PICTURE MOMMY DEAD (1966)
Article #1034 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-13-2004
Posting Date: 6-11-2004
Directed by Bert I. Gordon
Featuring Don Ameche, Martha Hyer, Zsa Zsa Gabor

A young girl is taken out of a convent and returned to her ancestral home where her mother died a horrible death years ago. She begins to have strange nightmares.

You know, the basic story of this movie is pretty good, and I will admit to having been caught off guard by the somewhat shocking ending; this is a fairly sick movie in its way. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I think this one of Gordon’s better stabs at the horror genre (though I prefer his science fiction). Unfortunately, it does have some major problems. The dialogue is very bad at times, with its tendency to be trite, cliched, melodramatic and hokey. Furthermore, a great deal of the movie consists of an endless parade of two-person scenes that get quite tiresome one after the other, especially as very little creativity is used in the way these scenes are staged. Some of the scares are more silly than scary, and it does include one of the clumsiest murder weapons I’ve ever seen in a horror movie. It does have Don Ameche, Zsa Zsa Gabor, a young Susan Gordon, and an old Wendell Corey, who would probably have given the best performance if I’d been able to understand a word he said.

PORTRAIT OF JENNIE (1948)
Article #1032 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-11-2004
Posting Date: 6-9-2004
Directed by William Dieterle
Featuring Joseph Cotten, Jennifer Jones, Ethel Barrymore

A down-on-his-luck painter encounters a strange girl in a park with whom he falls in love. It turns out that she is actually a woman who died several years ago.

Generally, romantic fantasies of this ilk don’t really do much for me, but this one is so beautifully shot (I love the moody use of light and dark and the occasional visual look of a painting or woodcutting) and so well acted (both Jones and Barrymore are excellent, and Cotten does a fine job as well) that it wins me over. Furthermore, there are some familiar faces in the supporting cast with Cecil Kellaway, Henry Hull (though the lighting is so dark on him that I found it hard to recognize him) and an uncredited Lillian Gish as a nun. It also make good use of tinting (the hurricane sequence is all in green) and uses color photography in the final shot of the painting. Time-crossed lovers pop up occasionally in movies (BERKELEY SQUARE and SOMEWHERE IN TIME, for example), but this one is my favorite of that subgenre.

PINOCCHIO (1940)
Article #1031 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-10-2004
Posting Date: 6-8-2004
Directed by Hamilton Luske, Ben Sharpsteen
Featuring the Voices of Dickie Jones, Cliff Edwards, Christian Rub

A puppeteer wishes that his new puppet creation would be a real boy, and a fairy grants him his wish by bringing the puppet to life. However, it is up to the puppet to prove that he is worthy to be a real boy before he can become one.

If there’s one thing Disney really knew what to do, it was how to inject charm into the proceedings. This comes in very useful here; the first half of this movie is actually somewhat slow moving in terms of plot, but the movie is loaded with simple pleasures (the clocks and toys in Gepetto’s home, for example) to hold your interest until the things really get moving in the second half. In particular, horror fans will find two sequences particularly interesting; the scene on pleasure island when Pinocchio and his friend begin turning into donkeys is quite unnerving, and the Monstro the whale sequence is truly terrifying. This is another thing I appreciate about Disney’s work; he wasn’t afraid to be scary, and that helps make his movies enjoyable to adults as well as children.