Favorite films
Don’t forget to select your favorite films!
Don’t forget to select your favorite films!
Newsweek: Volume 70, Issue 5
Home on the Veldt
Despite its unlikely title, "Africa—Texas Style!" is a likely and likable children's entertainment in which the standard Western formula undergoes an ingenious translocation. The cowboys are herding antelope in Kenya, the Indians are Masai tribesmen. Hugh O'Brian does some tol'able roping and riding, John Mills runs a tight game ranch, and Charles Malinda, a beautiful little African boy and an astonishingly good actor, steals the show each time he bats an…
Newsweek: Volume 70, Issue 5
School Days
Robert Mulligan’s "Up the Down Staircase" does not paint the lily so much as it shaves the cactus. The slum school of Bel Kaufman's novel is properly dilapidated. The loudspeakers in the halls still boom "Disregard all bells!" while the bells keep ringing. But pandemonium has been cut down to clamor, chaos to confusion, menace to moodiness and all the absurdities of cultural discontinuity reduced to gingerly claptrap. Mulligan has turned Calvin Coolidge…
The smart, pretty woman in "The Whole Wide World," Novalyne Price (Renee Zellweger), sits stunned in the front seat of a flivver--it's Texas in 1934--with the young man she adores, a published writer named Bob Howard (Vincent D'Onofrio). He has just rebuffed her tender advances and she can't understand why. But we know something about this charming, tortured scribbler that poor Novalyne doesn't. He's tied to his sick mother in incestuous ways that the movie chooses merely, and mercifully, to…
Rewind
Ingrid Bergman at her most dazzling. (Yes, even more so than in “Casablanca.”) She recalls, in Stig Björkman’s documentary, that in shooting this film with Alfred Hitchcock “every day was happiness,” and that Cary Grant was one of the nicest co-stars she ever worked with, even though she’d expected him to be “conceited and stuck-up.” In François Truffaut’s celebrated 1962 conversations with the Master of Suspense, Truffaut calls the film “the very essence of Hitchcock.”