Joseph Cotten

Niagara

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Rose in bed, red lips prominent

Shot of Niagara, anyone? As a film it’s famous for all sorts of reasons – a film noir in Technicolor, Marilyn Monroe’s first star billing, the use of Niagara Falls as a set backdrop. On the other hand it isn’t famous for being a good film. Even its stoutest supporters struggle to defend it, largely because it starts off as one thing and then fails to follow through on what looks like a delicious promise. Two couples at Niagara Falls, famous for its honeymooners. First we meet the Loomises. George (Joseph Cotten) the husband who we first glimpse moping about at the edge of the Falls at 5am. Rose (Marilyn Monroe) back at the … Read more

Beyond the Forest

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Rosa reclining with cigarette

“Nobody’s as good as Bette when she’s bad!” screamed the posters for this 1949 melodrama starring, of course, Bette Davis. But bad how? The latest of a run of flops for Davis when it was released, Beyond the Forest allowed Jack Warner to offload the star who’d made him fistfuls of money for 18 years. Good riddance to you too, said Bette, who’d wanted out anyway. Or so she said. It’s a madly overcooked affair from the outset, with a rolling written introduction after the opening credits insisting that this is a grim but necessary portrait of evil and its rewards and ending with a metaphor about a “scorpion in a mad fury” … Read more

The Magnificent Ambersons

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Lucy and George

The film that never was, a magnificent mess, Orson Welles’s masterpiece, better even than Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons is all these things and more, or perhaps less, since no one apart from a handful of people in 1942 has ever seen the finished version. Instead there’s just the version we have, which is minus 50 minutes of material Welles had included in the rough cut he’d made with editor Robert Wise (later of The Sound of Music fame). After negative screenings, a general antipathy towards Welles at RKO and a change of public mood on account of Pearl Harbor having just propelled the USA into the Second World War, the studio ordered … Read more

The Third Man

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carolreed thethirdman 11

So much is right about the Third Man that could have gone so wrong. Producer David O. Selznick wanted it shot entirely on studio sets. Director Carol Reed disagreed and won, which is why it’s shot on the dank streets of post-war Vienna, a city as overrun with black marketeers as the film suggests. Selznick also wanted Noel Coward to play Harry Lime, the role eventually taken by Orson Welles. Perhaps Coward would have made a good “Third Man”, a shit trading penicillin to the highest bidder and damn the children who die as a consequence. But if Coward had taken the role, there wouldn’t have been the “cuckoo clock” speech, written by … Read more