input: Back in the day of the big studio system, the darndest casting decisions were made. Good old all American James Stewart appearing as a Hungarian in The Shop Around the Corner. Had I been casting the film, the part of Kralik would have been perfect for Charles Boyer. His accent mixed in with all the other European accents would have been nothing. Stewart had some of the same problem in the Mortal Storm also with Margaret Sullavan.

Margaret Sullavan was his most frequent leading lady on the screen, he did four films with her. But is only this one where neither of them dies. Sullavan and her husband Leland Heyward knew Stewart back in the day when he was a struggling player in New York. In fact Sullavan's husband was Stewart's good friend Henry Fonda back then.

I think only Clark Gable was able to carry off being an American in a cast of non-Americans in Mutiny on the Bounty. Stewart in The Mortal Storm was German, but all the other players were American as well so nothing stood out.

But if you can accept Stewart, than you'll be seeing a fine film from Ernest Lubitsch. The plot is pretty simple, a man and woman working in a department store in Budapest don't get along in person. But it seems that they are carrying on a correspondence with some anonymous admirers which turn out to be each other. Also employer Frank Morgan suspects Stewart wrongly of kanoodling with his wife.

Though the leads are fine and Frank Morgan departs from his usual befuddled self, the two players who come off best are Felix Bressart and Joseph Schildkraut. Bressart has my favorite moments in the film when he takes off after Morgan starts asking people for opinions. He makes himself very scarce.

And Joseph Schildkraut, who is always good, is just great as the officious little worm who is constantly kissing up to Frank Morgan. You really hate people like that, I've known too many like Schildkraut in real life who are at office politics 24 hours a day. Sad that it pays off a good deal of the time.

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input: This is one of the great movies of the 80s in MY collection that I think about all the time.

The Running Man is one of Arnold's best and most different films even to this day and when I first saw The Running Man I was so excited to see a movie like this. I just adore all of the fights and this is truly a special movie. It also has Jesse Ventura, the legendary Professor Toru Tanaka, Sven-Ole Thorsen, the beautiful Maria Conchita Alonso, Yaphet Kotto, Kurt Fuller, Richard Dawson, and Thomas Rosales Jr. who seems to always like death in his movies because he has been killed in such films as Universal Solder, The Lost World, Robo Cop 2, Predator 2, and among others. All Arnold fans should love this film from the beginning to the end because its action packed, star filled, and its one its one of Arnold's best to date!

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input: Oh my, from the box description I thought it would be LA-crazy like 2 Days in the Valley or Hugo Pool. Ulrich Seidl must be a very strong man. Most, after directing this, would have driven off a cliff or at least committed a mass murder. I confess to only watching the first half hour (for now). Reading all the comments here, I have a lot to look forward to. Professional reviews often mention the Swedish film Songs from the Second Floor as a parallel but that's graced with humor and fantasy and this is unrelenting in its dour realism. What hath the Marshall Plan and the EU wrought? Seeing this in a theater with anyone I know would have only resulted in an enforced departure after many fewer minutes than I got through on DVD. There's a more annoying creature in the universe than Jar Jar Binks - the Hitchhiker from Hell. Whatever happens to her, it isn't enough! Soulless suburbia that I thought only existed in Arizona and Florida thrives in Lower Austria. Oh no! I thought sex clubs had ceased to exist even in New York and San Francisco, and here they are in suburban shopping malls? Was it Mahatma Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru who said when asked about Western Civilization, 'why that might be a nice idea'? If the world were truly like this film, bring on that black hole, we're ready.

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input: Written by the writer who penned the excellent Murder Rooms series which chronicled ACD's adventures with Doctor Joseph Bell, I was looking forward to this and I wasn't disappointed. It was quite slow moving, with a lot of emphasis on Doyle's frustration at Sherlock Holmes which was very accurate and excellently portrayed. It was an interesting character study and very well shot ( on digital video, unusual for a period piece ). The acting was excellent all round, particularly Tim McInnery and Brian Cox although the actor who portrayed ACD, whose name I cannot remember impressed me no end. An excellent character study which has about the same amount of twists as any normal Sherlock Holmes case. Do see this if you get the chance

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positive