The Grouchy Editor

I have an idea for a movie.  We’ll cast the two romantic leads from today’s biggest film, Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington of Avatar, as an attractive young couple.  We’ll follow them through a cute courtship, then veer into their squabbles over money, child-rearing, and sex.  For good measure, we’ll have them cheat on each other.  Sound like something you’d like to see?  No?

It’s a tribute to old-time star power that Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney pull off this scenario so effortlessly in Two for the Road, director Stanley Donen’s 1967 comic drama.  And yes, there is a lot of humor in the movie. 

Donen uses flashbacks and flash-forwards to chronicle 12 years in the lives of Mark and Joanna Wallace, allowing us to see up close how even an apparent match-made-in-heaven can falter.  With the wrong actors, this wouldn’t work, but hey, we are talking Hepburn and Finney here.  Hepburn, as she so often played in her career, is physically frail yet deceptively tough.  Finney is all gruff and bravado, yet deceptively soft.

The lush cinematography is a bonus as the Wallaces embark on a series of road trips in Europe — many of them quite funny.  And once again, I find myself praising the musical talent of the film’s scorer, Henry Mancini.

So do the Wallaces have a happy ending?  I won’t say, but I will say I’ve thought about which ending — split up or stay together — would make for a more satisfying film, and that’s a very tough call.      Grade:  A-

Director:  Stanley Donen  Cast:  Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney, Eleanor Bron, William Daniels, Claude Dauphin, Nadia Gray  Release:  1967

    Watch the Trailer (click here)

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the most beautiful star of all?

Could it be a woman so stunning she can make a man fall hopelessly in love with her portrait?  Or possibly an actress who — 65 years after her signature role and 30 years after her death — still mesmerizes audiences as Laura Hunt, the heroine of director Otto Preminger’s classic mystery, Laura?

Gene Tierney is perfectly cast as the unattainable Laura, but the film might be as impenetrable as Laura’s veneer were it not for a couple of standout male performances.  Dana Andrews is nearly as enigmatic as Tierney in his portrayal of a lovelorn homicide detective, a man who avoids eye contact with the people he interrogates, yet who can’t stop staring at that portrait of an apparently murdered woman.  And Clifton Webb, as the sardonic Waldo Lydecker, proves that no Hollywood actor was as adept at the witty putdown.

But the movie belongs to Tierney, the inspiration for both the painting (in reality a touched-up photo) and the memorable title song.   Said David Raksin, composer of “Laura”:  “When I was working on the score, I kept looking at her all the time.  There’s this fabulous creature.  You come across something marvelous and it inspires you.”      Grade:  A

Director:  Otto Preminger  Cast:  Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price, Judith Anderson  Release:  1944

      Watch the Trailer  (click here)

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

It’s a tough sell to describe any film from 1962 as “frightening” to an audience today.  We live, after all, in a movie world of three-dimensional buckets of gore — not to mention terrorism in real life.  So how about I just call Experiment in Terror “effective and creepy”?  It’s definitely that, in no small measure thanks to an unlikely director and a musical genius.

Blake Edwards, whom most people associate with comedy (the Pink Panther films), made just one excursion into the realm of suspense, but it was a doozy.   Experiment stars Lee Remick as unfortunate bank teller Kelly Sherwood, targeted by asthmatic menace “Red” Lynch (Ross Martin) to steal $100,000 from the bank where she works.  Lynch, to prod Kelly along, embarks on a systematic terror campaign, including the abduction of her younger sister.

Edwards filmed the movie in black-and-white and his use of light and shadow is masterful;  San Francisco at night never looked eerier.  Bit by bit, Edwards reveals his villain to the audience — first shadows, then a closeup of a mouth, then a profile — as Lynch gradually escalates his threats against Kelly.

Aiding and abetting all of this is a hair-raising musical score courtesy of Henry Mancini.  Mancini’s music is creepy and crawly, like footsteps slowly advancing up the basement stairs, making their way toward you in the dark.     Grade:  A

Director:  Blake Edwards  Cast:  Lee Remick, Glenn Ford, Ross Martin, Stefanie Powers, Roy Poole, Ned Glass  Release:  1962

                                            Watch the Trailer (click here)

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

Cube is one of those little films you stumble upon while channel surfing at 1 a.m., fully intending to switch stations after watching for a few minutes.  Or maybe just a few more minutes … hey wait — this movie is intriguing.

Six disparate characters — including a doctor, a cop, a math whiz, and an autistic young man — wake up inside a gigantic Rubik’s Cube, with no idea how they got there and, more to the point, how to get the hell out.  The solution involves a lot of math, but for the number-challenged among us, that doesn’t detract from the fun. It turns out that our panicky protagonists are not in just one block, but in a master cube composed of thousands of interlocking rooms, many of them equipped with deadly booby-traps.

Cube gets a bit scrambled when the script calls for the characters to interact with each other, rather than the maze, because they aren’t written with much depth.  And the conclusion will probably leave some viewers dissatisfied.  But the ending isn’t really that important.  It’s a bit like solving a crossword puzzle and leaving a few blank squares.  It’s enjoyable getting to the end, even if the puzzle’s not 100 percent complete.       Grade:  B

Director:  Vincenzo Natali  Cast:  Julian Richings, Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, Maurice Dean Wint, David Hewlett, Andrew Miller, Wayne Robson  Release:  1998

      Watch Trailers (click here)

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)