested heavily in the place — meaning he’s lost a lot of money there.

There’s a blatant absurdity in the premise of Meet Me in Las Vegas. Sitting on the casino floor, Chuck Rodwell grabs hold of a passing woman for good luck (This would not fly today). However, this particular lady is the management’s new floor show, and she’s prepared to walk out if she has to perform in front of a bunch of grubby socialites having a good time and clinking their glasses and silverware. Cyd Charisse foreshadows her turn in the Ninotchka remake Silk Stockings by playing a surly, put-upon entertainer who castigates her indulgent employer (Jim Bachus).

In their subsequent meet-cute, she’s prepared to dress down the audacious Texan because she’s already in a foul mood, and what he does is uncalled for. And yet she just happens to have the magic touch! He literally can’t miss when he keeps her company and keeps hold of her hand like a rabbit’s foot. The hokey metaphor of the movie is clear: When they hold hands, something magical happens, just not romance, not yet, that is.

They both have someone in their corner. For Dan, it’s the dealer Lotzi (Oskar Karlweis) who always offers encouragement. For Cyd, it’s Sari (Lili Darvas) who has an impish sense of humor when it comes to men and her employer’s uptight attitude around them. They’re a couple of veterans with a genial old European charm.

Cara Williams shows up as an old confederate of Chuck’s. I’m sure she sees the opportunity for them to get together, rekindle flames, and maybe have a few laughs. She has a confident air about her.

Her presence turns Maria Corvier (Charisse) off completely. The contentious threesome shares a table during an evening floorshow, and Maria becomes more inebriated and uninhibited as the night goes on with the ambition to take back what’s hers (if it ever was hers). She hops up on the stage in her stupor and hams it up much to Chuck’s embarrassment. Perhaps it’s the first time she realizes she’s jealous for the affections of this man.

What makes the film a true delight is how the world is stuffed full of in-jokes and cameos. It’s not quite the Rat Pack and Ocean’s Eleven, but there’s a sense of this kind of ubiquitous celebrity. We see Debbie Reynolds and Vic Damone, performers who are familiar from director Roy Rowland’s earliest assignments, including Two Weeks with Love and Hit The Deck.

There’s a sweltering song from the always exquisite Lena Horne and a comic number very on brand with Jerry Colonia, primping his mustache surrounded by a stage of bodacious beauties.

Frank Sinatra getting lucky at the slot machine is a blink-and-you-miss-it gag, followed by Peter Lorre looking visibly demoralized, slowly being bled dry at the blackjack tables. Even Charisse’s husband, Tony Martin, shows up in a cameo that I didn’t catch immediately. Of everyone, it feels most unnatural to see George Chakiris as a young newlywed with his wife (Betty Lynn) out on the casino floor instead of the dance floor (Apparently, he had a number that was cut).

Cyd doing a volleyball ballet is something I never thought I’d see. It seems as unprecedented as it is bizarre, though she also manages to give it her usual stylized class. Forgotten Japanese star Mitsuko Sawamura does a charming duet with Dan Dailey of “Lucky Star,” which is decidedly absent of any cultural condescension.

For the story’s sake, Chuck finally takes Maria out to his ranch to introduce her to his irascible but loving mother (Agnes Moorehead) and his way of life. The upbeat rural charm of “The Gal with the Yaller Shoes” gets the point across, and Charisse is more than game to go along.

However, the real showstopper is a reworking of “Frankie and Johnny” back in Vegas, starring Cyd Charisse with John Brascia (of White Christmas fame) and the vocals of none other than Sammy Davis Jr. Yes, please.

If you look up “svelte” in the dictionary, it must be an entry on Cyd Charisse. Her numbers usually balance between two poles. There’s something so sophisticated about them, and yet they can be equally provocative. It’s all in the manner she pirouettes, slides, slinks, and slithers with her body. It defies banal description. It’s better witnessed.

How do you even begin to categorize something like this glitzy confection of a movie? The plot makes no rational sense, and there’s no reason to even try to justify it. People don’t act like this, but what do I know? I’m a Vegas novice. It’s also almost two hours long and probably could have used some trimming.

