He Ran All the Way

A hood on the lam (John Garfield) takes a family hostage in their apartment.

A model for Wyler’s The Desperate Hours and perfect in itself.

James Wong Howe is the cinematographer, Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler wrote it, Francis D. Lyon edited it and Arnold Laven is the dialogue director, not to mention Franz Waxman’s score.

The daughter of the house (Shelley Winters) has a soft spot for the guy, he can’t believe it but in his dying moments the yellow convertible he sent her to buy rolls up along the gutter he’s in.

“Studiously horrifying”, Bosley Crowther calls it (New York Times), and “far-fetched”.

“Uninteresting” (Halliwell’s Film Guide).

Maya

The adventures of a boy (Jay North) in India, and those of his father (Clint Walker).

The boy attains the greatest treasure in all the world, envied by the gods.

The father loses his cowardice and becomes a tigrero (Samuel Fuller tells the tale to Kaurismäki).

The beauty of this, apart from the location filming and the animals and everything else, is the apparent division of the film into adult and childhood perspectives.

A film of such magnitude, on the Saturday matinee circuit and evidently disregarded in any other sense, is a fine tribute to the masterworks by Swift and Twain on the children’s shelf.

Claudine

This is a fine view of one of James Earl Jones’ lines in action on film, one that he developed into a solo instrument of great power and beauty on stage in Fences, and which he also deployed as a secondary role in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings. Berry manages to generate a circus on one side and Jones taking it in on the other by cross-cutting, and he is able to pull off sunup on a brownstone stoop and various delicate low-rent interiors and cityscapes, as well as an ensemble of child actors around Diahann Carroll, who carries the burdensome articulation of the part very handily, in a film akin mutatis mutandis to Cinderella Liberty.