Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Matrixiole Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

bkoganbing Edward G. Robinson turns in a pair of great performances as both an actor theatrical impresario and as a character he plays out in real life as a possible investor in his new show which stars his sister Mary Astor. Thus Robinson becomes The Man With Two Faces.Things seem to be going well when Louis Calhern shows up. He was actually thought dead and had very few who mourned him. Calhern is a thorough going cad, in a few years his would have been a part that George Sanders would have relished. But he has a strange Svengali like influence over Astor and for her sake he's barely tolerated.Robinson has had a scheme long in the making about Calhern. The problem is that Calhern is in need of money. That's where Robinson as the investor comes in.Don't want to give too much away. The film is based on a George S. Kaufman-Alexander Woollcott play The Dark Tower. I thought it a strange product for Kaufman. None of the satirical wit is present or at least in this film version, it might have been drained antiseptic by the newly placed Code.However Robinson is outstanding and his fans should The Man With Two Faces.

charlytully Does THE MAN WITH TWO FACES really feature shoelaces? It might was well, as nearly everything but the kitchen sink is tossed into the mix by writer Tom Reed, in an apparently desperate effort to see what will stick. It's never really made clear exactly WHY svengali Stanley Vance (played by Louis Calhern) left his cash cow wife Jessica Wells (Mary Astor), over whom he exerts a never-explained hypnotic control. Further, it's not really clear how and why he faked his own death on the west coast. Furthermore, the white mice or rats he brings to the house of Jessica's Aunt Martha on his return to Manhattan are poorly explained. Are they the agents of his power over Jessica? Did he possess pet rodents when the pair got married? Are the little white creatures a breeding couple? (And why, by the way, does Jessica have to live with her Aunt Martha? If she and her brother Damon--Edward G. Robinson--are such hotshots on Broadway, couldn't they afford their own digs? And why does Damon spell the family surname "Welles," though Jessica's is listed in the movie credits as "Wells"? Does some sort of mental defect doom this family, in similar fashion to Edgar Allan Poe's ill-fated house of Madeleine and Roderick Usher?) Finally, a case broken by a mustache in a Gideon Bible? Like most of the plot points in this film with any resolution, this one is telegraphed from a mile away. I better stop reviewing this movie, before I have to downgrade my rating from "7" to a "5" or "6."

theowinthrop THE MAN WITH TWO FACES is one of the Edward G. Robinson films that rarely reappears on television, like SILVER DOLLAR and THE HATCHET MAN. I only saw it on television once in the last decade. It is about a famous actor who dislikes the swine who has married his sister (Louis Calhern, who is the husband of Mary Astor in this film). He creates a "perfect" crime scheme, kills Calhern in the apartment of a fictitious producer he has impersonated, and leaves Calhern there for the police to puzzle over. A blunder regarding the disguise (his false mustache is left in a bible) unravels the crime. But the film ends with Robinson (about to be arrested by Ricardo Cortez) believing he might be able to win acquittal at his own trial. Last minute bravura or growing insanity/instability...we are left guessing. The basis for this plot of the disguised murderer is as old as the hills, but the most likely source was the 1882 Pelzer Case in Belgium. Two brothers, Armand and Leon Pelzer, planned to murder a lawyer named Guillaume Bernays. Bernays was married to a woman Armand wanted to murder. They hoped that Armand, when comforting the widow, would be able to marry her. To commit the crime, Armand gave Leon money to go around Europe marketing a plausable business scheme for a new shipping line. Leon was carefully disguised with false hair and mustache. Leon was a linguist (apparently a good one) and pretended he was a man named Harry Vaughan from England. Thus a realistic straw man was created, even to the extent of "Vaughan" renting property in Paris, Brussels, and other cities. Bernays was approached by "Vaughan" to come to his rented rooms in an isolated building for a business meeting. Bernays went to the meeting, but was killed. Shortly afterwards the police were tipped off by a letter from "Vaughan" that there had been an accident at the meeting and Bernays was shot and killed. But when the police came they found evidence that the body had been tampered with. For nearly four months police throughout Europe and America were looking for the Englishman Harry Vaughan, when suspicion of Armand and his brother developed. Leon's movements were traced, and he was found to not be able to account for his movements when "Vaughan" seemed to have legitimately existed. Eventually both brothers were tried and convicted of murder, receiving life sentences (Belgium had abolished the death penalty). THE MAN WITH TWO FACES follows a general pattern based on the Pelzer Case, but consolidates it, and changes the motivation and relationship of the perpetrator and the victim. Whether or not a full film study of the actual Pelzer Case would be a better film I cannot guess. Nobody seems to have thought of doing one.

whpratt1 This 1934 film had a cast of movie legends along with Edward G. Robinson (Damon Welles) who also starred in "The Red House" and hundreds of other films. Mary Astor (Jessica Welles),who starred in "The Maltese Falcon" '41 with Humphrey Bogart. Even Mae Clarke (Daphne Martin) who was on "General Hospital '63 TV Series as Marge. Louis Calhern(Stanley Vance) played a nasty con-artist in this picture and was dispised by everyone, even Damon Welles. Louis Calhern starred in "Asphalt Jungle" 1950 along with Marilyn Monroe and had a long career in the 1920's to late 1960's. In 1934, this was considered a great drama or mystery, unfortunately, the plot was very poor, but the Actors made this a True Film Classic.