But the operative word is entertainment. Vegas is on full display, and it’s packed with all sorts of decadent delights. Every scene we get Cyd Charisse doing what Cyd Charisse does best draws us back into her inertia. It’s impossible to look away. In the end, it’s almost an afterthought to forgive the ludicrous script because it’s a blast, and Charisse does some more first-rate work.

3.5/5 Stars

Daddy Long Legs (1955)

Posted on December 17, 2025 by 4 Star Films

The movie opens with a snooty art docent bloviating to a rapt audience about the various paintings within the Pendleton family collection from Renoir to Whistler. The joke is that the latest member of the family, Jervis Pendleton III, has gone a bit off the rails. It’s reflected in his portrait and by the fact he bangs away on his drums in the next room over like the eccentric, happy-go-luck magnate that he is.

The action quickly gets transposed from New York to France. The reason doesn’t matter much. However, the aforementioned Mr. Jervis happens to wander onto the premises of a local orphanage in search of a telephone. Instead, he discovers a young woman named Julie Andre (Leslie Caron) from a respectable distance.

He notices the rapport she has with the kids in her care and learns she, too, is an orphan without family or prospects. Right on the spot, he feels moved to do something. He gets back to his grousing second-in-command, Griggs — the man managing his assets — and vows to sponsor her (since adoption is out of the question).

If it’s not apparent already, it’s a fluffy little fairy tale, a bit too thick in the middle, but soon enough Leslie Caron finds herself off to America! Our French Cinderella travels to New York to begin university thanks to her mysterious benefactor.

Daddy Long Legs becomes a kind of collegiate musical having more in common with the worlds of Good News or Take Care of My Little Girl than it does An American in Paris (or even the cross-cultural Silk Stockings), though she is a Frenchwoman in America if you will. It’s a not-so-subtle twist on the formula as Caron receives her room, two new roommates (including a perky Terry Moore), and some light hazing from the upperclassmen. Two trunks also arrive at her doorstep, laden with the most exquisite of clothes.

Fred Astaire disappears for a while, and it becomes Caron’s movie by design. Her absent sponsor forgets about her, running off to do who knows what, as is his nature. He’s a creature of caprice. She’s left melancholy and teary-eyed as she writes to her pen pal, “Daddy Long Legs,” who never writes her back.

That doesn’t mean no one’s reading her heartfelt messages. Namely, the company secretary played by the pitch-perfect Thelma Ritter (one could watch her all day). She’s a closet romantic who grows misty with each subsequent letter added to the growing dossier. In her eyes, this is cruel and unusual punishment; someone needs to respond to the girl! She has a point.

Fred Clark plays his curmudgeonly corporate sui,t who has no time for sentiments. He has enough grief keeping the boss’s affairs in order while he’s off gallivanting around.

One of the first standout musical numbers has Caron conjuring up her dream benefactor. The movie quite vividly brings her dreams to life about who he might be, from a Stetson-wearing moneybags to a suave playboy in a top hat and tails, and finally a guardian angel. This last incarnation is one of the most enchanting, bringing our two stars together in a bit of a fantasy where Astaire effectively guides her steps like an angelic shadow, though they very rarely touch.

Eventually, Astaire does respawn in the flesh, and being such a good-natured fellow, he decides to pay a visit to his college girl under a pretense. You see, his niece (Terry Moore) conveniently is Julie’s roommate, so he goes down to the school with his sister-in-law while actually wanting to catch a glimpse of his orphan, who has come into her own with campus life.

It’s no small effort to try and disregard the universe where Astaire going to a college dance is not cringey, especially when there’s a comment made about his leering at co-eds and how very young they are. Perhaps Daddy Long Legs is more self-aware of the disparity between its stars than most of its contemporaries.

It gets a bit more tolerable with Astaire hamming it up on the dance floor with a full dance card, all while feigning ignorance (he only knows the box step). And of course, all the students want to be hospitable to Linda’s elderly uncle.

