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An ensemble comedy disguised as a crime caper, Beat the Devil (1953) is quite unlike any other Humphrey Bogart / John Huston collaboration. The pair's previous success on The Maltese Falcon and, more recently, The African Queen , probably earned them a lot of leeway on the project, which, by all accounts, was arranged as little more than a working vacation on the Amalfi Coast of Italy. But to dismiss the film as nothing more than a mostly-improvised drunken cast party is to overlook its unique charms, preeminently the wickedly witty script by Truman Capote and a sparkling performance by Jennifer Jones. The cast of eccentric characters revolves around Billy Dannreuther (Bogart), a failed business tycoon looking for a quick score in a shady uranium deal. His associates are a squirrely, paranoid bunch so afraid of being double-crossed that they fall for the harmless exaggerations of Mrs. Gwendolen Chelm (Jones), a compulsive daydreamer vacationing with her uptight British husband...

While John Wayne would likely win the popular vote for "Most Famous Movie Cowboy," Henry Fonda is the dark horse who quietly gets the job done. Able to take on any role from an affable man of the people to a cold blooded killer, Fonda may not be as irreversibly linked with the West as the Duke, but his performances are undeniably more interesting...even in a movie as confused as The Return of Frank James (1940), director Fritz Lang's first stab at the genre and first film in color. A sequel to 1939's Jesse James , with many actors (including Henry Hull and John Carradine) repeating their respective roles, the plot picks up with the killing of the famous outlaw while his brother, Frank (Fonda), is living anonymously on an Missouri farm. When the law pardons the cowardly Ford brothers, Frank sets out to avenge his kin, saddled with a price on his head and overly eager protégé (Jackie Cooper). The duo buy some time by leading a naive reporter (Gene Tierney, making ...

Transposing many of the western tropes to South Africa, Untamed (1955) winds up being all over the map...in a good way. The film forgoes the usual exposition to abruptly introduce Katie O'Neill (Susan Hayward), a fiery Irish redhead with cutthroat romantic ambitions. After being spurned by her first love, Paul (Tyrone Power), she marries again in hopes of following him to the dark continent where free land awaits those with the courage to claim it. Facing down Zulu tribesmen, catastrophic storms and financial ruin, Katie survives by setting one man against another, leaving a trail of broken relationships behind her in a quest for wealth, success and a slim chance at a happy ending with Paul. It's rather shocking how unlikable Hayward is allowed to be here. Katie - rechristened Katje when arrives in her new home - is essentially a femme fatale, manipulating anything with Y-chromosome that looks her way. And the script revels in the emotional damage with melodramatic zeal...

Lost amongst Brian De Palma's many Hitchcock-inspired thrillers is 1976's Obsession , starring Cliff Robertson as Michael Courtland, a wealthy real estate mogul whose wife and daughter are killed in kidnapping plot gone wrong. Fast-forward 20 years. While on a business trip, Courtland stumbles upon Sandra (Genevieve Bujold), a native Italian who looks exactly like his dear departed wife. A whirlwind romance leads to a wedding date set back in the states. But is Sandra really who she claims to be...or is Courtland's second chance all an elaborate scam? The amount of talent at work on Obsession is staggering. Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond ( Close Encounters ) with his typical foggy brilliance, plus a screenplay by Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver ) and a score by the great Bernard Herrmann, this is the closest De Palma ever came to straight-up Hitchcock quality. While his subsequent success evolved into a more hyper-sexualized and gleefully violent sizzle reel, here he shoots ...

Although known for its overabundance of style, the thriller genre probably allows for the least amount of creative wiggle room by a director. Audience expectations and plot requirements just don't leave much space for subtext or introspection. Hitchcock was one of the few to crack the code, which explains why most filmmakers blatantly followed his formula for success...with hit or miss results. My Name is Julia Ross (1945) comes closer to the target than most. Directed by B-movie auteur Joseph H. Lewis ( Gun Crazy ), the film's white-knuckle plot involves a struggling working girl who takes a job as a personal secretary to a mysterious mother-son pair. But the next day she wakes up in an isolated seaside estate with new clothes and a new name. Her employers insist she is really Marion Hughes, wife of the mentally unbalanced man of the house, merely suffering from a nervous breakdown. From that intriguing first act, the film rarely takes its foot off the gas, staging s...

By default, most films revolve around a three-act structure, which, optimistically, leads the audience through the story with an engaging beginning, middle and end. However the art of balancing each act with an equal amount of wit, drama, thrills or suspense is an achievement that rarely makes it onscreen. More often a film is slow out of the gate, sags around the middle, fails to stick the landing, or some combination of the three. So why disparage an entire film for one poor act? Rather, let's celebrate those who manage to pull themselves out of mediocrity for one exciting climax! The True Story of Jesse James (1957) uses flashbacks to give us a supposedly fair and balanced profile of the legendary outlaw whose career as a bank robber was instigated as much by the sins of the Civil War as for financial gain. With Robert Wagner in the lead role, Nicholas Ray's film leans towards lionizing James as a misunderstood romantic, almost selfless in his plan to rebuild the liv...

"Road Warrior on the water" is a perfectly accurate pitch for Waterworld , a B-movie concept that became the most expensive production in movie history after the casting of Kevin Costner. The film aspired to nothing more than building off that clever concept, with monstrous practical sets, a tricked-out trimaran and some not-so-subtle environmental posturing buoyed by incredible stunts and an outrageous performance by Dennis Hopper. There are no pretensions, just pulp sci-fi extravagance. But Costner backlash doomed the project from the start, as journalists eagerly reported the rising budget so they could watch the film sink upon release. The fact that Waterworld was actually profitable didn't stop them from labeling it a failure, however. And what should have been a celebration of the last pre-CGI action spectacle of the '90s became a pile-on of unwarranted animosity and exaggerated criticism. There's no denying director Kevin Reynold's film has...