The Modest Charm of Cinematic Intemperance Cinema wasn't born yesterday. Remakes were also indulged in classics, Hitchcock ("The Man Who Knew Too Much"), Leo McKerry ("An Unforgettable Novel"), and their remakes of themselves are appreciated by critics much higher than the originals. It's okay. That “Vicky”, noir from the fifties of the last century, also a remake, I realized towards the end of the session, when vaguely began to recall previously seen, shot at the dawn of the “golden age” of Hollywood black film, “Nightmare” (1941). “I have seen this film four times. Killer butler! shouts the 1953 version in Frankie's cinema hall. The unnamed director of Vicki makes me laugh. Why would he remake a detective movie after 12 years when everyone who saw him already knows who the killer is? That's how, laughing, stuffing each other with sharp elbows, cozying up in the adjacent chairs, we did not notice how we fell in love. This is not a laughing matter.
In 1941, the film was made for Betty Grable. Frank Christopher, a 1941 version, lectures her that he would never put his girlfriend on public display, and in the next scene drags Betty into the pool to show everyone what perfect legs she has! The detective line is run worse than the winter garden, dries somewhere in the side, and on the screen blossom around la murs and plump cheeks a la Jennifer Lawrence.
That’s what the director of Vicki did. Do not re-shoot “Nightmare”, and shoot it again, so that the viewer forgets that he has already seen this film. Instead of Betty Grable, there's a brilliant Jean Peters in his arsenal. In the right place. In the role of rising, but already shining, stars posters, advertisements, magazines. The director is not stingy. To fill the screen with its photogenic beauty, it captures entire shelves, walls of houses, it seems that this new star has peeked into every window of multimillion-dollar New York. The humble charm of cinematic intemperance. It feels as if Joseph Lewis and William Castle are behind the doors of the set, dissatisfied with cinematography.
A little bit about the plot. A crippled, slightly nervous police inspector, Ed Cornell, gives up a week of vacation in a backwater motel when he learns that Vicky Lynn, a famous model, has been murdered. He personally takes on the case and identifies four suspects, Vicki's sister, her impresario, a famous journalist and a visiting theater or movie star. During the investigation, the inspector shows an unhealthy interest in catching the criminal, comes to assault (in the 1941 version, for example, it is not Betty Grable who is beaten, but she herself, as if we are not in the police station, but at a children's matinee "Who has curls golden and sponges plump ..."), and tries to smear Vicky's manager, Frankie Christopher, by all illegal means.
Yes, as I said above, the 1953 version of Nightmare is tougher, more brutal, more energetic, noirier and more detective. In 1941, for the creators of Nightmare, the film was a commercial toy. Radiant Grable and Matthewr are not a bit overshadowed by the murder, there are no shadows in the film, and the lunatic brought under the curtain does not work, except as a mockery of Hollywood over those who worship “his” beauty, equating “his” products with the category of deities. The creators of "Viki" did not laugh. Painfully honing frame by frame, they conveyed to the viewer their truth, the “truth” of a psychopath, mystically shaded by the sounds of theremin, the “truth” Vicky, who abandoned everyone for career advancement and the "truth" of life when Vicky's poster is taped with a new face. Putting them on top of each other like playing cards, the entire crew of Vicki confirms that only love wins in this world. Even the love of cinema.
10 out of 10