Charlton Heston as a wartime surgeon whose homecoming finds him working and loving well below his station in BAD FOR EACH OTHER.
Owen swallows his distaste... but, as in every film set in a coal com- munity, another mining disaster comes along for the climax, which hauls a tuxedoed Tom out of a society function so he can get his posh clothes grubby and bloody as he shows his true worth fighting to save lives in an unsafe tunnel with straining beams and the threat of fatal collapse. The sort of schematic morality tale which needs to take place in a peculiar America bereft of a middle class, where everyone is either a suffering miner (or the grieving wife of a suffering miner) or a plutocrat (or the useless wife of a plutocrat), BAD FOR EACH OTHER stacks its deck so badly that the MAD Magazine “Scenes We’d Like to See” impulse kicks in and it’s hard not to wish for a
scene in which Tom tells his moralistic old mother to get lost so he can enjoy the big office, expensive women and high life which are supposed to symbol- ize ruination. It’s still an expert confection—and the young, im- possibly manly Heston sells its bill of goods with a sincere grin. It’s scarcely noir, lacking a real crimi- nal element—even in the para- noid 1950s, no one convened a senate committee to look into the soaring rate of older doctors tak- ing credit for brilliant surgeries performed by their junior part- ners. Scott, again, turns out to be soft-boiled, meekly pulling in her claws to let Tom go back to the mine when a real noir bitch would have been scratching his face or flicking a cigarette into mine-works full of flammable gas.
Directed by Maxwell Shane
(FEAR IN THE NIGHT) from a script he co-wrote with Ivan Shane and producer Ivan Tors (GOG), THE GLASS WALL looks and feels more noir, though it’s at heart a social comment pic- ture. Peter Kaban (Vittorio Gassman), a stateless survivor of Auschwitz, has escaped from Hungary by stowing away on a ship to New York, but is told by immigration official Bailey (Douglas Spencer) that he’ll have to be repatriated. A pos- sible loophole is that Kaban claims to have helped a wounded GI during the War, but only knows he’s a clarinet player called Tom who works in Times Square. Kaban jumps ship, breaking ribs in the process, and searches for Tom, hooking
49
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84
