Elmer Bernstein's beautiful Jazz theme and Saul Bass' sensuously lyric opening credits set the tone for this tale of Dove Linkhorn and his search for his lost love Hallie Gerard through the tough underbelly of 1930's New Orleans. These opening shots of a back cat prowling through an alley are justifiably considered one of the best credit sequences ever filmed. Cinematically sublime and well worth the viewing.
What follows is a high melodrama set in a brothel called the Doll House, where Dove, Hallie, Kitty and Madame Jo Courtney meet their various tragic ends. As directed by once black listed director Edward Dmytryk "Walk on the Wild Side" is a full-blown old style drama that is chock full of finely tuned old style performances.
Cast against character Laurence Harvey as Dove tackles his roll as a love sick Texas cowboy with more than his usual cool approach. He manages a plausible Texas accent and turns Dove into a man of fire and misguided passion. He makes it believable that he is the kind of guy that the women he meets with the exception of Barbara Stanwyck find it hard to resist. This is no mean feat for the thin aristocratic British actor.
French beauty Capucine seems almost too refined at first to play Hallie the artistic and wounded object of Dove's affection. But as the film progresses she delivers just the right blend of tragedy and pathos of a girl lost in the world of prostitution.
The accomplished Anne Baxter makes her presence known as Teresina Vidaverri the Mexican café owner who helps Dove and along the way also falls for him. Miscast in an age when Hollywood had most major roles of Latinos played by non-Latinos she is tough, tender and manages to be believable in the role.
Jane Fonda appears as the spurned bad girl Kitty. She walks the wild side with abandon and shows her range as an actress in this, one of her early rolls. Sexy, slinky and utterly rotten her Kitty is pure fun as in her desperation for Dove's affections carries the turn of events for him and Hallie to damnation and loss.
When Barbara Stanwyck comes on the screen she steals the picture out from under all concerned as Jo the lesbian Madame who looses her cool over her unrequited passion for Hallie. It is a classic Stanwyck performance full of all the power and history of this great American star. In her speech to Hallie about what love is she shines as she reveals her own tragic past. This was the first American film to show a lesbian on the screen and Stanwyck presents us with a real woman full of strengths and flaws that is much more than one would expect from a gay character in mainstream Hollywood of 1962.
Joseph MacDonald captures all the heat and steam of New Orleans with his shimmering black and white cinematography. The out of time early 60's costumes by Charles La Maire are stunning in their range from rags to high class call girl glamour. Bernstein's wonderful score is one of his best and adds the right touch of jazzy glitz to the drama.
"Walk on the Wild Side" is one hell of a ride and well worth the admission price to the Doll House.
The Original "Pulp Fiction"!
I think Quentin Terintino should remake this tale of desperate behavior in the depression era. Jane Fonda---at the peak of her youthful beauty--plays an alleycat that hitches a ride from Texas to New Orleans with good-guy "Dove" but is unable to seduce him. Dove, you see, is on a quest to find Hallie, his lost love who is rumored to be in the city.
When Jane and Dove fall off the back of their haywagon outside the city, they first stop at a roadside diner run by none other than Anne Baxter as a Mexicana hash-slinger, whom Janes rips off with her "your chili almost killed me and I'm going to sue you unless this meal is free" scam. Jane grabs Anne's rosary on the way out just for good measure!
Unbeknownst to Dove, Hallie has gone wayward and become a prostitute under the watchful (and jealous) tutelage of Barbara Stanwyk as the butch Madame "Jo". (Indeed, one of the funniest lines of dialogue is when a john refers to Stanwyk as "that Joe guy"!) When Dove finally finds Hallie working at the brothel, the fireworks really begin, as Jane and Anne pursue Dove , while Dove and Stanwyk pursue Hallie. (yes, by this point, Jane has been picked up for vagrancy, "rescued" by Jo and is working at the brothel as well). Think "A Midsummer Nights Dream", only in depression era New Orleans, and with prostitutes and lesbians!
Stanwyk is predictably vivid as the bisexual and ultimately psychotic madame bored with her legless husband (don't ask) and obsessed with Hallie. Supermodel Capucine plays Halle with a Garbo-esque world-weariness so metropolitan, exotic and frigid that it's hard to figure what she could ever have had in common with farm-boy Dove in the first place. This pairing really stretches the limits of believability; they make about as much sense together as, say, Marlene Dietrich and Andy Griffith! But the weirdness of their pairing doesn't hurt "Wild Side" one bit. The movie is already so bizarre that further strangeness cannot possibly hinder it!
In fact, this sordid and pulpy melodrama manages to be both depressing and great fun! it's stylish too- with the jazzy soundtrack and cool opening montage featuring a black cat (Jane?) slinking along city streets. The cover artwork is a bit misleading however. Jane Fonda plays only a secondary role in this, and the deceptively "Breakfast at Tiffany's" look she sports in the photo is not emblematic of this film's atmosphere at all. It's in slightly grimy black and white and for most of the picture, Jane has a slightly bedraggled look about her. She is only "dolled up" for one scene.
A pulp-fictiony, "cautionary" tale about obsession and all its guises-- Sex, Love & Loneliness . Tenessee Williams Lite. Quentin, are you reading this?