When it’s their turn, Caron and Astaire set up court near the statue of his dear grandfather, and she divulges to him about her relationship with “Daddy Long Legs.” The movie tried to kickstart its own dance craze, the “Slewfoot,” and I gather it didn’t catch on. Although watching Astaire and Caron do anything together feels spectacular in itself. It need not be more.

Astaire is also still a stellar interpreter of song. Here it takes the form of “Something’s Gotta Give,” but it also foregrounds the uncomfortable undercurrents of this relationship inching toward romance. It doesn’t help when Jervis’s indignant friend (Larry Keating), eavesdropping next door, makes an unflattering comparison between him and King David of biblical times, even if it is only a misunderstanding.

Thus, it’s easiest to talk about the film on the plane of performance and the brand of physicality where romance is implied on the dance floor. Though he does sneak a quick kiss, Astaire was always best in this kind of Classical Hollywood’s coded distillation of passion, most memorably achieved with Ginger Rogers. There’s an elegance to the metaphor and two people being connected and knowing one another through dance.

Astaire and Caron match each other step to step and grace for grace. The way they move down to their hands and the tilt of their heads each represent the complete epitome and essence of elegance. It’s like there’s a giant tractor beam drawing us in.

The final opportunity for Caron to do some ballet would feel like a missed opportunity otherwise, but the ensuing Hong Kong Cafe segment feels a bit queasy, like she’s cast as her own diminutive version of a sensual Cyd Charisse, and it doesn’t fit with Caron’s image, especially for such a young woman.

But despite whatever misgivings the plot might engender, Leslie Caron and Fred Astaire are able to transcend these pitfalls with bits of movie magic. What’s more, at such a precocious age, Caron had the distinction of dancing opposite the two greatest movie dancers of all time (There are six women in the coveted club). And she is hardly an ancillary addition. This must be stated outright.

The partnership only works if both parties are up to it. With her rigorous training as a ballerina, she more than holds her own and blesses the audience in the process.

In fact, although Fred would continue to be visible in That’s Entertainment extravaganzas and TV specials with Barrie Chase, he was in the twilight years of his film career. Although she ascended early, Caron still had much further to go; she was just beginning as a star.

3.5/5 Stars

Lili (1953)

Posted on December 15, 2025 by 4 Star Films

“She’s like a little bell who gives off a pure sound.”

Leslie Caron always cast an image of a sweet young gamine presaging Audrey Hepburn, and thus, early in her career, it’s a masterstroke to cast her in the role of a destitute orphan with nowhere to go.

Set in provincial Hollywood — somewhere vague and still distinctly French, Lili (Caron) shows up in a small town with an address and a name. Her father is dead, she has no relatives, and the acquaintance she meant to inquire about has since moved away. She has no leads, no food, no shelter.

A shopkeeper next door hears her sad story and is prepared to take advantage of her. She flees his abode and follows a troupe of performers like a little lost puppy. They feel sorry for her, and so they try and do her a favor.

Their world is a cornucopia of colors. The story itself is a trifle. Magician Marc is such a charismatic fellow. Lili is quickly devoted to him and taken by his lifestyle, mesmerizing people with his illusions. She, too, falls under his spell, smitten with her first crush. She’s so taken in fact she quickly gets fired from a temp job as a waitress. She was too invested in the floor show to keep up with her work.

While Ferrer is the biggest name, he somehow flies under the radar until we become aware he’s in love with this girl. He cuts a gaunt figure, mostly agitated and repressed as he nurses his wounds and bruised ego since he can no longer dance after being maimed in the war. He masks his feelings by treating Lili gruffly and pushing her away.

However, because he and his compatriot are puppeteers, Ferrer uses his alter ego to form a bond with her. There’s a fine line here for them to walk, and somehow it comes off because of Caron’s clear-eyed belief. Each interaction feels real and genuine. I liken it to the authenticity I always felt in the human-to-puppet interactions in childhood episodes of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make-Believe. There’s no condescension, and everything seems to be taken with true sincerity.

Lili expands on their performance because she imbues the puppets with meaning and attributes personality to them just with her gaze and a total commitment to their words. She believes they are real, and it becomes one of the enchanted conceits of the movie.

