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Call Me Madam (1953)
Terrible miscasting of George Sanders
Yes, we love Ethel. And Donald can dance. But the movie is spoiled for me with the casting of Sanders as the super-ethical bemedaled singing heartthrob with a borscht-belt accent. If you've ever enjoyed Sanders in Rebecca, or All About Eve, or Dorian Gray, you'll wince during every moment of his performance here.
The BBC Television Shakespeare: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1980)
A sexy Claudius
Other user reviews here point out that the text of the play would have Claudius much more repellent than the young, sexy Patrick Stewart plays him. Two years younger, in real life, than Jacobi, his 'nephew'! But I found Stewart's Claudius to be fascinatingly convincing -- a worthy villain. After all, how did he manage to seduce Gertrude if he was the sneaky, ugly troll that Hamlet thinks him to be!
Every English-speaker in the world should see this imperishable masterpiece. And if you aren't quite fluent in Elizabethan, what a help the closed captioning is!
Connecting Rooms (1970)
Total disappointment
Hotel Beauregard meets swinging London. What a mashup! Two bad movies combined. Sorry for Michael and Bette, wonderful actors, who had to go through with this. And why couldn't that kid hold his head up? Did he have some neck problem??
Alice Adams (1935)
Practicing to be Katherine Hepburn
Don't bother with this one. Tedious uninteresting story line, Tedious uninteresting characters. Watch Hepburn becoming the star she would later be. Watch Fred Mac Murray practice being tall. One interesting glimpse: Hattie MacDaniels is already the Hattie MacDaniels of "Gone With The Wind", 4 years later.
The Dresser (1983)
In memoriam Albert Finney
I'd have to say this was Finney's most perfectly realized role. And what a role-- mirroring Shakespeare's King as Courtenay mirrors his Fool. Heartbreaking and exhilarating at the same time, just as tragedy is supposed to be.
Foul Play (1978)
Try real Hitchcock, not lame substitute
Alfred Hitchcock's last film, "Family Plot", came out two years earlier than "Foul Play". It is also filmed in San Francisco, also features a winsome heroine and a clutsy hero, and also involves a diabolical plot against a man of the church. But instead of mediocre acting, lame pacing, and an endless car chase, it has Hitchcock's polish and gentle wit. "Foul Play" looks to me like a plagiaristic attempt to combine Hitchcock's work with -- what? -- "Bullitt"?
The only thing that saves "Foul Play" for me is the Gilbert-and-Sullivan, although I have to admit that the treatment of what Hitchcock would call the "McGuffin" was somewhat inventive.
Murder! (1930)
Foreshadows Hitchcock's great public scenes
(semi-spoiler here) I love Hitchcock, and this was one of the few of his movies I'd never seen until now.
Over his career, one of his most effective trademarks became the climactic scene, occurring in public, that resonates with horrible, private, deathly significance, of which all the simple-minded onlookers are unaware. Think of the music-hall ending of "The 39 Steps", the Albert-Hall shooting in "Man Who Knew Too Much", the carnival setting of the deaths in "Strangers on a Train", the Statue of Liberty scene in "Saboteur", Charles Laughton jumping from the yardarm in "Jamaica Inn", Cary Grant on Mount Rushmore in "North By Northwest", all the way down to Hitchcock's very last picture, "Family Plot", where evil is perpetrated in full view of hundreds of worshippers in the sanctuary of Grace Cathedral! "Murder"'s climax is, I think, the first in this series.
Surely the uncanny horror of all these scenes was powered by a huge, Hamlet-like personal introversion in Hitchcock's psyche("I am a sea of alone", he supposedly said at the end of his life.) The public space --even, especially, a place where people are supposed to be having fun! -- always holds unspoken threats. I sometimes wonder whether a real extrovert can be as complete a Hitchcock fan as I am!
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
Unbelievably bad!
I love comedy, and each of the many stars of this movie gave me many joyful moments over the years --Phil Silvers! --Sid Caesar! How dreadful to watch them all in a completely unfunny, tedious, inane movie! One keeps waiting for the funny part to start, and it never does. Buddy Hackett and Sid Caesar and Jerry Lewis cross their eyes, repeatedly. That's about it, in 188 minutes!