News

Just what is the dreaded ‘Process 97’? Henry Hathaway’s docu-drama combined newsreel ‘reality’ with a true espionage story from the files of the F.B.I., creating a thriller about spies and atom secrets that dazzled the film-going public. But how much of it was true, and how much invented?

The House on 92nd Street

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1945 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 88 min. / Street Date November 15, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring William Eythe, Lloyd Nolan, Signe Hasso, Gene Lockhart, Leo G. Carroll, Lydia St. Clair, William Post Jr., Harry Bellaver, Bruno Wick, Harro Meller, Charles Wagenheim, Alfred Linder, Renee Carson, Paul Ford, Vincent Gardenia, Reed Hadley, E.G. Marshall, Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel.

Cinematography Norbert Brodine

Film Editor Harmon Jones

Original Music David Buttolph

Written by Barré Lyndon, Charles G. Booth, John Monks Jr.

Produced by Louis De Rochemont

Directed by Henry Hathaway

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

I can’t believe...

Leave it to director William Wellman to direct the most compelling social justice movie of the 1940s. Taken from a bestselling novel, it's a wrenching examination of the workings of a natural American phenomenon, the Lynch Mob. The Ox-Bow Incident Blu-ray Kl Studio Classics 1942 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 75 min. / Street Date July 12, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes, Anthony Quinn, William Eythe, Harry Morgan, Jane Darwell, Matt Briggs, Harry Davenport, Frank Conroy, Marc Lawrence Cinematography Arthur Miller Art Direction James Basevi, Richard Day Film Editor Allen McNeil Original Music Cyril J. Mockridge Written and Produced by Lamar Trotti from a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark Directed by William A. Wellman

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

In the first scene of this grim feature, Henry Fonda stumbles out of a saloon street and throws up in the street. Apparently that was the reaction shared...

Fact would have been more fun than fiction in this overblown big-screen biopic of Russia's 18th-century empress

A Royal Scandal (1945)

Director: Otto Preminger

Entertainment grade: B-

History grade: C

Catherine II "the Great" was Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796.

International relations

Anna (Anne Baxter), a lady in waiting, emerges from Catherine (Tallulah Bankhead)'s chambers to tell the chancellor of Russia (Charles Coburn) that the empress is fighting with the commander of the palace guard. The chancellor is known in the film simply as Nikolai Ilyich, with no surname, though since the film seems to be set in 1763 he should probably be Nikita Ivanovich Panin. In her rage, Catherine smashes a porcelain horseman – a gift from Frederick the Great, king of Prussia. "Even in her most furious moments, her majesty has exquisite taste," says the chancellor.

Romance

Anna's fiance, a young soldier called Alexei Chernoff (William Eythe), bursts into the...

Tyrone Power III: Gay Rumors, Errol Flynn So if Tyrone Power was off having gay liaisons while he was at Fox, it was in another part of the world in someone’s sub-sub-basement (while he was working 18 hours a day at Fox), because if Darryl Zanuck even had so much of a whiff of it, that would have been itsville. Case in point: William Eythe. Heard of him? Most haven’t. He was being brought along as a leading man by Fox in the ’40s, working in The Ox Bow Incident, The Song of Bernadette, A Royal Scandal, etc. It was all systems go, since everyone else was in the service. He could have established himself the way that Dana Andrews had. When [...]...