Foreign Intrigue (1956) Directed by Sheldon Reynolds
This is a fairly unknown Robert Mitchum movie and for a good reason.
It's a very unremarkable genre attempt, that instead should had been
made 10 years earlier.
It's very weird to see how old fashioned this movie is being with its style and storytelling approach. It's incredibly dry and stretched out all, making this movie feel very outdated for its time. It's basically feeling more consistent with the thriller genre movie from the '40's, that always took its time to setup things slowly and leave room for a distracting and needless love story, in which characters fall in love in no time, without really knowing anything about each other.
Guess that on some levels this movie still goes for a more noir type of approach but I can't really say it works out too well, since the movie its story basically isn't interesting and solid enough.
It's most likely also due to the movie its pace that the movie doesn't feel like the most engaging and interesting one. You won't believe how stretched out some of the scenes in this movie are and lots of stuff could and should had been shortened, or left out entirely.
You could blame director Sheldon Reynolds for all of this. His background in television might be the cause of the movie being a stretched out and slower moving one. He was also involved with the television series that aired prior to this movie and ended one year before this movie got released. But as far as I can tell, it's not following the same story, or even following the same characters, so it's hard to see how the two of them are connected, besides featuring both the same title and having Sheldon Reynolds involved.
It's also a very obviously cheap production. It's the sort of movie that rather uses painted backgrounds instead of filming at location. It's really a movie that got shot mostly inside of a studio, though they obviously still had the money and resources to shoot at several European locations as well for a couple of shots, causing this movie to feel somewhat inconsistent with its visual style as well. The interior and exterior shots don't always match too well and they don't blend in very naturally.
But at the same time, it's far from the worst genre movie you could watch. It's never becoming a truly bad movie, it's just that it's never being the most interesting or best made one.
Robert Mitchum is good in it but good enough to carry the entire movie on his own? Well, partly but there is only so much one man could do for a movie of course. Still, his presence remains reason enough to still consider it a watchable enough little flick, that won't leave a lasting impression on you however.
6/10
It's very weird to see how old fashioned this movie is being with its style and storytelling approach. It's incredibly dry and stretched out all, making this movie feel very outdated for its time. It's basically feeling more consistent with the thriller genre movie from the '40's, that always took its time to setup things slowly and leave room for a distracting and needless love story, in which characters fall in love in no time, without really knowing anything about each other.
Guess that on some levels this movie still goes for a more noir type of approach but I can't really say it works out too well, since the movie its story basically isn't interesting and solid enough.
It's most likely also due to the movie its pace that the movie doesn't feel like the most engaging and interesting one. You won't believe how stretched out some of the scenes in this movie are and lots of stuff could and should had been shortened, or left out entirely.
You could blame director Sheldon Reynolds for all of this. His background in television might be the cause of the movie being a stretched out and slower moving one. He was also involved with the television series that aired prior to this movie and ended one year before this movie got released. But as far as I can tell, it's not following the same story, or even following the same characters, so it's hard to see how the two of them are connected, besides featuring both the same title and having Sheldon Reynolds involved.
It's also a very obviously cheap production. It's the sort of movie that rather uses painted backgrounds instead of filming at location. It's really a movie that got shot mostly inside of a studio, though they obviously still had the money and resources to shoot at several European locations as well for a couple of shots, causing this movie to feel somewhat inconsistent with its visual style as well. The interior and exterior shots don't always match too well and they don't blend in very naturally.
But at the same time, it's far from the worst genre movie you could watch. It's never becoming a truly bad movie, it's just that it's never being the most interesting or best made one.
Robert Mitchum is good in it but good enough to carry the entire movie on his own? Well, partly but there is only so much one man could do for a movie of course. Still, his presence remains reason enough to still consider it a watchable enough little flick, that won't leave a lasting impression on you however.
6/10
Watch trailer