Otherwise, it would fall apart and feel disingenuous. Within the story itself, her interplay draws in an audience and helps their little trio grow a following. She, in turn, is given a stake in their profits and a small place to stay. For the time being, she has a home.

The meta conversations with the puppets become more pointed when they ask her, under the veil of performance, what she wants in life and how she feels about her love potentially leaving her. What’s special about her is that there is no compartmentalizing of fantasy and reality; she keeps them both together so they remain one and the same. The curtain between Lili and Paul makes it all the more intriguing. Because there is some kind of shroud mediating them.

Although Audrey Hepburn has already been mentioned, there is also a shared affinity between Lili’s performance on the green and the Punch and Judy Show in Charade. It might feel like reaching, but because of the connection between Hepburn and Mel Ferrer, it’s difficult not to intertwine them in my mind.

A turning point in Lili’s maturity is not so much one of passion or romance, but recognizing there is cruelty in the world, and it is something to buttress yourself against. We see Marc in a different light. He’s a married man and free spirit who plays up his bachelorhood for the sake of their show and perhaps his own desire to live the life of an uninhibited bon vivant. Fidelity is not one of his highest priorities.

Zsa Zsa Gabor is poised as the blonde “other woman” or rival for Marc’s affections, and yet she is given a more sympathetic position once we realize Marc is actually her husband. She has every right to be protective of him.

It occurs to me, just like how Lili says she was living in a dream like a little girl, this movie is like a fairy tale. As C.S. Lewis pointed out in close conjunction with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, these tales can be a kind of safe space to explore topics of evil and suffering while eliciting responses like wonder and joy.

When Mel Ferrer pulls back the curtains and makes his pronouncements about his character, a bit of something is lost, but not enough to look down upon the movie. Lili had me charmed, and it doesn’t outstay its welcome. It’s slight and enchanting in a way children can appreciate, and adults so often dismiss. You must come to it with a childlike heart.

It’s possible to be prejudiced against musicals that only have songs. Dance is something that taps into the visual medium in other ways. No pun intended. Caron, of course, made a name for herself as a ballerina, and although her opportunities here are minor, there’s a lithe elegance with which she carries herself that serves her well.

The ending evokes Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road with all her friends. And yet, for her, as the puppets become living, breathing beings in her dreams, it signals the end of something, not the beginning of the journey.

With each representing some part of Paul, their absence is too much for her to bear. Like all the great musical interludes, it’s almost wordless, but the confluence of movement and melody conjures up all the emotions we require between Caron and Ferrer to make their parting and reunification mean something.

Because of the child-like outlook of the movie, it brings to mind the words written by journalist Francis Church to a young girl named Virginia. He said:

“You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond.”

The magic of Lili is how its own veil is torn in two, and still the movie maintains the semblance of a fairy tale. When the divide is breached, it brings more supernal beauty and not less. Again, it’s a lovely paradox wrapped up in an often overshadowed MGM musical. Perhaps this is the eucatastrophe Tolkien talked about.

3.5/5 Stars

The Accused (1949)

Posted on November 24, 2025 by 4 Star Films

Loretta Young must own a pair of the most luminous eyes in the history of Hollywood, and in black and white, she’s incandescent. More important than that, she’s one of the great sympathetic heroines of Classic Hollywood. In The Accused, she plays both a woman in danger and a working professional. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and it makes for a far more nuanced character, especially for the post-war 40s.

Like poor Ida Lupino in Woman in Hiding, we meet her in the dead of night on the road. It’s evident she’s frantic and on the run from something. She gets picked up by a truck driver, though she’s not much for conversation, and he lets her off without much consequence.

A flashback introduces her pre-existing life as Dr. Wilma Tuttle, a professor of psychology at an unnamed university in L.A. It’s finals week as students take their exams and classes wind down.

We get an inkling of drama as we watch the wordless interaction between the fidgety teacher with a leering male student, mirroring her every move and, no doubt, turning in a Bluebook analyzing her own personal psychoses from biting on pencils to tugging on her hair. It’s a queasy relationship because, although she’s in a position of authority, she also seems helpless to do anything.

