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bobhay
Reviews
Darker Than Amber (1970)
Good movie, but hard to see
This is indeed a good movie--a tidy, well-acted and -directed thriller with a good "take" on Travis McGee by the rock-solid and dependable Rod Taylor. But it is a tough one to get to see in its entirety, as some of the other reviewers have noted. Even the commercial prints have a running time of 91 minutes, and they are obviously and clumsily cut (here's a clue: the background music and sound jump drastically). No doubt this is because the violence is graphic for a film of this vintage, although that doesn't explain why it almost impossible to find a complete 93-minute copy here in the 21st century. I found one through a guy who knew a guy and so on--a Dutch copy with Dutch subtitles--and after 30 years of poking around (I was doing other things, too, during these decades) I finally got to see the whole movie. And it was worth it, as it almost always is to see the entire work, as the director (Clouse's next film was "Enter the Dragon") intended it. Some might think 2 minutes out of a film is no big deal (although they might gripe if you handed them a novel with 2 or 3 percent of its pages torn out) but this is too good a movie to snip. And although there have been bigger, longer, bloodier, more you-name-it fights, no two men on screen have ever looked like they are really, desperately trying to hurt each other as much as Rod Taylor and William Smith in the climactic fight in this movie. If you can find it, watch it. Good luck.
Little Jack Little & Orchestra (1936)
Entertaining look at some vintage music.
The kind of musical revue Nick and Nora Charles might have run across, and as such a good look into the period, this short good naturedly breezes through some standards of the mid-Thirties (you probably will recognize most of them). Usual clunky story--simply an excuse to mount a few songs-with a couple certified highlights: a great dance number by Dot, Donna, and Teddy, and a wild piano version of "Somebody Stole My Gal" by himself, Little Jack Little. Well worth it for these two gems from the second half. LJL plays like Chico Marx on speed.