Here's something unusual:
I discovered the big conceit of this film a couple years ago, but I never actually found a copy of the film until I saw the DVD (long Out-of-print) at a flea market. If you've watched this, you might have figured it out: there is not a single word of dialogue in the whole film. No speech, no title cards representing the gist of what the characters are saying, so this relies even less on language than most actual silent era films. The closest thing we get to speech is a character screaming halfway through and the occasional shot of text that characters are reading. Well, that and repeated shots of the insistent ring of a telephone.
Overall, though it reeks of the "Dancing Bear" factor, especially since it's an experiment in silent film made by Hollywood 23 years after they had absolutely abandoned it, married to the film noir popular at the time, and with nuclear espionage as a crucial plot point for a film made while the Rosenbergs were waiting to be executed, it's certainly a fascinating little film. It still manages to tell its story pretty well. At any rate, it lacks the anti-communist speechifying omnipresent in films of this era and theme. Ray Milland turns in one of the best performances of his career (though it's not likely to top The Lost Weekend), and Herschel Burke Gilbert's wall-to-wall music score certainly enhances it all.
I discovered the big conceit of this film a couple years ago, but I never actually found a copy of the film until I saw the DVD (long Out-of-print) at a flea market. If you've watched this, you might have figured it out: there is not a single word of dialogue in the whole film. No speech, no title cards representing the gist of what the characters are saying, so this relies even less on language than most actual silent era films. The closest thing we get to speech is a character screaming halfway through and the occasional shot of text that characters are reading. Well, that and repeated shots of the insistent ring of a telephone.
Overall, though it reeks of the "Dancing Bear" factor, especially since it's an experiment in silent film made by Hollywood 23 years after they had absolutely abandoned it, married to the film noir popular at the time, and with nuclear espionage as a crucial plot point for a film made while the Rosenbergs were waiting to be executed, it's certainly a fascinating little film. It still manages to tell its story pretty well. At any rate, it lacks the anti-communist speechifying omnipresent in films of this era and theme. Ray Milland turns in one of the best performances of his career (though it's not likely to top The Lost Weekend), and Herschel Burke Gilbert's wall-to-wall music score certainly enhances it all.
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.