Douglas Dick does well as the slimy, if charismatic, co-ed who looks ready to entrap his teacher; he’s a kind of skeevy-eyed homme fatale playing teacher’s pet and coaxing his favorite instructor along — first offering her a ride home and then stopping by the seaside in Malibu.

Without using too much equivocation, it becomes a movie about assault and trauma, with the feminine victim becoming the accused, much like Anne Baxter in Blue Gardenia. There needn’t be a movie, but in the 1940s, she operates out of a position of fear in a predominantly male world.

Wilma’s internal monologue gets a bit oppressive, becoming a monotonous crutch, but the cavalcade of performers who come alongside Young are a worthwhile reason to stay the course. Robert Cummings and Wendell Corey aren’t showstoppers necessarily, and still, they have the prerequisite appeal to see them through the career of a reliable actor in Hollywood.

We meet lawyer Warren Ford (Cummings) and Lt. Ted Dorgan (Corey) together at Malibu police headquarters. The former was the boy’s guardian, and the policeman is investigating the case. After the boy’s body washed up on the beach, it was deemed an accident and no foul play.

No fingerprints were found in the car. Immediately, as an audience, we’re doing our mental calculations. Could this be, or is it merely a glaring plot hole? I’ll save you the trouble. Young was wearing gloves as a true lady does in the 1940s. Or else she wiped them…

The film’s asset comes with how it ties all of its primary relationships into twisted knots, all in the name of interpersonal tension. Warren has some personal connection with the deceased, but he quickly becomes enamored with the lady professor, and why wouldn’t he be? They effectively mix work and play, with Cummings being the smooth silk to Corey’s abrasive sandpaper approach.

In its latter half, The Accused becomes a Columbo episode from the inside out. We have our Hollywood star. There’s an opening prologue before the police get involved, and she falls in love. She also begins to feel trapped by what otherwise would be everyday occurrences as she tries to protect herself and cover her tracks.

One of her pupils is a primary suspect. She’s also requested to drop off the dead boy’s Bluebook, which might incriminate her. The truck driver who picked her up in the dead of night is called in as an eyewitness. Then, there’s the business of a missing note that she left for the dead boy and then misplaced. She must find and incinerate it.

Corey’s character is difficult to read. There’s something horrid about him, far worse than his incarnation in Rear Window, and yet he tries to play it off as an act or all part of the game he’s embroiled in on the daily as he does his job. It’s a bit of a curious surprise to see both Henry Travers and Sam Jaffe taking up positions in the police lab. There’s a rational inevitability about the work they do.

Wilma feels the heat, and a date at a boxing match brings out all her latent traumas to the surface again as she transposes the boxer in the ring with the boy she killed. In one sense, there needn’t be a movie because she is a victim, though she digs a bigger hole for herself.

Ultimately, the movie’s denouement is open-ended. The courtroom proceedings are just beginning, and her fate is far from settled, but as we stare into the dazzling eyes of Loretta Young, it’s easy enough to know she will beat the rap with a hedge of innocence around her.

If you dwell a little too much on the implications, the optics that Dorgan also observes might be a flaw in the justice system — if sympathetic appearances are taken as everything. However, in a movie about a woman who is assaulted and then plays the culprit out of fear, it’s at least par for the course.

There’s also a couple of oddities: Corey flirts with her in the courtroom, and Cummings is effectively defending her for killing his “nephew,” though they weren’t close. And still, Corey’s impish sense of humor and Cummings’s passionate orations for his beloved don’t change the bottom line.

This is Loretta Young’s movie, and even as she plays an intelligent woman often hassled and infantilized by the world around her, there’s something so winsome and generous about her performance. The noir elements burn off to make it a story of reclamation and vindication of a life. If you go digging, it does feel like a movie moderately ahead of its time, courtesy of screenwriter Ketti Fring and Young, respectively.

3.5/5 Stars

The Unsuspected (1947)

Posted on November 22, 2025 by 4 Star Films

The Unsuspected has a delicious opening dripping with a foreboding chiaroscuro atmosphere. It’s the dead of night. There’s a woman on the telephone tucked away in a back room. The familiar face of Audrey Totter picks up on the other end of the line. She’s out enjoying herself at a club with some male company.

