Marcello Mastroianni plays a married man who falls in love with a woman who may be his daughter. Nastassia Kinski (Klaus’s daughter) is the woman, Alberto Lattuada directed.
Category: Film
In Harm’s Way
Otto Preminger’s epic rendition of the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. It’s a huge film, intertwining the Navy’s preparation for war with a dozen personal stories, yet all the elements are kept in perfect balance. No one was better at these big-scale melodramas than Preminger; the cross-references here are Jack Smight’s Midway and Rene Clement’s Is […]
Valentino
A strangely warm-hearted Ken Russell movie, portraying the silent star (played by Rudolf Nureyev) as a man of dignity and charm—if not a whole lot of smarts—beset by baroque horrors of the sort that could only arise in a Ken Russell vision of Hollywood. Russell’s supercamp sensibility is not for all tastes, but this is […]
When You’re In Love
Robert Riskin, Frank Capra’s favorite screenwriter (It Happened One Night), took his only shot at directing with this 1937 vehicle for soprano Grace Moore. She plays an opera star who hires Cary Grant to pose as her husband, in order to protect her from her legions of fans. She also gets to sing “Minnie the […]
Alexander the Great
An early (1956) CinemaScope epic by Robert Rossen, more intelligent and more personal than most of the entries in that silly cycle, though hardly feather light. Rossen’s Alexander is an extension of his Huey Long in All the King’s Men, a demagogue riding a shaky wave of power. Richard Burton stars, golden-tressed in his first […]