The Penalty

A tale of “the richest city in the western world.” The Blizzard and his gang of Reds are an important source of Pabst’s Die Dreigroschenoper to all appearances, a five-minute prologue has him losing his legs in a childhood traffic accident and the misdiagnosis of a young doctor on his first case.

Assassins, hoodlums. “He’s gathered up his dance hall girls and he’s put them to work in his house—making hats—thousands of hats.”

Evidently a source of Batman’s monstrous villains and their enormous capers.

The great Lon Chaney, artist incomparable.

Rosie of the Federal Secret Service goes in. “Of course. Well, I’m game.”

The surgeon’s daughter is a sculptress, the work in question is Satan After the Fall. “How do you happen to know so much about Art?”

A sheer masterpiece by a director of genius with a cast to suit. It will be noted that Blizzard’s underground establishment is a mainstay of Michael Garrison’s The Wild Wild West.

For the plan, cf. The Taking of Beverly Hills (dir. Sidney J. Furie), “ours to loot at will.”

Says the sculptress to her model, “you are the best critic in the world.”

Rodney Sauer’s noble compilation score is second only to the original, if known.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

The nicety of judgment exhibited by Worsley is the decisive factor in the film’s success. His vast scenic constructions give him a coign of vantage he modulates through his shots, his dressings and costumes and the apparatus of the titles give him a weighty texture, so the proper decision is forced on him and he gladly accepts it, the actors play it all very lightly.

The work might be said to be a fertile jest on the Church Visible and Invisible, built up around a variation of the Three Estates. The script’s diagrammatic approach renders it all very clearly, even clairvoyantly.