Guy Sorel Movies

Upon completing Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, a tearful Liza Minnelli declared publicly that she would never, ever work with tyrannical director Otto Preminger again. Worse luck for her: Junie Moon contains what may well be Minnelli's best non-musical performance. Based on the novel by Marjorie Kellogg, the film surprisingly manages to evoke humor and pathos from some of the least promising material in movie history. Minnelli plays an emotionally imbalanced young girl whose face is horribly disfigured by her psycho boy friend Ben Piazza. Ken Howard is cast as an epileptic who has wrongly been diagnosed as mentally retarded. And Robert Moore (future director of such films as The Cheap Detective and Murder by Death) portrays a homosexual, confined to a wheelchair after a hunting accident. After meeting one another in a hospital, these three social outcasts decide to move in together, forming a united front against a cold, judgmental world. The devastating events that follow might have lapsed into the grotesque and exploitational, but director Preminger is extremely careful to depict his protagonists as three-dimensional human beings rather than "freaks." Unfortunately, some filmgoers, assuming that any film with a title like Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon just had to be a campy laff riot, were turned off by the repellant aspects of the early scenes and refused to give the rest of this fascinating film a chance. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

One of the most ambitious productions ever undertaken during the era of "live" television, this adaptation of Walter Lord's best-seller A Night to Remember successfully conveys the full scope and horror of the sinking of the superliner Titanic on April 14, 1912. Utilizing seven cameras, 31 different sets and over 100 actors, director George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting), meticulously recreates the last three hours of the Titanic from the moment it struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic to its final descent beneath the waves, carrying some 1500 souls to a watery grave. Like Lord's book, John Whedon's adaptation emphasizes the element of fate in the tragedy, noting the hundred-and-one ways in which the disaster could have been averted, and also offers brief, poignant character vignettes, illustrating individual moments of courage and cowardice. Although there is plenty of dialogue, the dominant voice in the proceedings is narrator Claude Rains, who dispassionately dispenses the chronology of the disaster, minute by minute, as the viewer watches them unfold. Featured in the enormous cast is a pre-Avengers Patrick Macnee as Thomas Andrews, benighted designer of the Titanic. This version of A Night to Remember was originally telecast as an episode of the NBC anthology Kraft Television Theater; it was subsequently restaged for British viewers by the BBC, and was ultimately adapted as a theatrical feature in 1958 (long, long before either Kate Winslet or Leonardo DiCaprio were even born). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

A remake of the French Le Corbeau ("The Raven"), The Thirteenth Letter is a film noir in a curious setting -- a rural village deep in Quebec, seemingly sleepy and typical. Dr. Laurent (Charles Boyer) returns from a medical convention in Montreal, anxious to see his much younger wife, Cora (Constance Smith). Cora is attracted to Dr. Pearson (Michael Rennie), a young doctor who moved into the town soon after his unfaithful wife killed herself. Soon Pearson, Laurent and Cora all receive letters -- signed "the Raven" -- hinting at an affair between Pearson and Cora. Soon more poison pen letters are showing up around town, including one which insinuates that Pearson has not been telling the truth about the medical condition of a wounded war hero. Distraught, the veteran takes his life, unaware that the information in the letter was a lie. Meanwhile, Pearson has become attracted to Denise, (Linda Darnell), a romance-starved young woman born with a clubfoot. As suspicion builds about who is sending the letters -- and about whether Pearson should be trusted -- the Mayor takes charge of the investigation, and Pearson doubles his efforts to prove his innocence. ~ Craig Butler, Rovi