From the jump, Nicholas Ray and Humphrey Bogart are perfectly in sync, the director knowing just how to get the best from his star and exactly how to frame it for maximum impact.
For this alone, I’d like to reframe the idea of Knock on Any Door being a minor work for Ray, but rather, the perfect warm-up for the duo to make a masterpiece the following year with In a Lonely Place.
We also see Ray doing sexier, angstier…
Bogart gets a really cool turn-to-camera intro that plays into his Casablanca iconography with the trench coat and cigarette dangling from his mouth. I’d argue that later, he looks even cooler in a fur collar leather jacket.
What’s not cool, is Bogart rolling around on the floor, unconvincingly trying to sell himself as a Judo expert and striking cringe fight stances.
That his character owns a bar in a foreign land is another overt connection to his most famous film,…
In my least favourite decade of film, The Fabulous Baker Boys is immediately one of my favourites of the '80s for being the polar opposite of the avarice represented by the era on-screen.
Hard-bitten, wintery photography makes the bottom of show business feel bottomless; the small-time struggles of a lounge trio cut through with a line of smart-alecky cynicism as sharp and sad as unforgiving Seattle winds.
Pithy patter masks fifteen years of pathetic artistic compromise, while a constant fog…
In place of rapey anal jokes (unless you count the title), we've got an extended fingering gag!
They may dress like it, but none of the characters or the makers of this repellant trash have any class or clue about acting like a gentleman.
For a second time, Matthew Vaughn tries to sell us on the idea of Colin Firth's Harry Hart being a firm believer of "manners maketh man", but these are empty words, for this even fouler-mouthed sequel's…