Wretched and Delicious
Tawdry trash, of the finest sort, rife with revolting characters and dreadful performances. Adapted from the same novel by noted Texas writer Nelson Algren, who, like Jim Thompson, wrote about the human underbelly. The screenplay, however, with multiple rewrites, including drafts by Clifford Odets and Ben Hecht, goes terribly awry. That, coupled with the fact that the movie suffers from deplorable casting, makes WWS a turgid and lurid (these are not necessarily *bad* qualities in a movie) drama along the lines of some ill-advised Tennessee Williams indulgence. With Laurence Harvey (nominated by one anonymous viewer as #1 Lithuanian-American actor of all time!) as Dove Linkhorn, a drifter searching for his lost love, a sculptor/prostitute named Hallie, played by the 100% beautiful and 100% talent-free Capucine. Also stars Jane Fonda, as Kitty Twist, an amoral, mentally-deficient thief and prostitute, the magnificent Barbara Stanwyck as Jo Carter, the glamorous but tough and domineering (of course) lesbian brothelkeeper at the "Dollhouse" where Kitty and Hallie work, and, mysteriously, the usually capable Anne Baxter stars as a Mexican woman who offers her *chicharonnes* to complete strangers. Please - this is 1962! Rita Moreno and Chita Rivera must have been out of town that weekend.
It is the early-30's in New Orleans, and the plot becomes complicated when Hallie, who, in Capucine's incompetent hands displays that particularly unpleasant early-60s European cinematic ennui, is reunited with Dove, and tries to leave the Dollhouse. Madam Jo, a part that Stanwyck sinks her teeth into as only *she* can, siccs her goons, led by her legless husband who drags himself around on a rolling cart, on Dove and Hallie, and things turn ugly and Hallie dies of an accidental gunshot wound. Also typical of early-60s filmmaking is the complete disregard for period-appropriate hair, makeup and costuming. If the titles hadn't told us this was the early-30s, we would have had no clue. The title song, which has a sleazy sound that is perfectly suited to this film, garnered an Oscar nomination. Other attention focused on this movie was no doubt based upon its one-time shocking content. Now, it is a very amusing, outdated, convoluted morality tale, whose lesson is a mystery.
This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $8.98YOU SAVE $6!
Buy it
In the opening sequence of The Letter, director William Wyler delivers a primer on film directing: at a rubber plantation, in the tropical funk of a Malaysian night, the heavy stillness is suddenly broken by shots... and a woman with a gun, descending a staircase. She is the wife of the plantation owner, and the dead man is, ahem, not her husband. Holding the gun so securely is Bette Davis, in one of her greatest performances (her acting of a big revelation, late in the film, is still an astounding piece of emotional fluency). The story is taken from one of those sturdy Somerset Maugham tales that has proved itself in many versions, but this is the keeper; it was nominated for seven Oscars®, including best picture, director, and actress, winning none. Wyler's... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Bette Davis - Herbert Marshall - James Stephenson Director(s): William Wyler DVD Release Date: Released the 11 January 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.97 Your Price: $15.98YOU SAVE $3.99!
Buy it
I remember those days. I used to dress up for work, the high heels and stockings and garter belts, before pantyhose. I like this movie and always try to catch it when it's on TV. I know I'll catch heck for saying this, but I miss those days. During the so called "women's lib" days women were very cruel to other woman who wanted to be married and raise a family. I used to say back to these woman "this is America, we have a choice". Of course I was shouted down so I learned to keep my opinions to myself. Whatever we've gained from "women's lib" (much, much more work, if you ask me and our children are suffering for it)doesn't make up for all we've lost. More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Hope Lange - Stephen Boyd Director(s): Jean Negulesco DVD Release Date: Released the 24 May 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $13.48YOU SAVE $1.5!
Buy it
Samuel Fuller came up with one of his gutsiest "headline shots" for House of Bamboo: Mount Fuji, in CinemaScope, framed between the boots of a U.S. soldier lying murdered on a snowy Japanese embankment. Happily, the movie that follows is no letdown. This brutal gangster film was the first American production to shoot in Japan, and Fuller exploits his locations to the max, up to and including a climactic gun battle around a Tokyo rooftop facsimile of the turning Earth. Officially the screenplay is credited to Harry Kleiner, with Fuller cited for "additional dialogue"; in actuality, the 20th Century-Fox movie transplants the basic premise of the Kleiner-scripted Street with No Name (1948) from an American Midwest town to Tokyo, but otherwise the picture is unmistakably... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Robert Ryan - Robert Stack Director(s): Samuel Fuller DVD Release Date: Released the 07 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $13.48YOU SAVE $1.5!
Buy it
An amazingly effective film noir action movie, shot on location in New Orleans in 1950, that has twists of plot and explosions of violence that can still make audiences gasp. Elia Kazan, of all people, directed this story of a public health worker (Richard Widmark) and a police detective (Paul Douglas) who have only a few hours in which to capture some fleeing felons who may be infected with the plague. The bad guys are played, with enormous relish, by Jack Palance and Zero Mostel, the latter only a few years before Kazan ratted him out to the House Un-American Activities Committee. In retrospect, this modest crime picture looks like a crucial turning point in the formation of Kazan's distinctive style, a clear precursor to the blistering location work of landmark films like On the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Richard Widmark - Paul Douglas - Barbara Bel Geddes - Jack Palance Director(s): Elia Kazan DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $13.48YOU SAVE $1.5!
Buy it
