The serial murderer in the spooky The Spiral Staircase (1946) is the worst kind of man there could be—one who targets women who are especially vulnerable, women with “afflictions.”  Not always a sympathetic character, old, ailing Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore) is nevertheless right to urge her hired helper Helen (Dorothy McGuire), who is mute, to leave the vicinity.  The handsome Dr. Parry (Kent Smith), beginning to love Helen, agrees.  However, death (at the hand of the killer) has been in the town; now death is in the house!

Robert Siodmak‘s film is cleverly shot to look now fey, now horror-noirish.  It is very consistent with its melancholia, and its cast seems like old friends (ours).  Credit must go to Mel Dinelli, too, for script-adapting what is probably a fine entertainment novel by Ethel Lina White.

Improbability rises to the sky in the crime movie, Pendulum (1969), but I find it fascinating for its honesty about civil libertarian trends, criminals, and male-female relationships.  Police captain Frank Matthews (George Peppard) arrested a murderer-rapist named Sanderson only to see him turned loose—ultimately by the Supreme Court—but still impenitent.  Subsequently Matthews, rightly believing his wife Adele (Jean Seberg) to be an adulterer, is arrested for the crime of slaying her and her lover.  But Matthews gets away from his fellow police, for he strongly suspects the (vengeful) killing was done by Sanderson and he intends to hunt him down.

Stanley Niss‘s plot grows feeble because the authorities would have suspected crazy Sanderson as much as Matthews does, but they don’t.  More interesting than good, Pendulum, directed by George Schaefer, does yield a message or two, one of which is about the fundamental inadequacy of circumstantial evidence.  This may keep you watching the film, but probably not as much as the solid acting of Richard Kiley and Madeleine Sherwood and the first-rate looks of Jean Seberg.  Or the first-rate looks of George Peppard.

The flick can be seen on YouTube.

In-Lawfully Yours is a 2016 faith-based—or Christian—picture which for a long time resembles a good Frank Capra comedy.

Divorcing her husband after he two-times her, Jesse soon falls for a small-town minister who is solemnly told that Jesse is a bad influence on him.  (Chelsey Crisp and Philip Boyd are droll and pleasant as Jesse and hubby.)  The filmmakers do not believe this, albeit, well, it’s true that Jesse has never converted to the Faith.  But she’s learning.

The Capraesque delight fails to last.  I don’t care about a few comedic cliches, or some intermittent oddity, but, once again in a faith-based movie, there is conversion  propaganda.  It is allied with hey-God-is-on-your-side theology, and this theology will save your soul.  All in all, the film becomes rather silly, in more ways than one.  Jesse, for example, says it’s okay that Ben, her minister-lover, recently engaged in an angry food fight.  But it wasn’t just a food fight.  Ben struck Jesse’s ex-husband with his fist.  I am more impressed by the cast of In-Lawfully Yours than by its Christianity.  I must consider the pic a mere bauble.

Henry Hathaway‘s Call Northside 777 (1948) stars James Stewart as a newspaper reporter, P.J. McNeal, who does enough digging on an eleven-year-old case to find out that a convicted cop killer (Richard Conte) is innocent.  Many a person, especially a lying witness, bucks him.

Announcing itself to be a true story, the film has some smart dialogue and satisfactory plot details (usually).  I’m reluctant to call it a work of 1940s non-ideological liberalism, but I suppose that’s what it is—very different from the fanatical illiberalism of those who acted against Brett Kavanaugh by supporting the suspicious Christine Blasey Ford.  Who needs corroboration?

McNeal needs it in the movie, and gets it—corroboration for what he believes is the truth.  Ain’t no substitute for it.

In the landmark Michelangelo Antonioni film L’Avventura (1960), from Italy, the troubled young woman Anna (Lea Massari) disappears during a yachting party, never to be found.  While searching for her, Anna’s best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) and her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) begin a shaky romantic liaison.

A striking secularism, with mere touches of Catholicism, exists in L’Avventura‘s vast world.  But man without religion, without belief, turns into a missing person of sorts (as Anna is literally missing), with only eroticism employed as a tool for consolation.

Never again would Antonioni show as much ingenuity as he did in this picture.  Consider the eerie footage of the empty town called Noto.  And the filmic suggestion of human vulnerability in the spaciousness of the ocean.  Consider the small-town men eyeing and beginning to surround an uneasy Claudia.  And the sad, riveting mise en scene in the film’s final minutes.  On top of it all, the scenario glitters with merit.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

Cover of L’ Avventura