Someone emerges and descends on the flustered secretary. Moments later, she winds up hung from the ceiling — a grisly murder framed as suicide. For ’40s Hollywood, it doesn’t pull punches.

Since Totter is a consummate femme fatale, it’s easy to question what angle she could possibly have in this whole affair. We don’t have the answers, and so we must follow the rest of the film to find out; it’s a genuine pleasure to be afforded the opportunity.

If it’s not apparent already, we are in the hands of professionals with Warner Bros. stalwart Michael Curtiz directing a screenplay by Ranald MacDougall and the director’s wife, Bess Meredyth.

The film is dressed up nicely for a bit of noirish drama with the added benefit of the shadowy, gothic interiors when the story moves to the abode of one Victor Grandison (Claude Rain), a revered radio mystery performer who is reeling after the death of his secretary and the loss of his beloved niece who perished recently at sea.

Rains is an actor with such poise and regality, but building off his turn in Notorious, he plays another complicated figure. It’s a role worthy of his talents, and he anchors a packed menagerie of the usual suspects.

Totter as the sultry Althea always seems to take vindictive pleasure in playing the venomous harlot, and she’s just about one of the best from the era. With her arched eyebrows and intense eyes, she reflects the perfect epitome of an opportunistic, venomous vamp. Though it’s possible she only looks the part. Other people are willing to stoop to murder.

Her inebriated wet noodle of a husband (Hurd Hatfield) feels like a non-entity in comparison, and that’s precisely the point. Fred Clark always has a shifty authority about him, and he’s a close associate of Grandison. Over time, we realize he’s actually the local police detective, a handy man to have as a friend…

The ubiquitous Classic Hollywood heavy Jack Lambert is introduced in one lingering shot, looking out the window of some dive hotel window. What could he have to do with all of this? It’s difficult to implicate him immediately, but we know he’s waiting there for something.

Constance Bennett might just be the finest addition to the cast. She was the wit and experience like Eve Arden a la Mildred Pierce, both beautiful and able to trade banter and wisecracks with just about anyone. She lends a sense of levity to a movie that might otherwise feel oppressively dour. In some ways, she lives above the fray of everyone else, providing a kind of narrative escape valve for the audience.

If you think you already have a line on The Unsuspected, it’s a joy to mention it’s a movie full of perplexing wrinkles. A mysterious stranger (Michael North) shows up on their doorstep unannounced like a specter, and he asks to see Grandison. His next claim is even more outlandish: This young man, Steven Howard, was secretly married to Grandison’s niece Matilda.

Then, a dead person is resurrected like an apparition. Joan Caulfield’s character suffers from a cruel lapse in memory. What happened to her? I should have noted it sooner, but she has the aura like Gene Tierney in Laura, down to the portrait.

Like that picture, it’s a movie spent deciphering people’s motives; it feels like everyone is keeping secrets and no one wants to tell. Is it a case of elaborate gaslighting? It’s not unthinkable in the noir worlds of the 1940s, and Caufield is a ready victim, so sweet and innocent.

What are we to think? Who can we trust? In taxicabs, we find conspirators of a different kind — those trying to ascertain the truth behind a suicide. Because they know there is more than meets the eye.

Matilda returns to her home, lighting it up with the glow of her virginal white countenance in the dark recesses of the family mansion. It feels like oil and water. She does not belong there, but the story is still unresolved. There are several skin-crawling moments as Matilda is subjected to danger with a touch of Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941). Something’s not quite right, but perhaps her mind is playing tricks…We know she’s not crazy.

It might be low-hanging fruit, but the crucial nature of the antagonist makes the film feel like an early precursor to the Columbo series. Although we don’t know everything right away, eventually the audience is given the keys to the murder, and we must sit back in earnest to watch how they play out, from botched murders to car chases with the police toward the city dump.

I’m also intrigued by the trappings offered by murder mystery radio programs, and though they are used in other films like Abbott and Costello’s Who Done It?, to my knowledge, they aren’t as prevalent in Classical Hollywood as one might imagine.

