Twelve movies

[Zero to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Amazon Prime, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (dir. Charles Waters, 1960). From Jean Kerr’s bestseller. David Niven plays a retired professor who now works as a New York theater critic; Doris Day is his wife, who insists on moving to “the country” (seventy miles from New York) with their four boys and one dog. She fixes up their sprawling house while he resists the metropolitan allure of an actor (Janie Paige) whom he panned. A couple of meta moments — Day singing a bit of “Que Será, Será” and referencing Rock Hudson — made me more alert. But the comedy here is on the level of, say, The Brady Bunch. ★★ (TCM)

*

Crow Hollow (dir. Michael McCarthy, 1952). A variation on Rebecca : a whirlwind romance, followed by married life in a strange, great house with three aged aunts and a surly servant girl. Also on the premises: strychnine, a tarantula, and poisonous mushrooms. Newlywed Anne (Natasha Parry) is at a loss for what to do when someone tries to murder her while her dimbulb husband Robert (Donald Houston) goes about his country doctoring. A thoroughly satisfying B movie. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Frightened Man (dir. John Gilling, 1952). Not much here for anyone to be frightened about. It’s a story of jewel thievery, with a young man sent down from Oxford who turns to a life of crime. Both he and his antiques-dealer father will be in for a surprise. Some tension in the breaking-through-the-wall safe-cracking effort, but nothing of real interest here. ★★ (YT)

*

The Snorkel (dir. Guy Green, 1958). That last one was a dud, but there are so many superior movies waiting in obscurity at YouTube. This one is a variation on Shadow of a Doubt, with a teenager (Mandy Miller) who saw her stepfather (Peter van Eyck) murder her father and is now convinced that her mother’s locked-room suicide is another murder. But how did the stepfather do it, and how can his stepdaughter prove it? Van Eyck, Miller, and Betta St. John (as the teen’s nurse/chaperone and perhaps the stepfather’s new love interest) are all terrific, and the ending is sure to throw the viewer off balance. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Whole Truth (dir. John Guillermin, 1958). We’re in Nice, or a recreation thereof, in a story that begins with a chase through twisty narrow streets, winds back the clock, and moves forward to pick up the chase. The plot: a volatile actress (Gianna Maria Canale) is found dead, and the film producer (Stewart Granger) with whom she was having an affair is accused of murder. An inspector from Scotland Yard (George Sanders) steps in to investigate, as the producer’s wife (Donna Reed) looks on with dismay. The plot is tricky — too tricky, really, but still fun. ★★★ (YT)

*

A Tale of Two Cities (dir. Jack Conway, 1935). Watching the crowd scenes, I wondered, as I do when watching The Grapes of Wrath : where did they find people who looked like that? I know; they’re actors — but still. Ronald Colman shines as gentle, dissolute Sydney Carton; Blanche Yurka is a terrifying Madame De Farge; as the Marquis St. Evrémonde, Basil Rathbone looks eerily like Stephen Miller. The storming of the Bastille, worked out by Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur, is a crowd scene to end all crowd scenes. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

I Want You (dir. Mark Robson, 1951). A family and their associates on the eve of the Korean War, as men are called up for service. It’ll be over in two weeks, says one man in a bar — in a movie released a year and a half after American involvement began. There are moments of frank desperation about the reality of war — a father’s plea that his son be classified as an indispensable worker, the dread with which another son reads his draft notice — but the movie wraps up on a weirdly happy note. With Dana Andrews, Peggy Dow, Farley Granger, Dorothy McGuire, and a surprising moment from bit player Walter Baldwin. ★★★ (A)

*

Whatever It Takes: Inside the eBay Scandal (dir. Jenny Carchman, 2024). I had a vague recollection of “the eBay scandal,” the effort by high-ranking employees to terrify and silence a husband and wife team who blog about e-commerce. Their sin: they dared to criticize eBay. But the details of what these eBay employees did (authorized, it appears, at a high level) were new to me. A well-made and angry-making documentary about the corporate will to power. ★★★★ (A)

*

Sister Carrie (dir. Daniel Nearing, 2022). That this black-and-white, nearly silent movie has no ratings or reviews at IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes might make it an object of curiosity, but our curiosity turned to boredom to exasperation. Though the title is Sister Carrie, the end credits state that the movie also draws upon fiction by Sherwood Anderson, Alexandre Dumas Fils, and Antonie Francois Prévost — which must explain why the foreman at the Chicago shoe factory where Carrie works murders his wife and ends up in jail. Text, including lines from Philip Larkin’s “High Windows” and a postscript from Jonathan Safran Foer, appears on the screen in a highly unreadable font. It’s all a pretentious mess, though I did like seeing the Bean. (A)

[That’s right, no stars.]

*

Carrie (dir. William Wyler, 1952). It’s a big picture, beautifully made, and true to the urban poverty and glamour of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. But I have misgivings. This adaptation deprives Carrie Meeber (Jennifer Jones) of self-direction: she is instead present only as a victim or victimizer of men. As George Hurstwood, Laurence Olivier emotes all over everything; the movie, unlike the novel, even ends with him (whose life is it anyway?). But Eddie Albert is delightful as peppy, blithely libidinous Charles Drouet. ★★★ (A)

*

The Big Shakedown (dir. John Francis Dillon, 1934). Husband-to-be Jimmy Morrell (Charles Farrell) is a pharmacist; his wife-to-be Norma Nelson (Bette Davis) runs the register and the soda fountain, providing stamps, ice cream, and nickels for the telephone. Their drugstore, they admit, is more a community service than a flourishing business. All that changes when a gangster (Ricardo Cortez) stops in for a headache powder and persuades Jimmy to manufacture sham brandname products. Cortez is the real star here, brutish yet suave; with Davis in second place and Farrell a distant third. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Hamnet (dir. Chloé Zhao, 2025). Better late than never. It’s a curiously modern story, with a husband and father, Will (Paul Mescal), away at work or away in his own head, and a mother, Agnes, or Anne (Jessie Buckley), left to manage a house and children largely on her own. The glaring anachronisms (“Hello,” “OK”) are thus less jarring than a viewer might expect. I think the movie too often substitutes over-the-top emoting for genuine feeling, and in the final scene at the Globe, things really go off the rails. ★★★ (N)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)