Our reviewers select and review the best independent and foreign films on amazon.com, cd universe, and netflix

Watching In a Lonely Place, I couldn’t help recalling all those English Lit classes about tragedy and the hero with a tragic flaw. This is a film noir with Humphrey Bogart playing such a character and the result is a great, if heartbreaking, movie. (It’s a little eyebrow raising to find out the set was a replica of a place where director Nicholas Ray lived and the film is called In a Lonely Place.)

This is a movie about loneliness. As with many noirs, the hero (or anti-hero) is an outsider. He’s isolated from everyone around him. Here, however, he has a chance to alleviate that loneliness, finding love with a woman he feels understands him (Gloria Grahame).

Humphrey Bogart plays Dixon Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter with a less than stellar career. He’s cynical about the business he’s in, dislikes its commercialism and goes about with a chip on his shoulder. He also has a volatile temper. The anger he carries around with him is generally repressed but always on the verge of boiling over. Often, it does.

He’s given a novel to read to see what he can do about turning it into a script. But rather than read the novel, he gets a starry-eyed hatcheck girl to come over to his place and tell him the story (since she has read it). Later, after leaving, the girl is found murdered. Steele becomes the lead detective’s prime suspect.

Steele has an alibi, however. It comes by way of Laurel Grey (Grahame), his neighbor across the courtyard. Steele and Grey develop a relationship and are soon in love. This love frees Dixon from his demons, at least for a time, and he starts riding a creative wave, writing the script he’s been asked for but, at the same time, turning it from a trashy novel into something considerably better.

But the investigation of the murder haunts Dixon and Laurel. His temper soon resurfaces and she sees this part of him. Soon she (and we, the audience) start to wonder if Steele is innocent or not. His temper certainly makes it seem possible he committed the crime.

Doubt and distrust begin to eat away at Dixon and Laurel’s relationship and it soon starts to spiral downward.

Bogart is tremendous in this movie and you could make a good case for this being his best performance. While you can empathize with him to an extent, and want the relationship of Dixon and Laurel to work, you can’t help also disliking him because of his anger and suspicions. With a personality such as his, with his emotional problems, it’s easy to see how if the relationship were to work it would soon become characterized by domestic violence.

Gloria Grahame is also perfect. It’s difficult to imagine anyone else in this role. You can see the love and fear battling within her. In noirs, she’s the ideal femme fatale. (See The Big Heat, for example.)

The movie also has a perfect ending. It has something of a twist to it but it doesn’t seem forced or imposed. Rather, it seems inevitable.

While In a Lonely Place begins with the appearance of a potboiler murder story (which I gather the book it came from was), the murder here is just an excuse to tell the the real story — the relationship between Dixon and Laurel, and how Dixon’s flaw affects and determines its end.

Note: There is also some great black and white cinematography here. Roger Deakins has mentioned this as one of the movies that influenced the shooting of Coen brothers The Man Who Wasn’t There.

There’s a heck of a lot of drinking in this movie. But there’s also a heck of a lot of fun. In fact, The Thin Man is a delight from start to finish.

It begins as a standard, noir-like mystery-thriller of the period (1934). We meet some characters, most not very savory, and we soon realize that something none-too-good will happen. And it does.

There’s a murder but we’re not sure who committed it (though we’re given some possible suspects). And there is yet another mystery which we’re not necessarily aware of yet (the mysterious Wynant) — it will develop as the film goes on.

Only after we’ve been given all this story set up do we finally meet the stars of the film, William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, the cocktail loving, free-spirited couple who, between drinks, may poke their noses into a mystery or two. (Oh yes, there is their dog, Asta, too.)

Upon meeting Nick and Nora, the tone of the film abruptly changes. The pair party, wisecrack and generally take everything that comes into their lives breezily. Everything is a passing amusement.

From a noirish piece, we’re now into a comedy. (Maybe it’s more accurate to say a comedy has been laid over the thriller — more or less smothering it. And that’s more than okay. It’s a great comedy.)

Nick and Nora are absolutely charming. They’re always witty — which is remarkable since Nick, at least, is almost always tipsy. Powell plays it perfectly, not simply with the intonation of his lines but also to getting a bit of a slur into his voice.

While there is a great supporting cast this movie works primarily because of its stars, Powell and Loy. They work beautifully together. Loy is the perfect foil to Powell since she rarely takes anything he says seriously. She’s as casual as he is.

The movie also works due to its quick pace. Remarkably, with all the amusing nonsense going on, it also manages to be suspenseful. It wraps up with one of the best “gathering of all the suspects” scenes ever as Powell’s Nick tries to determine who the murderer is (he hasn’t a clue, but he doesn’t let anyone other than Nora know that).

This is definitely a movie about dialogue, of which Powell is a master.

Roger Ebert puts it best, I think, when he says, “William Powell is to dialogue as Fred Astaire is to dance.” (For another great Powell performance, see My Man Godfrey.)

The Thin Man is absolutely great entertainment. It still plays well and it’s easy to see why it spawned a number of sequels. Together, William Powell and Myrna Loy are utterly charming.

Take an affluent couple with little regard for anything but themselves, pit them against each other, and you get The Awful Truth (1937), a genuinely great screwball comedy. Late in the movie, Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) quotes back to her husband Jerry (Cary Grant) his own words:

“Lend me an ear, I implore you, this comes from my heart:
I’ll always adore you, till death do us part.”

