Linkshoch Wonderful Movie

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Alex da Silva Ex serviceman Trevor Howard (Clem) is bored now that the war is over and agrees to join a criminal gang headed up by spiv boss Griffith Jones (Narcy) who peddles whatever contraband comes in – cigarettes, meat and even sherbet. I love sherbet. It seems a funny thing to ban, though. Anyway, Howard is enraged by the fact that this sherbet is being peddled unlawfully. He obviously feels for the sweetshop traders. His stand on sherbet causes a rift with Jones. Jones has plans for Howard. Not good ones.There are a few good things going for this film including the ending which wouldn't be allowed in Hollywood in which the dialogue as delivered by Jones is completely unexpected and standout. There is also a memorable sequence with housewife Vida Hope (Mrs Fenshaw) who wants a favour of Howard in return for sheltering him whilst he is on the run. Vida is really freaky! The cast are a mish-mash. I didn't think any of the women convinced and I couldn't relate to any of the male cast. Trevor is OK in the lead. And what is it with the names of the gang? I thought one guy was called 'Sophie' for most of the film. And the lead gangster is just one letter away from being called 'Nancy'. But I think that falls in line with British gangsters of the time – note 'Pinkie' from "Brighton Rock" made in the same year. Of course, the famous 'nancy-boy' Kray twins popped up later in 1960s London.The film is OK but watch out for the fake fights. The rubber milk bottles that are hurled about and bounce off people's heads contrast sharply with the sequence when Sally Gray (Sally) gets beaten up. The violence towards women in this film is disturbing and once again, the dialogue as delivered by Jones is menacing during these sequences. Overall, it's not quite up there with the best.

LeonLouisRicci Film-Noir, the Brits didn't do Many but in this Case They did it with All of the Grim Nastiness that the Genre would be Defined. The Cracking Sparring with Impolite Darkly Humored Dialog is so Non-British that it Sent Shivers Up and Down the Spines of the Critics and the Unsuspecting Public.Post-War Cynicism and the Criminal Class was Against the Grain of the Recent Allied Victory for the Stiff Upper Lips and this one was Surely a Surreal Entertainment with Creepy Violence and Creepier Characters.Trevor Howard is Uncanny in His Beaten Down Naturalness and this was a Distinct and Dismal Portrayal of the Ex-RAF Hero that Discovered that Returning Home was not much of a Glory. Falling in with some Low-Life Black Marketeers He Soon Finds Himself at Odds with Some of the Activities, Namely Drug Smuggling. "I am a criminal, but not that type of criminal.".There are Many an Unsettling Scenes of Woman Bashing and Unsavory Situations that take this One to an All New Level. An Odd and Eerie Scene of Howard Seeking Refuge in a Country Home Finding Himself in a House of Horrors, the Film not only Shows a Female Shooting Her Boozer Husband, but Unloads All Six Shots at Her Seemingly Innocent Spouse. Brutal Stuff.The Camera Angles are Extremely Expressionistic with Mirrors Reflecting a Distorted Reality and there is Hardly a Shot that is Done Straight or Typical. It is a Filmed Universe of a World Gone Nuts. The Final Confrontation Displays more Diabolical Set-Ups and the Ending Never Cops Out.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx This one is a damned curious British noir (some, including myself, would generally have that as an oxymoron, but I'm comfortable with the term here, as it really is precisely tapping into post-war malaise and other very recognisable Yankee genre tropes). Nice dialogue too, "He's not even a respectable crook, he's cheap, rotten, after-the-war trash" describing baddie Narcy (short for Narcissus after the Greek myth, well played by Griffith Jones).Wild child RAF ace Clem (Trevor Howard) is too bored with civvy street after all the shoot-em-ups, Immelmans and ack-ack show. So he decides to try his arm at crookery and ends up with Narcy and his gang, Narcy needs a guy with class. Only things don't go so well so Narcy hangs a frame on Clem and takes his popsy. "What's 'e in for?" "Manslaughter - killing a cop" "That's not manslaughter, that's fumigation".The rest of the film is the revenge story. It's all nice and dark up to a point, but gets rather too intricate for its own good and sprawls a bit, ending up feeling twenty minutes too long at 1 hr 40 mins. Due to the times there's not much scope for the violence that some scenes in this film pretty much demand according to the dictates of logic. The lack of the effect half of cause and effect makes the climactic scene absurd, and actually had almost the entire theatre at the Edinburgh Film Festival's revival screening in giggles. There's room for humour in a film like this, Hitchcock showed that well, but I think Cavalcanti over-eggs the pudding in the manner of Jon Farrow's American noir of 1951, His Kind Of Woman. The humour came in as a step change rather than equally spread in an even-toned master work. I may of course be in the position of being kind and assuming that the humour was intentional.

Piafredux Fine cast, crackling dialogue, sure-handed direction, and some lovely camera work make 'They Made Me A Fugitive' a splendid viewing experience, but the film's ripping, breathless pacing most impressed me. From the outset I just felt immersed into a cesspool of criminality, through which the pacing just dunked me again and again, deeper and deeper into the depravity of the characters. The police seem to exist in another England - the one of "bright, sunlit uplands" - while the film shoves you and binds you amid hoodlums, spivs, black marketeers, and sadistic enforcers who inhabit a claustrophobic, treacherous underworld in which violence to body and soul lurks in every shadow.At the remove of six decades some of the dialogue and action seems clichéd (although - spoiler coming here - the sequence of the fall-from-power fate of the gang leader, Narcy, socked me in my gut: it's a clever, artful, uncompromising bit of camera work); but on the whole the film still punches and lands hard blows. And, oh boy, the one character, Narcy's chief muscle-enforcer, still chills me to the bone whenever, in deliberate or unbidden recall, he lurks in and lunges from the chiaroscuro brandishing his menacing, meaty bulk, punishment-keen fists, charmless, cold, piggish face, vicious, predatory eyes, and glinting knife blade. Gives me the creeps! See 'They Made Me A Fugitive' and be swept, panting, through ninety-six minutes that seem to be counted in thunderous heartbeats that, in the underworld of this tale, may - or may not - get to go on pounding behind the thin, warm, vulnerable flesh of your chest. This one's as good as noir ever got to be.