Compulsion (1959)

Surely Ttuman Capote, often touted as the pioneer of the true crime novel, was in fact influenced either by journalist Meyer Levin's 1955 novel, Compulsion - a fiction based on the infamous Leopold-Loeb murder case - or by this movie adaptation of it which turns the disturbing subject matter (the 1924 murder in Chicago of a schoolkid at the hands of two Nietzsche-spouting teens) into an utterly compelling thriller, one that keeps so close to fact it really isn't a fiction at all - consider for example the fact that Orson Welles adopts prosthetics to look like real-life lawyer Clarence Darrow.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Bat (1959)

Apart from the screamtrack, the only other things screaming in this charmless horror thriller, which strips the original Broadway play of its comedy, are the cheaply and unimaginatively dressed sets, the dreary dialogue, the plodding plot and the sleepwalking actors, all of them screaming, 'No-one cares," about the story of a The Avengers tv-style masked serial killer The Bat who pays visits to Agnes Moorhead's crime writer's southern mansion, momentarily upsetting the women inside before they seemingly forget and get back on with their leaden conversations.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

House on Haunted Hill (1959)

Horror fans, turn off the lights and delight in all the macabre things - disembodied heads, antisocial party favours, ghosts, ghouls, acid baths, skeletons and magic ropes - that turn up in the House on Haunted Hill, the murder-site-for-party-hire where Vincent Price's Frederick Loren invites five guests to stay - no, challenges them to survive! - over the course of one grisly night and one ludicrous plot!

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Scapegoat (1959)

Daphne du Maurier can carry off an unlikely plot like that of The Scapegoat (a man finds himself thrust into the family life of his doppelgänger) but this 1959 movie can't, especially with Alec Guinness playing so wet a lead character that the film's entirety is infected with his dreariness; rather than a suspense thriller that ratchets up tension, this plodding movie is a cartoony melodrama sans the complexities of du Maurier's plot, full of holes and unanswered questions.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

North By Northwest (1959)

This Hitchcock masterpiece has Cary Grant as debonair ad man Roger Thornhill embroiled in a case of mistaken identity and an international intrigue that sees him framed for murder, famously chased by a crop-duster, dangled from Mount Rushmore, and head-over-heels in love with an icy Eva Marie Saint.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS