Prince of Players

Edwin Booth, son of Junius Brutus, brother of John Wilkes.

Much acting delineation, the finer point of Mary Devlin was utterly lost on Bosley Crowther of the New York Times.

Life of an artist, life of the art.

Rare screenplay by Moss Hart, score by Bernard Herrmann.

Ten North Frederick

A lawyer in politics is undone by his children but reaps a windfall romance.

Such are the peccadilloes of youth that the son wants to study music at Juilliard instead of law at Yale, one’s social set does not approve, he goes to Yale.

The daughter meets and marries a jazz trumpeter, that can be taken care of.

Scotched as lieutenant governor and future president, it’s back to the law practice, but the daughter has a pretty roommate, congenial, love while it lasts.

Propriety demands a simple end, he dies a short while after.

And there is the practical account of a legal mind and inherited position (father in politics) mourned in retrospect.

In Love and War

Marines in San Francisco, 1944.

Taking an island.

The coward comes through (his childhood sweetheart the WAVE marries an Army paratrooper).

The rich kid (shipping) sees both sides of the war (spoiled fiancée, nurse from Honolulu), he gets a million dollar wound.

The hero sergeant dies a hero.

“A big, sentimental war picture” to Bosley Crowther of the New York Times.

The imposition of war, the unspeakable brutality of it.

Halliwell’s Film Guide, “self-conscious propaganda concoction of bare routine interest.”

Blindfold

Dunne’s supreme masterwork as a director, a highly intricate guffaw of psychological themes and motifs explicitly founded on the basis of Hitchcock’s Psycho, you’d have to be crazy not to marry Vicky (Claudia Cardinale).

That is her brother’s predicament, a neurotic gone into paranoid psychosis who happens to be a top theoretical physicist.

The government keeps him under wraps down South and flies in his New York psychiatrist (Rock Hudson) night after night for treatment.

There’s an international black market in brains, a “business enterprise” wants to sell the chap to the Red Chinese.

A million jokes, his father’s name is Michelangelo, he makes mannequins for Undiedummies, Inc., male and female (Vicky’s the model for these), a perfect statement of psychological equanimity.

The psychiatrist is brought in blindfolded for “airtight security,” finger-snap, thumb up, “a work of art.”