Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

High Noon
(Fred Zinnemann, 1952)
Zinnemann's classic what-a-man's-gotta-do western, with Oscar-winner Gary Cooper as
Marshal Kane, who must face the men who hate him on the day he's due to wed Grace Kelly.
Tex Ritter's great song racks up the tension as the clock counts down in real time: the
townsfolk's refusal to help was seen as a liberal lament for lost integrity in the McCarthy age.
The Hired Hand
(Peter Fonda, 1971)
Peter Fonda (who also directed) and Warren Oates are drifters who, after the death of a
friend, find themselves wending back to the wife and child Fonda long ago abandoned. This
beautifully photographed road movie is a very 70s ode to freedom as another word for
"nothing left to lose".
Hiroshima Mon Amour
(Alain Resnais, 1959)
A multi-award-winning New Wave classic whose leitmotif ("You saw nothing in Hiroshima.
Nothing!") juxtaposes flashbacks of a French actress' experiences in occupied France with
those of her Japanese lover, who survived the atomic bomb. Resnais and scenarist Duras
weave chilling real-life footage of postwar Japan into a dreamy, enigmatic drama about love,
war and memory.
His Girl Friday
(Howard Hawks, 1940)
Talk about suspense! Just as he she is about to go up to Albany to marry Ralph Bellamy,
Rosalind Russell calls in at the newspaper to say fare-thee-well and kiss off to her exhusband
and the paper's editor, Cary Grant. It's like the umpire ordering "play", having first
torn the rule book to shreds. All Cary has to do is to get Ros to think again - about Ralph,
journalism, Albany and Cary. He's in luck: there's a death-cell watch in the city so every
newspaper is on its toes. What follows is one of the greatest three-set matches ever played,
as fast talk, faster manoeuvres and wicked gamesmanship hold sway. It all comes from The
Front Page, a hit play by Ben Hecht and Charlie MacArthur in which the editor and the
reporter were men and it was all about loyalty. (See the orthodox film versions: Lewis
Milestone made one before this, with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien, and Billy Wilder did
afterward, with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.) Suppose the reporter is a dame, said
director Howard Hawks. Suppose they were married once. Suppose we think they ought to
get back together again. Suppose ... suppose we wake up and realized that the only reason
Ros went into the office was because she was desperate not to go to Albany. All of the above
is His Girl Friday which you can accept as a comedy or a screwball noir about the disaster of
being married. It's one of those films where people enter into divorce just so they can have
the fun of wooing each other again. It's 66 years old and about a thousand times faster than
anything anyone dreams of today.
David Thomson
A History of Violence
(David Cronenberg, 2005)
A family man commits a heroic act, but his newfound fame beckons the ghosts of his past to
haunt him. Cronenberg's film examines how a single act of violence can infect an entire life,
and works equally well as a comedy, a western, an action-thriller, and an icky horror flick.
The Holy Mountain
(Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973)
Midnight-movie maverick turned graphic novelist, Alejandro Jodorowsky wowed young
cineastes in the 1970s with his hallucinogenic offerings, of which The Holy Mountain is his
baroque masterpiece. John Lennon and Yoko Ono provided the finance and, while it's glued
to their era, the director's mythic imagery mixes the prurient with the profound to transcend
hippy cliches.