Not unlike House of Strangers (1949), The Street with No Name is a fellow noir that’s perhaps been overshadowed by its bigger, and in this case, crazier colour CinemaScope remake, Sam Fuller’s House of Bamboo (1955), but Harry Kleiner’s story and William Keighley’s direction managed to form a near-perfect 1948 thriller that’s more true crime than noir…
After working his way up to A-level pictures at Fox and peaking with The Street with No Name (1948) and The Snake Pit (1948), Mark Stevens slowly slid into B pictures again, eventually settling into TV with the occasional feature film – Fate is the Hunter (1964) being a rare A-level venture…
Reviews of two films featuring very distinct perspectives of a brutal WWII battle: the German 2003 documentary series Stalingrad (Synapse Films), and the 1949 Soviet propaganda epic The Battle of Stalingrad / Stalingradskaya bitva (Icestorm).
The story of the Nazis’ attempt to claim and flatten the city of Stalingrad and make its deepest foray into Soviet Russia had been chronicled in several dramatic films – notably in 1949 and 1993 – but this 2003 German 165 minute documentary series marked the first time survivors of the battle, which claimed 200,000 Germans and more than 500,000 Russian soldiers and civilians…
The Battle of Stalingrad was the first cinematic attempt to dramatize the pivotal 1942-1943 battle in which Adolph Hitler’s 6th Army and the 4th Panzer Army were surrounded (‘kesseled’) by Joseph Stalin’s Red Army, and what Adolph Hitler had naively and foolishly felt would be a winnable…
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