The Sentinel (1977)

“Rebecca and Malcolm Stinnett. Sell. Gerde Engstrom. Emma and Lillian Clotkin. Anna Clark. All people the Parker girl said she met.”
“All killers, all dead. She went to a party with eight dead murderers.”

            Rarely do I watch any kind of movie that was made past 1960. I cannot stand many movies made in the 1970s (alright except for Star Wars but who does NOT like Star Wars? And I have no choice but to like the trilogy my brothers watch it all the time. Oh and I like Dirty Harry too that is really good and Murder on the Orient Express). I find after the studio system fell the glamour went out of movies. Anyway, so I have The Sentinel a chance and that as only because Ava Gardner had a part in it and to my discovery so did many other actors. It is almost like a who’s who of acting.

            Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) is a young model. She has been living with her boyfriend Michael who is a lawyer. He wants her to marry him but his wife died recently and there was a big scandal with that and she tried to kill herself afterwards. Cristina wants to move out of the apartment she shares with Michael so she can think things over and be by herself. With the help of a woman named Miss Logan (Ava Gardner) she finds a nice old apartment building in Brooklyn facing the water.

            Alison likes the apartment very much. It is furnished with old furniture and nice and spacious. One by one she meets her neighbors and they are all very odd. An old man named Chase (Burgess Meredith) is obsessed with his cat going so far as to throw it a birthday party and there are two lesbian dancers living downstairs from her. A blind and very old priest lives upstairs and constantly stares out the window. Not long after she is settled Alison begins to hear things in the middle of the night and she faints and does not feel well when she is doing shoots.

            Things turn really creepy and scary for Alison. One night she believes she stabbed someone and runs out into the street in a fit and has to be put into the hospital. The police (one of them includes a young Christopher Walken) investigate what happened to Alison because they suspect Michael is behind something (they feel he killed his wife). She and Michael individually find out the Catholic Church is behind what is going on with her and they are not good.

            Alright so I did not really explain the plot but I cannot give the whole thing away. The movie was alright, the story was so-so. Someone online gave a review saying that if you like The Sixth Sense you will like this movie. Well let me tell you The Sentinel is nothing like The Sixth Sense and I was laughing throughout the movie.

            The cast was interesting. I am saying interesting because it was not the greatest and it is odd that all these people are in it. Ava Gardner as Miss Logan added a touch of glamour to a crappily made movie. I mean come she’s Ava Gardner no matter how old the woman got she was still gorgeous (her voice was deeper if you just heard her voice you would not believe it was her and the effects of her hard living were starting to show). Burgess Meredith was a creepy bastard, he reminded me of the old men that flirt with me when I work (being a hostess in a restaurant is so much fun *sarcastic tone*). A young Beverly D’Angelo plays one of the lesbian dancers and I will never be able to look at her in Christmas Vacation the same way ever again. Eli Wallach is the older detective. Jerry Orbach is in one scene as a director. Jeff Goldbloom is a photographer in a few scenes. Martin Balsalm gets one of the top billings but he is only in one scene for like two seconds. Cristina Raines was good I have heard of her but never seen her in anything. She was very very pretty.

            This is one movie that was made in the ‘70s that had all these old stars because there was a renewed appreciation for old Hollywood. I feel they put all these old actors in films because they knew they were better than the ones around and they knew that most of them were getting old and would not be around anymore. Or better reason they knew they would draw audiences.

            The Sentinel is not the greatest of movies ever made. It is one of the movies that are so bad they are so good. I plan on getting on DVD so me and my friends can laugh watching it together. This is one movie I would not mind being remade it had potential to be good but it fell flat on the scary and it kind of dragged. 

Murder on the Orient Express

“The murderer is with us now!”

            Murder on the Orient Express is one of the quintessential mystery stories ever written… of course it is the story was written by the great mystery writer of all time Agatha Christie. Christie excellently takes her main mystery and motive from the Lindberg Baby kidnapping and weaves the sad story into the lives of her characters. The story takes place on board the famous Orient Express traveling from Turkey (on the European side) to London. Famous detective Hercule Poirot is traveling back to Belgium on the train on the insistence of his friend Mr. Bianchi. One night the train gets caught behind a large pile of snow on the tracks. The next morning the body of a passenger named Ratchett is found in his room dead from multiple stab wounds. There seems to be no motive behind the killing. No one on the train knows each other… or do they? What possible motive would strangers have for killing this man?

            Such a great plot for a murder mystery book which was made into an even better murder mystery movie. No writer in Hollywood today could come up with a better story for a movie. From the moment the train pulls out of the station you get this great thrill of excitement as if you were on the train traveling across 1930s Europe yourself.

            Another great thrill is watching the amazing cast. This is like a movie dream team. The reason I bought this movie was for Ingrid Bergman around the time I started to become interested in classic film. This was actually my first Lauren Bacall movie I had never seen her in anything before although I knew who she was. Seeing a young Michael York aka “Basil Expedition” from Austin Powers was a bit strange at first but now I can only picture him as the Hungarian Count Andrenyi. Anthony Perkins plays McQueen who is oddly in a way a less psychotic more neurotic version of Norman Bates. Sean Connery was the biggest name at the time and the lure to get the other big names signed on for the movie. He plays Colonel Arbuthnot a former Colonel for the Scots Army. Vanessa Redgrave is the beautiful Miss. Debenham in love with Arbuthnot. And let’s not forget Albert Finney who brings great life to the main character Hercule Poirot.