While it may not be great poetry, it succinctly states the theme of the film. The Warriners are social gadflies, each apparently going his or her own way with little regard for anything else around them, including each other. (However, this may be more true of Grant’s character than Dunne’s.)

As the movie begins, it turns out Grant’s character has been deceiving his wife. He’s a bit of a cad; a bit of a philanderer. He was supposed to be in Florida but wasn’t – he was off having fun elsewhere. He takes pains to keep this from her.

As it turns out, when he returns home he finds she is not there. He’s disappointed by this and a little put out. It’s okay for him to deceive his wife, but for her to deceive him? He’s outraged.

When she arrives, he only hears part of her story. He jumps to conclusions; he assumes she’s having an affair with her music teacher. An argument ensues and it leads (rather quickly, I might add) to divorce proceedings. Now the fight is on. Through the rest of the movie, they battle back and forth trying to get one another jealous, each trying to best the other.

They get so caught up in their fight, they don’t imagine what the actual consequences will be. It’s only when each starts to realize the end result, the other’s removal from their life, that they start getting doubts.

The above sounds much more serious than it plays. The film is supremely funny. The lines are quick and witty and Grant’s pratfalls are perfect.

The supporting cast, including Ralph Bellamy (who again gets to play the dull nice guy, as he would later in 1940?s His Girl Friday), are tremendous and truly add to the film. (They always do in films of that period.)

The chemistry between Grant and Dunne is wonderful. She meets and plays off of his quickness and facial expressions with great skill and ease. She often gets the best of him in a scene. They seem made for each other.

If there is any flaw in The Awful Truth it may be the ending, which may be a tad too sentimental. It works, but it nudges at that fine line.

If, like me, you love screwball comedies this movie is a must. It’s definitely one of the better ones. Highly recommended.

Everyone has his or her favorite movie and I have mine – My Man Godfrey. It’s from way back in 1938, directed by Gregory La Cava, and is in beautiful black and white (though there are colorized versions out there). Since this is my first post here at Movie With Me, it seemed the best movie to start with.

I love screwball comedy, I love Carole Lombard and I love this movie, perhaps because both, the genre and the star, are at the top of their form. And let’s not forget the pitch perfect William Powell as Godfrey.

From what I gather, the very term “screwball comedy” comes from a performance by Carole Lombard, though there seems to be some confusion about whether it was a reference to her in My Man Godfrey or Nothing Sacred (1937). But someone, at one time, referred to a performance by her as “screwball” and the term stuck.

My Man Godfrey is a template for this kind of comedy.

Anything you could ever want to know about screwball is in this movie, beginning with Lombard’s performance as Irene Bullock, the quintessential ditsy, rich young woman, the heart and soul of this type of film. But perhaps the thing that puts Godfrey a cut above other movies is that they have not only constructed the perfect screwball comedy, they go a little beyond it with a compelling, if frenetic, romance and even social commentary.

The beautiful and the wealthy, dressed in tuxedos and gowns and all a bit “spiffed” (as Jimmy Stewart refers to it in Harvey), are amusing themselves with a scavenger hunt. The crowning achievement in the hunt is to return with a “lost man,” someone who is out-of-work and homeless due to the Depression.

One of the hunt’s parties, led by Irene’s sister Cornelia (Gail Patrick), comes across Godfrey. Unfortunately, Godfrey doesn’t receive her with the gratitude she expects. Rather, Godfrey is offended and angry at how callous and frivolous they are.

Then Irene comes along. She’s thrilled at her sister’s treatment and somewhat apologetic for how Godfrey has been treated. Godfrey sees Irene as not the sharpest knife in the drawer but more or less harmless. He sees how anxious she is to beat her sister in the hunt due and decides, why not? He’ll go with Irene and see just how frivolous and vain these rich people are.

He does, she wins, Godfrey gets to express his opinion of what kind of people the wealthy are and then … Then, Irene gets the idea of hiring Godfrey as the family butler. And he accepts!

From here on in it’s Godfrey, the one sane person in the film, and the wealthy, self-indulgent, and screwy Bullock family.

The movie excels with an extraordinary cast providing marvelous performances, including Eugene Pallette as the financially beset, ineffective patriarch of the house.

The house is like an insane asylum. But Godfrey’s presence has a calming influence, to a small degree, since he is the one voice of reason and understanding. With Godfrey around, everyone begins to become more grounded and, frankly, more human. They begin to lose their self-absorption and see the world, and people, around them.

But it isn’t only Godfrey who as an effect on others, and it isn’t only the family that is affected. Lombard’s Irene has an effect on Godfrey, seducing him with her madcap antics and her way of seeing the world. Reason alone isn’t exciting. Irene’s craziness is also vitality. Godfrey slowly falls in love.

All of this happens with a chaos of fast-paced dialogue and quick moving action. It’s a frenetic world Godfrey has entered and he is a fish out of water.

The pairing of Lombard and Powell is absolutely perfect. His droll, hang-dog look of seriousness against her constantly changing expressions of wild excitement and abject sorrow make a great contrast.

When I think of the age of this movie, I am amazed. It still does everything you could possibly want a film to do. It’s funny, exciting, and moving, and it does all this while remaining essentially simple.

If ever a film warranted the term classic, it’s My Man Godfrey. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen it. And no matter how many times I do, I always find it rewarding.

My favorite movie.