OUT OF THE PAST

year: 1947
rating: **

Jacques Tourneur is a personal favorite director, but not because of OUT OF THE PAST, considered his very best work for those who didn't pay close attention to the unique, intricate details of CAT PEOPLE, THE LEOPARD MAN, CANYON PASSAGE or CURSE OF THE DEMON...

Those movies had tiers to climb, and obstacles to cross. This movie, like Robert Mitchum's character, sleepwalks from scene to scene where everything is just too easy: Find the pretty girl who stole Kirk Douglas's money. No problem. She's in Mexico and in a matter of scenes she's found, and quickly swept off her feet. After all, Mitchum is handsome and Jane Greer's really pretty. But this is a hollow, mannequin romance, and there have been more intriguing, risque affairs on daytime soaps. Not even Tourneur's direction rises above the dull script, so full of contrived, forced-quotable one-liners, there's hardly a complete sentence uttered: it's a random collection of snapshots that aren't even postcards.

THE WALKING DEAD: STRADIVARIUS

Worst episode of Season Nine, 2018: Centers on the title violin and a dog, and only one survives. THE WALKING DEAD sans Rick Grimes is THE LOVE BOAT slashed by an iceberg...

Usually there are conversations about what happened yesterday, or last week, but now the dialogue centers on six years ago. Meanwhile, these new characters are very dull, and hilariously they cover the entire PC spectrum: a black kid; a deaf woman; a white woman; a nerdy white guy. All of them rambling on and on, and even with an annoying device of subtitled sign language there's too much dialogue. For god's sake, at this point, this show's propaganda machine, THE TALKING DEAD, should either switch titles or share one since there's far more talking than walking, or any dead. PS One-note Daryl Dixon's dog can act circles around him. Rating is One Star. And hardly even that.

KEY LARGO

title: KEY LARGO
cast: Humphrey Bogart
year: 1948 rates: **

Locked inside a Florida Keys ocean-front hotel during a hurricane, war vet Humphrey Bogart, ingenue Lauren Bacall and her endearing crippled father spend so much time running-down and chewing out, lecturing and even heckling mobster Edward G. Robinson, he hardly has time to steal a picture that desperately needs stealing... HIS way...