There’s a delightful meta-quality with Grandison narrating plotlines that played out in the story around him, adding another perturbing layer for the filmmakers to play with. It feels especially fitting here, thanks to Rains’s mellifluous voice and the continued prevalence of mystery and true crime stories to this day. It seems like we still can’t get enough of them over 75 years later. The Unsuspected represents the best of Warner Bros. and the mystery genre, wrapped up in a movie that rarely gets talked about.

4/5 Stars

The Chase (1946)

Posted on November 20, 2025 by 4 Star Films

The Chase opens as a wonderful contrivance of noir done up in a couple of successive visuals. A bedraggled man (Robert Cummings) stares through a shop window at a griddle laden with fresh bacon and hot cakes. He leans in so his hat brim mashes up against the glass, and proceeds to cinch up his belt. He doesn’t have any dough.

Then, he looks down right at that precise moment and notices a wallet at his feet stacked with cash. Any person in the real world would have seen it immediately, but it’s set up perfectly for the camera. He proceeds to treat himself to breakfast and a cigar, and after he has a full belly, he decides to pay a visit to the address inside the wallet.

You get a sense of the milieu with a mention of a standoffish Peter Lorre staring through a peephole and questioning what the stranger wants. Our hero is unwittingly cryptic, saying he wants to see one Eddie Roman — he has something to give him…

It could be a belly full of lead or something more innocuous, and, of course, it’s the latter. They give him the once over and reluctantly let him in. The room’s stacked high with statues and ornate antiquities; somehow, they make the interiors feel not just capacious but hollow.

Who lies down the corridors is anyone’s guess because this isn’t where ordinary folks dwell, only cinematic creations. Sure enough, the ex-Navy man Chuck Scott has just happened to fall in with a psychotic lunatic (Steve Cochran). We’re introduced to his temperament when he gives his manicurist a slap for screwing up and sends her simpering out the front door.

Still, he’s impressed by Chuck: An honest guy shows up on his doorstep, and he even tells him he treated himself to breakfast for a dollar and a half (those were the days!). For being such a standout guy, he repays him with a gig as his chauffeur. When you’re destitute, you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

There’s an uneasy tension in everything Cochran and Lorre, his right-hand man, have their hands in. The controlling Eddie is married to a young lady (Michèle Morgan) named Lorna; he’s hardly allowed her out of the house in 3 years. It says so much about their relationship.

The sadistic slant of the movie becomes increasingly apparent as they stick a different dinner guest in the wine seller to be ripped apart by Eddie’s prized pooch. He has something they want for their business dealings, and any semblance of hospitality burns off as his bubbly conversationalism quickly turns into despair.

For a time, The Chase becomes a kind of contained chamber piece drama. It’s not obvious if it will break out and be something more as Chuck forms an uneasy existence between the backseat driving of his new boss and the despondency of Lorna, who stares out at the crashing waves of the ocean, all but bent on presaging Kim Novak in Vertigo by jumping in and ending it all.

Lorna and her newfound advocate book two tickets to Havana and are prepared to skip out together. Even these scenes evoke a foreboding mood more than anything more concrete because there’s only a vague sense of plot or purpose. From here, it builds into this debilitating sense of obscured conspiracy in the bowels of Havana.

There are obdurate carriage drivers, slinking foreigners, and cloak-and-dagger antics that find his woman harmed and Chuck fleeing from the authorities. The surreal tones of the story just continue to proliferate with novel characters and new environs materializing rather than moving systematically from one scene to the next.

This inherent sense of surreal atmosphere might place the picture ahead of its time, with a select few films of the era. However, it comes off as rather stultifying after auspicious beginnings because it doesn’t accomplish what many of the great Classical Hollywood films managed by telling compelling three-act stories with a sense of economy.

The underlying perplexing tension set against a dreamscape, siphoned from Cornell Woolrich’s source material, is not enough for The Chase to fully pay off on the goods. It feels more like an intriguing experiment than a successful crime drama.

