Gloria Grahame as an epically unimpressed moll with the fanciest gloves this side of the Suez
surmounting her froth of skirts like Aphrodite arising from the sea
She can't use Charles himself as a reason not to cheat, not as he is, her dull, loyal, maladroit husband who wouldn't know how to be Byronic if you handed him a translation of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage with diagrams.
I don't blame him for scratching his head like he's trying to find his phrenological area of reality check
His dry voice reinforces the character's cynical edge, which a surfeit of love and tulips never quite succeeds in sanding off; his knack for vulnerability means that while it's in the script that his native New Yorker is utterly confounded by the rural sweetness of Little Delft, it's from Heflin's off-rhythm delivery and tight reflexive smile that we suspect that even in his natural habitat the reporter isn't totally the smooth operator he'd like us to believe.
the self-conscious efforts of adults to make contact run off her like rain
His face is always having an argument with itself—the mouth is cynical, but the eyes are concerned.
Girls come and go, but Johnny's "stooge" stays, as permanent a fixture as the streamlined furniture or the modern sculpture by the door, headachily wincing his way through love-talk at the breakfast table between Johnny and his latest imminent ex.
Jeff, who has been drinking steadily throughout as if trying to drown his bullshit detector, finds that he can't do it and puts down the glass with a sourly muttered "That sure went down the wrong way."
She was a singer, a political activist, and a politician, with an astonishing face—broad-mouthed, lion-eyed—a mane of heavy, Helen-fair hair and a voice so deep and husky, it sounds like the earth itself growling when it drops even further with emotion.
He has the lean height of an archaic hero; his eyes are white and dark as a bronze statue's glass.
He's been waiting fatalistically his entire life to prove the worst of himself and simultaneously kicking hard against the town's opinion of him: what the viewer can't tell is whether he believes there's redemption for him any way he turns or only different ways of going to hell.
He has brushy dark hair, quick-drawn brows at a troubled tilt, a mouth that folds tightly over its own pain; the actor was about ten years older than his character at the time of filming, but the effect is poignant rather than artificial—at twenty-five, Danny Hawkins already looks bitter to the bone.
She has a cat-eyed expressiveness that makes up for the shortcomings in her dialogue
He drags one leg with an audible rasp, a snakelike signature. Disembarking in idyllic Santa Lisa, he halts briefly at a crosswalk while a Memorial Day parade passes by, all proud brass and flags; he is the war's unwelcome shadow, cutting through the celebratory ranks at his own disruptive, disabled pace.
He returns to Santa Lisa a changed man. Something has been skinned off him: the gleaming confidence of the future-bright '50's he seemed to embody, perhaps. He sweats. His smile is too tight. His eyes are too wide. Drawing the shades, switching out the lights, canceling dinner plans to eat at the kitchen table by a minimal third-degree glow, he plunges his house from shining postwar optimism into the cross-barred darkness of noir.
Mary Astor's Pat is the Mehitabel of L.A., a weathered alleycat of a former beauty in broken heels and chipped nail polish; she's seen it all, done it all or had it done to her, and her face is disdainful with preemptive disappointment, but the nervous generosity that flashes out of her is real, if not always well-aimed.
the room of mirrored closets, each containing a previous generation of beautiful, imprisoned, girl-shaped AI, sullen as a heart in the red lights of a power outage
It is correct that David Bowie should be almost impossibly beautiful as the alien who goes by the name of Thomas Jerome Newton, with his translucent face and his luminous clementine-peel hair; he can look dangerous and desperately vulnerable in the same breath, too thin-skinned for this planet of overwhelming mental noise and wasteful wealth.
no subject
Gloria Grahame as an epically unimpressed moll with the fanciest gloves this side of the Suez
surmounting her froth of skirts like Aphrodite arising from the sea
She can't use Charles himself as a reason not to cheat, not as he is, her dull, loyal, maladroit husband who wouldn't know how to be Byronic if you handed him a translation of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage with diagrams.
I don't blame him for scratching his head like he's trying to find his phrenological area of reality check
His dry voice reinforces the character's cynical edge, which a surfeit of love and tulips never quite succeeds in sanding off; his knack for vulnerability means that while it's in the script that his native New Yorker is utterly confounded by the rural sweetness of Little Delft, it's from Heflin's off-rhythm delivery and tight reflexive smile that we suspect that even in his natural habitat the reporter isn't totally the smooth operator he'd like us to believe.
the self-conscious efforts of adults to make contact run off her like rain
His face is always having an argument with itself—the mouth is cynical, but the eyes are concerned.
Girls come and go, but Johnny's "stooge" stays, as permanent a fixture as the streamlined furniture or the modern sculpture by the door, headachily wincing his way through love-talk at the breakfast table between Johnny and his latest imminent ex.
Jeff, who has been drinking steadily throughout as if trying to drown his bullshit detector, finds that he can't do it and puts down the glass with a sourly muttered "That sure went down the wrong way."
She was a singer, a political activist, and a politician, with an astonishing face—broad-mouthed, lion-eyed—a mane of heavy, Helen-fair hair and a voice so deep and husky, it sounds like the earth itself growling when it drops even further with emotion.
He has the lean height of an archaic hero; his eyes are white and dark as a bronze statue's glass.
He's been waiting fatalistically his entire life to prove the worst of himself and simultaneously kicking hard against the town's opinion of him: what the viewer can't tell is whether he believes there's redemption for him any way he turns or only different ways of going to hell.
He has brushy dark hair, quick-drawn brows at a troubled tilt, a mouth that folds tightly over its own pain; the actor was about ten years older than his character at the time of filming, but the effect is poignant rather than artificial—at twenty-five, Danny Hawkins already looks bitter to the bone.
She has a cat-eyed expressiveness that makes up for the shortcomings in her dialogue
He drags one leg with an audible rasp, a snakelike signature. Disembarking in idyllic Santa Lisa, he halts briefly at a crosswalk while a Memorial Day parade passes by, all proud brass and flags; he is the war's unwelcome shadow, cutting through the celebratory ranks at his own disruptive, disabled pace.
He returns to Santa Lisa a changed man. Something has been skinned off him: the gleaming confidence of the future-bright '50's he seemed to embody, perhaps. He sweats. His smile is too tight. His eyes are too wide. Drawing the shades, switching out the lights, canceling dinner plans to eat at the kitchen table by a minimal third-degree glow, he plunges his house from shining postwar optimism into the cross-barred darkness of noir.
Mary Astor's Pat is the Mehitabel of L.A., a weathered alleycat of a former beauty in broken heels and chipped nail polish; she's seen it all, done it all or had it done to her, and her face is disdainful with preemptive disappointment, but the nervous generosity that flashes out of her is real, if not always well-aimed.
the room of mirrored closets, each containing a previous generation of beautiful, imprisoned, girl-shaped AI, sullen as a heart in the red lights of a power outage
It is correct that David Bowie should be almost impossibly beautiful as the alien who goes by the name of Thomas Jerome Newton, with his translucent face and his luminous clementine-peel hair; he can look dangerous and desperately vulnerable in the same breath, too thin-skinned for this planet of overwhelming mental noise and wasteful wealth.