            Everyone in the cast brought great life to their characters. I read the book after having watched the movie and the whole time I was thinking about the actors in their parts and all of them fit so well. Reading the book you can just imagine Albert Finney as Poirot with his slicked hair and funny voice. Ingrid Bergman and Lauren Bacall were hysterical in their roles they make this movie so enjoyable to me. Bergman plays the timid Swedish missionary Greta. She has some of the funniest lines in the movie, they’re not supposed to be funny but the way she says them with her real Swedish accent have me laughing before she even starts talking. Bergman won an Academy Award (and the only Award of several the movie was up for) for this part and she deserved it. Her facial expressions are almost like an instinct or real like she was not acting at all. Lauren Bacall is the obnoxious American Mrs. Hubbard who constantly talks and very loudly. Even in her fifties Bacall was still a beautiful lady (even now currently in her eighties) with a great bite. She was perfect for the role of Mrs. Hubbard. I find it rather a great coincidence that both Bergman and Bacall made their greatest films in Hollywood’s Golden Age with Humphrey Bogart.

            Murder on the Orient Express is a movie I can watch over and over again and never be tired of. It is one of the movies that was made and put together so wonderfully. Watching Murder on the Orient Express always makes me wish movies like this could be made today one that had some of the top best actors and actresses of today with a story that is as great as they are. The movie remains very faithful to the book and is the only film adaptation of her books which Agatha Christie was liked very much.

Psycho (1960)



“I think I must have one of those faces you can't help believing.”

Ever since I first watched Psycho I have always asked myself the question of why this film is so great. After seeing several Hitchcock films such as Rebecca, Notorious, Spellbound, To Catch a Thief, and several others I still could not understand the big deal with Psycho. Then I realized for the most part that like any classic movie to truly appreciate it you need to look at the time period it was made in… and do a little bit of research along the way.

            One of the big questions about Psycho is what makes this film so scary? We look today at what is considered “horror” often with half naked women running around as a crazed guy in a mask runs through the woods chasing them with a blade. Modern horror movies do not grip us psychologically. The bad guys are scary to look but that is about all they are not real and we know that. Psycho is what makes Alfred Hitchcock a genius he made a genuine horror movie that was realistic in its subject. What unnerves us as the viewers so much is knowing that men like Norman Bates exist in the real world and that what happens to Marion Crane could happen to anyone.

            Paranoia plays a major role in the film. All the main characters go through a state of paranoia. The point when Marion steals the money the characters and the audience are put into a constant state of paranoia. It is a great device and feeling that other “thrillers” severely lack. We get into Marion’s paranoia over the simplest things. As she drives away from Phoenix after she has seen her boss she starts to imagine what everyone must be saying about her. We see her squirming in her seat and fear in her eyes. Marion feels paranoid believing someone besides her coworkers know what she has done and this feeling intensifies when the cop knocks on her car window. Even Norman becomes paranoid when his sinks Marion’s car with her body in it and it stops a bit before it submerges completely. The killer starts to unravel with paranoia when Detective Arbogast and Lila Crane and Sam start coming around asking questions.  We are lead to feel for Marion we want her to get away. Even though Norman is a bad guy we take a deep breath in anxiety hoping the car will go down so he will not be caught. To me the best example of paranoia and fear is when Lila is walking through Norman's mother's room and she catches her reflection in the mirror really quick and scares herself. That was awesome it shows how on edge she was and also broke the tension somewhat. 

            No analysis of Psycho would be complete without talking of the most famous scene in cinematic history: the shower scene. If you can look at this scene deeply it is truly terrifying and genius. Hitchcock played on the fact that we are at our most vulnerable when we are naked alone in the shower. Marion’s privacy and vulnerability has been brutally invaded. This is what shocked and disturbed so many movie goers when the film premiered. Hitchcock also used the idea that what you do not see is scarier than what you do see. We never see the knife plunge into Marion the camera quickly cuts away before we see contact. At the end of the brutal commotion is a great transition from the water flowing down the drain to Marion’s open dead eye. Truffaut asked Hitchcock what attracted him to turn the novel Psycho is based off of into a movie to which the director replied “the suddenness of the murder in the shower, coming as it were, out of the blue. That was about all.”

            Another aspect that shocked audience members is the killing of Janet Leigh half way through the film. This was never done before no one was expecting to see her die. This was part of Hitchcock trying to direct the viewers away from what they were so used to doing when they went to movies. As viewers we try to think we are clever and know what will happen next, he was deliberately playing on the fact that he could control the audiences’ thoughts. It is always a shock when something happens that we do not see coming.

            Adding as much of the tension and shock is the incredible score by Bernard Herrmann. The music does not move us it is cold and sterile only played by strings. The music does not allow for any attachment emotionally to the characters which we are not truly meant to. Herrmann made the score a bit twisted; the strings are soft while being played on a high note. Hitchcock did not want a lot of music being played throughout the film, he did not even want music in the shower scene mostly because there is not instrumental music playing all around someone in real life. Once he heard the score for the scene Hitchcock changed his mind.

            Now I do appreciate Psycho more than I used to once I read about it and watched in a film class I took but I will have to disagree that this is Hitchcock’s greatest film. Yes it has left a very long and fantastic legacy on film making but I just do not see it as the director’s best. It is a very good story because it strikes a nerve it is something that could happen it could be real. I will say the film making is the best I have ever seen I will always be amazed by the cinematography and the direction. To me Psycho is just not as good as Hitchcock’s early American films.

            When Hitchcock was interviewed by François Truffaut about Psycho, the director said that he did not care about the subject matter or about the acting what he really cared about was getting to the audience through filmmaking and making them scream. He made this thriller for the audience. Even after its release fifty-one years ago audiences are still left amazed and terrified.