Sidney Lumet

The Dybbuk is a made for TV film adaptation of a classic Jewish folktale. The story is about a young Jewish man, Sender (Theodore Bikel) who loves a young Jewish woman, Leah (Carol Lawrence) but her father arranges her marriage with another man. The grief of this causes Sender to die, but his spirit passes into the body of his beloved on her wedding day. Rabbi Azrael (Ludwig Donath), who serves as our narrator through the beginning of the film, is charged with the task of exercising Sender’s Dybbuk (sometimes defined as a malicious spirit or demon who possesses the living) from Leah’s body.Read More »

Red (Tab Hunter) meets and falls in love with Kay (Sophia Loren) even though he understands she’s a “kept woman”. It was intended to be Loren’s breakthrough American movie, but failed at the box office. “That Kind of Woman” stands up well thanks to a script by the then blacklisted Walter Bernstein, a strong supporting cast and good performances by Hunter and Loren in the prime of their youth.Read More »

Synopsis
When a military computer error deploys a squadron of SAC bombers to destroy Moscow, the American President (Fonda) tries to call them back. But their sophisticated fail-safe system prevents him from aborting the attack, so he must convince the Soviets not to retaliate. In desperation, the President offers to sacrifice an American city if his pilots succeed in their deadly mission over Moscow. A four-star techno-thriller that builds tension and suspense with every tick of the nuclear clock.
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IMDb wrote:
A psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, investigates the savage blinding of six horses with a metal spike in a stable in Hampshire, England. The atrocity was committed by an unassuming seventeen-year-old stable boy named Alan Strang, the only son of an opinionated but inwardly-timid father and a genteel, religious mother. As Dysart exposes the truths behind the boy’s demons, he finds himself face-to-face with his own.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
A Puerto Rican youth is on trial for murder, accused of knifing his father to death. The twelve jurors retire to the jury room, having been admonished that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Eleven of the jurors vote for conviction, each for reasons of his own. The sole holdout is Juror #8, played by Henry Fonda. As Fonda persuades the weary jurors to re-examine the evidence, we learn the backstory of each man. Juror #3 (Lee J. Cobb), a bullying self-made man, has estranged himself from his own son. Juror #7 (Jack Warden) has an ingrained mistrust of foreigners; so, to a lesser extent, does Juror #6 (Edward Binns). Jurors #10 (Ed Begley) and #11 (George Voskovec), so certain of the infallibility of the Law, assume that if the boy was arrested, he must be guilty. Juror #4 (E.G. Marshall) is an advocate of dispassionate deductive reasoning. Juror #5 (Jack Klugman), like the defendant a product of “the streets,” hopes that his guilty vote will distance himself from his past. Juror #12 (Robert Webber), an advertising man, doesn’t understand anything that he can’t package and market. And Jurors #1 (Martin Balsam), #2 (John Fiedler) and #9 (Joseph Sweeney), anxious not to make waves, “go with the flow.” The excruciatingly hot day drags into an even hotter night; still, Fonda chips away at the guilty verdict, insisting that his fellow jurors bear in mind those words “reasonable doubt.” A pet project of Henry Fonda’s, Twelve Angry Men was his only foray into film production; the actor’s partner in this venture was Reginald Rose, who wrote the 1954 television play on which the film was based. Carried over from the TV version was director Sidney Lumet, here making his feature-film debut. A flop when it first came out (surprisingly, since it cost almost nothing to make), Twelve Angry Men holds up beautifully when seen today. It was remade for television in 1997 by director William Friedkin with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott.
Hal Erickson on All Movie GuideRead More »

Plot:
Based on Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical play, this magnificent screen adaptation was directed by the great Sidney Lumet and starred Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell.Read More »

Rod Steiger plays a benumbed Jewish survivor of the concentration camps who lives on in Harlem running a pawnship–fat, sagging, past pain, past caring. Adapted from the Edward Lewis Wallant novel and directed by Sidney Lumet, the film is trite, and you can see the big pushes for powerful effects, yet it isn’t negligible. It wrenches audiences, making them fear that they, too, could become like this man. And when events strip off his armor, he doesn’t discover a new, warm humanity, he discovers sharper suffering–just what his armor had protected him from. Most of the intensity comes from Steiger’s performance and from the performance of the great old Juano Hernandez, as a man who comes into the shop to talk.

-Pauline KaelRead More »

Quote:
Had Dame Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” been made into a movie 40 years ago (when it was published here as “Murder on the Calais Coach”), it would have been photographed in black-and-white on a back lot in Burbank or Culver City, with one or two stars and a dozen character actors and studio contract players. Its running time would have been around 67 minutes and it could have been a very respectable B-picture.

“Murder on the Orient Express” wasn’t made into a movie 40 years ago, and after you see the Sidney Lumet production that opened yesterday at the Coronet, you may be both surprised and glad it wasn’t. An earlier adaptation could have interfered with plans to produce this terrifically entertaining super-valentine to a kind of whodunit that may well be one of the last fixed points in our inflationary universe.Read More »

Synopsis
Leon Prochnik adapted the evocative Robert Moresco play Child’s Play for the screen, with Sidney Lumet assuming directorial duties. Beau Bridges stars as a young teacher at an exclusive Catholic boy’s boarding school named Paul Reis. An outbreak of violence and brutality among the students has Reis perplexed. He suspects that one of the older professors is responsible for inciting the mayhem. The two most likely suspects, played by James Mason and Robert Preston, are long-standing rivals who blame each other for the student turmoil. One of the old enemies goes so far as to discredit the other — but his motives are at great odds with the religious doctrine taught within the school’s walls.Read More »