This clever mystery with a strong cast and memorable payoff stars Anne Baxter as an heiress driven to near madness when a man turns up claiming to be her dead brother and everybody but her believes him. Richard Todd is the smooth impostor and Herbert Lom the understandably confused police inspector. Set among the wealthy elite of Barcelona, this atmospheric little movie benefits enormously from a clever script that doesn’t outstay its welcome and some fine visuals courtesy of director Michael Anderson. We begin in a darkened room as two conspirators watch some surveillance footage …
The following review is offered for Tuesday’s Overlooked Film meme hosted by Todd Mason at Sweet Freedom. Continue reading
James M. Cain’s debut novel was the publishing sensation of 1934 – and still packs a punch thanks to its twisty plot, sexually charged protagonists and violent emotional undercurrent. Based loosely on a real-life case, this obliquely titled tale of infidelity, passion, murder and legal chicanery helped establish the classic Noir template.
Susan Hayward and Peter Finch star in this awkwardly titled romantic mystery, which took the eponymous 1958 book by Audrey Erskine Lindop -
Thousands of years in the future the cities of Earth are housed in domes, the eponymous caves, and humans are too agoraphobic to leave. Settlers from their off-world colonies come back after centuries but insist on living separately and promoting the use of robots, generating malcontent as humans lose jobs to their mechanical counterparts. Then one of the most senior robot scientists is murdered …
Robert Sheckley’s ‘The Seventh Victim’, a prescient short story of murder as public spectacle, was first published in 1953, well before The Hunger Games. Elio Petri adapted it as the Ursula Andress movie, The 10th Victim, also the title of Sheckley’s 1966 novelisation. It is set in a near future where killing people is a competitive sport …
