Reviews

Naked Spur features fine performances from the cast. And this is one movie that is very much reduced to character development . Even though it's a western with some excellent Rocky Mountain high scenery. The film has only 5 actors in it from beginning to end. Unless you count some Indian extras and 4 horses and a mule. Jimmy Stewart is excellent as a bounty hunter who is very close to losing all sense of morality as he brings killer Robert Ryan to justice. Ryan plays a villain for a change. Just kidding he always plays a villain and is excellent at doing so. Beautiful Janet Leigh holds her own against the heavy weights and is very compelling . Meeker and Mitchell also provide excellent support. My issues are with certain reaction shots of the main characters that don't seem in sync with what is going on. Or the camera places them at an angle where it is difficult to ascertain their proximity to the main action. This is noticeable in the Stewart / Meeker fight sequence for example. Also Leigh's character's motivations for staying with Ryan don't make any sense especially when during one attempted escape he was clearly going to leave her behind. Then there's the score with it's recurring beautiful dreamer motif which seems to have nothing to do with the story. All that said this is still a very enjoyable western where in the good and bad people are not always clear.

This is just a poorly acted and directed French bedroom farce. Yeah maybe it's a scathing commentary on the uber rich playing sex games. Who cares? The lead actress is a real life Austrian Princess with all the acting skills and charisma of a real life Austrian Princess. Her maid should have been the one all the men were chasing after. Renoir himself appears as a sort of court jester to these rich folks. His movements are bizarre, delivery overwrought , and he even manages to act poorly in a bear's costume! There's a scene involving the mass slaughter of rabbits and pheasants meant to show us the callous superficial cruelty of the bourgeoisie.

But as they actually do kill these animals the scene in effect condones the very thing it means to condemn! Great deep focus though! Here's 5 films from 1939 that are better than this so called masterpiece...1. The Wizard of Oz 2. The Roaring Twenties 3. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum 4. The Cat and the Canary 5. Wuthering Heights (also featuring deep focus but done much more effectively).

Kurosawa's take on the soulless scandal mongering of the paparazzi nine years before -La Dolce Vita-. Mifune understated and very charismatic as the artist implemented in gossip with the beautiful but underused Yamaguchi. Takashi Shimura appears memorably at first in a seemingly comic turn as the crooked lawyer. Things become unbearably maudlin from this point onwards. A Kurosawa flaw I've noticed in most of his films. Scenes of morose despair are hammered home far past being effective and end up exhausting the viewer. The tragic end of the saintly daugher well played by Yoko is a case in point. It's all just quite a bit too much after a promising first 2/3rds of the movie.

On the surface this is a fast moving well made heist film. But if you look a little closer it is full of flaws. Number one standing out like a thumb is the terrible truly terrible acting of Ali McGraw. She is one terrific looking woman but as the member of a gang of bank robbers she does not have a single convincing moment. Ali delivers her lines like she is ordering tacos at a food court. Then there is the Sally Struthers character which brings up another point did Peckinpah ever write a decent woman character in his movies. The fact that she takes up with a man who was willing to murder her and her husband is totally unbelievable. The rest is a confusing jumble of mishaps with a not convincing -happy ending. McQueen would do much better in his next film Papillon.

First of all what does the title mean? And then to make matters worse they wrote a song with that title. If that isn't bad enough I swear the sound is turned up every which way Clint punches someone . It's THUMP THUMP THUMP and when the other guy punches Clint it's snip snip. Ruth Gordon is in it. She was terrific in Rosemary's Baby. In this movie she's an old lady who swears a lot. Ain't that funny?? There's also an orang u tan who gives people the finger. Wow! What a scream! And what kind of name is Philoe Beddoe? A movie for people with IQs less than Clyde's.