3/5 Stars

The Flaming Star (1960)

Posted on October 23, 2025 by 4 Star Films

“No Ma. They ain’t my people. To tell the truth, I don’t know who’s my people. Maybe I don’t got any.” – Elvis as Pacer Burton

If I may be so bold The Flaming Star feels like an inflection point in Elvis Presley’s film career. It comes at a time where he’s still given the opportunity to act, and if he’s not some great talent, he’s certainly a charismatic performer in things like King Creole and Clair Huffaker’s Flaming Star.

G.I. Blues came out the same year as Flaming Star, and it feels like a schematic for the rest of his films under Hal B. Wallis. They punched up the songs and mostly stripped down the plots. All they needed was Elvis as a commodity, not an actor, because that’s what tween audiences were paying for. Money talks.

Although you can hardly equate the two, The Flaming Star compares favorably to something like Rio Bravo in how a musical interlude is used only once within the broader narrative. Granted, this film is much more plot-driven than Hawks’s hangout movie.

I would not initially peg director Don Siegel for this kind of picture — it feels uncharacteristic — and yet you can see what he can bring to the movie, which at times has a ferocity and flashes of violence. Also, it’s about as far afield from a typical Elvis picture as you can get, being both an oater and a drama seething with family drama rather than cotton candy pap.

While initially the Native Americans make for a handy purveyor of conflict, there is another element that proves slightly more intriguing. Elvis’s parents are played by John McIntire and Dolores Del Rio so he’s part of a multi-ethnic family in a time where that is frowned upon as being scandalous. People like this are to be ostracized since they deviated from the status quo of cultural norms.

Because of its confluence of themes, it brought to mind two pictures in particular. Although Gunman’s Walk is more of a Cain and Abel story on the range, The Flaming Star provides a variation on these themes. Pacer (Elvis) and Clint (Steve Forrest) are far more benevolent, and yet in the broader society, there’s no denying that they are perceived differently.

Likewise, Bhowani Junction casts another famed dark-haired star, Ava Gardner, as a sympathetic mixed-race character. The story bristles with flaws out of the era, and yet its context allows it to court themes about personal identity and racism at a time when many of these themes were either sordid or commonly disregarded without much consideration.

Even the Native Americans are given some motivation, and they slowly grow into the movie as represented by Buffalo Horn (Rodolfo Acosta), a warrior who knows the Burtons even as he tries to protect his people’s way of life.

From his perspective, they must fight or else die with the influx of settlers; there’s also an especially aberrant strain of racism going through the white community. Given this context, it’s hard not to appreciate why the Indians have resorted to violence. Because there is very little middle ground. They see their way of life dwindling and slowly being made extinct.

In fact, the Burtons represent that middle, and they are on especially tenuous ground, caught between two warring sides as they look to maintain and defend their homestead. I imagined Barbara Eden would be a frothy love interest on the beach. Instead we get a young woman burning with anger. Her town grows wary and more prejudiced against the Burton family since they are left mostly unharmed while many loved ones in the white community have been killed.

Some of the beats of the movie feel inevitable, and it’s a credit to the performers that they are able to imbue them with meaning. I think of John McIntire when he eulogizes his wife. The story calls for her to be sacrificed, and yet he loved her dearly. He makes the loss stick so it means something consequential.

As they stand near her grave, he recites the words from Genesis: “And Adam called his wife Eve because she was the mother of all living.” Then, he looks up to God and asks him to take care of his wife. He means it sincerely.

Later, as their livelihood continues to crumble and fracture, Mr. Burton gives his blessing to Pacer, knowing what he feels led to do, turning away from the white community that now rejects him.

Although McIntire isn’t lauded or always well-remembered beyond the classic movie community, his performance here shows the breadth of his work. He could be a tough old cuss, and yet there’s such a moving humanity to him here.

He’s far from perfect, but we sympathize with him and the life he chose. He didn’t decide who he fell in love with; he wasn’t trying to make any kind of statement. He simply fell in love with a woman who didn’t look like him, got married, and raised two sons. Now in spite of his best efforts, his boys are forced to live with the consequences.

The flaming star itself is a dreamed up portent of death. It represents the fictions of a Hollywood movie frontier. And yet the very best of Hollywood comes out in the characters and Siegel’s commitment to punchy, economical drama.

3.5/5 Stars