Composer · 1897–1980

Adolph Deutsch

4: briefs
13:00: average
52 min: in total

On film.briefs4

High Sierra

Raoul Walsh · 1941

High Sierra (1941), directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino, follows ageing gangster Roy Earle as he leads a jewel heist in California’s Sierra Nevada, then flees into the mountains. Adapted by John Huston and W. R. Burnett from Burnett’s novel, it uses location shooting, restrained performances, and unshowy craft to trace a quiet, physical descent — not toward redemption, but toward an ending already written in Roy’s body and the landscape.

13:00

Some Like It Hot

Billy Wilder · 1959

Some Like It Hot is a 1959 Prohibition-era romantic comedy about two musicians who dress as women to escape gangsters, join an all-female band, and fall for its lead singer. Directed by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, it uses disguise as both plot device and thematic lens, sustaining laughter through precise timing, physical performance and escalating absurdity. Shot in black and white after colour tests failed, it balances crime, romance and farce without resolving their tensions — and remains effective not as nostalgia, but as engineered comedy.

13:00

The Band Wagon

Vincente Minnelli · 1953

Tony Hunter, a fading musical star, joins a Broadway show written by friends — only for its director to recast it as a pretentious Faust adaptation. Clashing with ballerina Gabrielle Gerard, he walks out, then returns to reshape the show as light entertainment. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, with songs by Schwartz and Dietz and choreography by Michael Kidd, the film treats musical theatre as a living, negotiable form — not a vehicle for stardom, but a site of collective recalibration.

13:00

The Maltese Falcon

John Huston · 1941

John Huston’s 1941 debut adapts Dashiell Hammett’s novel with surgical fidelity: low-key lighting, unadorned dialogue, and performances that treat deception as craft. Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade operates by self-imposed rules, not ethics, and the pursuit of a jewel-encrusted falcon reveals not desire but the architecture of betrayal. Made for $300,000 on the Warner Bros. lot, it endures not as myth but as method — a blueprint for how to build tension without spectacle, and meaning without explanation.