Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Robert Joyner The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Yazmin Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Robert J. Maxwell Interesting exercise in style. Ray Milland is a physicist and a communist spy who passes secret information to his contacts. The FBI sniffs him out and the Party provides him with a new identity and passport to Cairo for his getaway. After accidentally causing the death of an FBI agent who has been following him, he makes it to the ship but then tears up his fake passport and turns himself in.Milland is in just about every shot and the whole exercise depends on him. He pretty much pulls it off. We very rarely get to read any written messages, but his expressions tells us much of what we need to know. He's tortured with guilt throughout. He sweats profusely, not from the heat but from the cupidity. And there are closeups of his face, so that the slightest change in his facial muscles registers on the Richter scale. The extreme closeups are sometimes odd -- a telephone receiver pressed against an ear -- but they tend to break up the sometimes irritating visual flow of figures coming and going without ever speaking. The director also breaks up the stream of traditional shot with some overhead angles.One of those figures doesn't have to speak. Rita Gam, as his provocative neighbor, slinking around in her loosely tied dressing gown, is astonishing sexy and extraordinarily attractive in an Arabic kind of way, an houri out of scripture, looking a little like a plump-lipped Cher. I don't know why Milland, before tearing up his fake identity, didn't move in with Rita Gam for a while. After all, the guy is in for a long stretch in the slams and maybe the hot seat. Might as well have one last fling. Looks like it would have been sufficiently memorable to last him a lifetime.But the film raises a question. Why make a film with no dialog? That is, what's the purpose behind imposing such a stricture on the production? Vladimir Nabokov once speculated on how successful a novel would be that avoided the use of the letter "e". It probably wouldn't be successful because the experiment would be pointless.Self-imposed limitations sometimes work. Hitchcock used only a lifeboat in the movie of the same name, but it generated a palpable sense of isolation and despair. But his experiments with long takes were pointless in "Rope" and "Under Capricorn." So-called concrete poetry strikes me as equally absurd -- poetry written in the shape of a rhomboid or a parallelogram. I have doubts about haiku in English as well, a form devised for use in a foreign language whose "syllables" don't correspond to English.In any case, the silence here is a little distracting, to be honest, but the story -- simple as it is -- is engaging enough to keep a viewer from being bored. And it took guts to make the movie.

JohnWelles "The Thief" (1952) is directed by Russell Rouse, who co-wrote the classic "D.O.A" (1950), and stars Ray Milland. Its main point of interest, and to be brutally honest, the only reason this film is remembered and watched is that this film noir contains not one line of dialogue. It has many sound effects and background noises but no one actually speaks. Before viewing, I did worry that this might become annoying and an overextended gimmick. However, it never does and it is handled extremely well.The plot is quite sophisticated for a film that relies on no dialogue. Written by Clarence Greene and Rouse, it has a nuclear physicist (Milland) working in Washington D.C. who spies for an unnamed foreign country. However, the pressure is great and he is unsure where is true allegiances are.Milland is very good in a role that is all about body language and facial expression. The real highlight though, is the superlative cinematography by the great Sam Leavitt, who also shot, amongst others, "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959), "The Crimson Kimono" (1959) and "Major Dundee" (1965). Full of pools of darkness and high contrast location shooting, this is a beauty to behold and reason enough to watch it.The direction, acting and photography all combine to make this one Film Noir not to miss.

Martin Teller One of the fun things about noir is few of its defining characteristics are prerequisites. There are perfectly good noirs without a femme fatale, or without chiaroscuro lighting, or outside of an urban setting. And not all noirs have the trademark snappy dialogue... the crisp lines, distinctive lingo, backbiting remarks. So why not a noir with NO dialogue? Not a word is uttered in this look at a nuclear physicist selling secrets to an unknown enemy. We see him (Ray Millard, in a bravura performance) smuggling out photos, we see the convoluted machinations of the spy ring, the procedures of the authorities trying to catch him, and we see him wrestle with fear, doubt, conscience. When dealing with a gimmick film, several questions come up. Is the gimmick pulled off well? For the most part, yes. There is one "cheat" where we see a teletype of police communication, but other than that it stays true to the conceit without seeming forced. There isn't a moment where you think "This scene really needs some dialogue." Is the gimmick distracting? Yes and no. I was always aware of it in the back of the mind, but it wasn't annoying me or anything. Would the film be better without the gimmick? I don't think so. Again, there wasn't a scene where I felt dialogue was essential. We're spared the gung-ho narration of a docudrama like House on 92nd Street, and there's a refreshing ambiguity in that we have no idea (nor do we really care) who this enemy is, or how Milland got involved with them. These unanswered questions are rare in noir, or in any movie of the period. And putting aside the lack of dialogue, it's a nice, tight thriller with a mighty fine chase scene, psychological tension, great location work, and a very good score (which becomes especially important in this case).

sol Tense dark drama made in 1952 at the height of the Cold War about the shadowy world of espionage without a word of dialog makes "The Thief" a one-of-a-kind film.Dr. Allan Fields, Ray Milland, has been spying for the Soviets by passing top secret documents from his position as a scientist at the Atomic Energy Commission, the AEC, to them. One afternoon in New York City one of Field's contacts is struck by a car and killed while he had in his possession a tin canister of microfilmed documents that Fields had given him. When the FBI finds out that the documents came from the AEC in Washington D.C they start to check out all those that are employed there and Fields seeing that the noose was closing in on him becomes a man on the run. Good acting and great photography of Washington D.C and New York City with a dramatic and heart thumping action chase scene on top of the Empire State Building and the 86th floor observation deck that rivals the final moments of the movie "King Kong". The film also has something that was lacking in most spy movies at that time; a believable ending that wasn't overly contrived. Ray Milland showed in "The Thief" that he was as good a silent actor as a speaking one.