Antonio Pietrangeli‘s The Magnificent Cuckold (1964) is a worthy film. In it, as imdb.com puts it, “Andrea Artust begins to have doubts about the loyalty of his beautiful wife. When doubt becomes an obsession, his behavior becomes completely crazy . . .”

Scripted from a play, the piece is not as fresh as it surely was in ’64. Though seriocomic, it greatly resembles Chabrol’s non-comic L’Enfer. What makes it work, however, are the flawless performances of Ugo Tognazzi (Andrea) and Claudia Cardinale (his wife, Maria Grazia) as well as its bright worldliness.

That Andrea himself is an adulterer has much to do with his reactions to everything, including, of course, his suspicions about Maria Grazia. It matters little that she doesn’t quite track, because Cardinale makes her believable and the chemistry between her and Tognazzi is just shy of outstanding. It is a powerfully watchable movie.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

A handsome, well-dressed fortune hunter, Ricardo, conducts an affair with the married Fritzi but, worse, weds the wealthy, fatally ill Valerie for her money—this in the course of the narrative of The Big Bluff, a 1955 film noir. As often occurs in life, Ricardo begins as a rogue and ends as a devil.

It is the task of storytellers Mindret Lord and Fred Freilberg to make the Ricardo-weds-Valerie concept convincing, and they do. Partly this is because an appetite for romance is everywhere. Ricardo romances Fritzi, Valerie’s good friend Marsha (Eva Miller) romances Valerie’s doctor; hence Valerie’s eagerness for involvement with the rogue simply comports with the rest of what is going on.

John Bromfield, not unsubtle, is successful as Ricardo, while Martha Vickers and Rosemary Bowe are okay as Valerie and Fritzi, respectively. The characters are good-looking enough, moreover, that they seem to have walked over from Le Amiche. W. Lee Wilder did the interesting direction.

Available on internetarchive.org

Love Story (1970) moves fluidly and isn’t dated, but it pays so much attention to the two young lovers, Jenny (Ali MacGraw) and Oliver (Ryan O’Neal), and not much to the other characters, that it gets a bit stifling.  Neither lover is all that interesting, especially since Jenny is incessantly cynical and smirky with hardly a trace of amatory tenderness.

MacGraw, who was better in Goodbye Columbus, can’t really handle her.  She’s superficial—smug when she should be more than that.  O’Neal is passable, neither strong nor weak.

Erich Segal’s novel may have value, but the movie doesn’t.

Cover of Love Story

Virtually every stunt that can be done with a train and train tracks takes place in Buster Keaton‘s silent classic, The General (1926). There is something fascinating about one ancient train pursuing another ancient train (until one of them is destroyed), particularly when Keaton’s vigorous acrobatics are featured.

A Civil War comedy, herein Keaton plays a Southern railroad engineer who is rejected as a Confederate recruit because he is deemed more valuable as an engineer than as a soldier. But Keaton becomes a soldier of sorts, entering the aforementioned pursuit, after scheming Yankees steal his train, “the General.” Less funny than the star’s shorter works, and overlong, The General is nonetheless a terrific comic adventure story, with derring-do at its jauntiest.

Because it’s a victory-for-the-losing side (the South) tale, Keaton’s film would be hated by the nefarious fools who wish to destroy all monument statues of Columbus, Washington, Lee and others, and by the U.S. political leaders who allow them to do so. They’re all philistines unaware of how, as has been pointed out, these statues fortuitously mark our progress as a nation.

Peter Graves enacts a federal investigator, Tom Kaylor, assigned to bust the supplier of illegal amphetamines in the film, Death in Small Doses (1957). He poses as a trucker because the “bennys” are being purchased by truckers intent on receiving pep for their long drives. But deaths are the consequence and the pushers are shady.

With acceptable direction by Joseph Newman. the movie is an almost too earnest entertainment item with energetic drama. Finally, though, it goes off a cliff; the writing by John McGreevey flops. Tom’s love interest, Val, is played by Mala Powers, a woman with an exquisite face and excellent breasts. However, the Val of the film’s first half is not at all consonant with the Val of the second half, and it hardly helps that Miss Powers plays her ineffectually. As for Graves, he fills the bill, but Chuck Connors is shallow. The thrills of the first two-thirds of Death made me glad I could see the picture on Amazon Prime.