Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Sunday, March 27, 2016

THE OUTRAGE (1964)

Between HUD/’63 and HOMBRE/’67, Paul Newman, director Martin Ritt & cinematographer James Wong Howe swung for the rafters and missed badly on this heavy-handed, poetically pretentious RASHOMON adaptation. Taken from a B’way retelling of the 1950 Kurosawa classic that retained his Japanese setting (see album cover, below), the film adaptation mercifully avoids any YellowFace issues by relocating the action to a Southern bordertown where three strangers (Edward G. Robinson, Howard Da Silva & William Shatner, staring into the void) are cogitating over a recent murder & rape case.

In a trio of flashbacks, the three involved principals (murder victim Laurence Harvey & wife/rape victim Claire Bloom in deep-fried Southern mode, Paul Newman in alarmingly swarthy make-up as a randy Frito-Bandito*), offer variant scenarios before Da Silva, a witness to the crimes, chimes in with a fourth view. Whom to believe? All? None? Or is truth unknowable? Worth a look if only for the striking, stylized train depot soundstage exterior with a positively Biblical threatening-storm cyclorama backdrop where the strangers take shelter and chew the cud. (The rest of the film plays out on natural locations; a fresh disappointment every time we cut back to that rainy, artificial depot, as atmospheric & visually compelling as something from late silent cinema. Very Josef von Sternberg.) Howe had recently achieved similar effects in the water tank on THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA/’59, but the look is even better in WideScreen monotone. (It also helps to have Eddie G. working the joint.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Someone must have felt that Newman’s famously piercing blue eyes wouldn’t show in b&w and wreck his Mex-make-up . . . someone was wrong.

No comments: