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Product Description: System Requirements:Running Time: 95 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA/CLASSICS Rating: NR UPC: 024543446613 Manufacturer No: 2244661 Amazon.com: Ginger Rogers steals the show as a selfish, snide Broadway superstar in Nunnally Johnson's Black Widow, preening, snooping, gossiping, and bestowing air kisses in equal abundance. This late-era (1954) color film noir is as delicious for its fabulous performances as for its dishy look at showbiz, fangs and all. Think of it as All About Eve with murder. Rogers is Carlotta Marin, a grande dame of the thea-tah, married, it would seem happily, to Brian Mullen (Reginald Gardiner). Discussing friends whose marriage is threatened by an alleged affair, Brian assures Lottie they wouldn't face such disgrace. "After all," he deadpans, "we have an understanding." "What kind of understanding?" Lottie asks warily. "The understanding that if you catch me with another woman, you'll break my neck." The two collapse in laughter. Yet at the heart of Black Widow is something grim, the death of a young, ambitious writer named Nancy (Peggy Ann Garner), who gloms onto a theater producer (Van Hefflin), who's in love with his wife, Iris (Gene Tierney, heartbreakingly lovely). Nancy's death appears to be self-inflicted, and yet as each piece of evidence--a weird suicide note, a threatening letter received in the mail--piles up, things begin to point to murder. The cast is excellent, especially delivering the great backbiting dialogue. And the plot contains more twists than Lombard Street in San Francisco, and will keep viewers guessing, and riveted, to the end. Extras include a great commentary by Alan K. Rode, an expert in film noir, as well as two wonderful featurettes, on the careers of Ginger Rogers and Gene Tierney respectively. Robert Osbourne offers his always insightful thoughts on the roles of Rogers, especially, as she sought to carve out a career after being paired with Fred Astaire. These solo steps are not to be missed.--A.T. Hurley Customer Reviews: Rating: 
Date: 2008-07-02
Costume/Drawing Room Drama in Cinemascope!
For fans of the movie-created world of 50's New York Society, this one's a real treat. However if you are looking for a taught, hard-edged noir thriller, this ain't it! Tune in for the costumes, the hilarious over-the-top acting, and the stagey apartment sets all done in glorious color and Cinemascope as only Fox could do in the 50's. Apparently someone at Fox thought this little potboiler deserved the same cinematographic treatment as "Ben Hur"! Gene Tierney is lovely, Ginger Rogers is delightfully catty, and most of the rest of the cast is window dressing. Unfortunately, the mystery unravels a little too early to hold interest till the final frame. Rating: 
Date: 2008-06-26
IN THE BEST WHO-DUNNIT TRADITION
Younger viewers would be unfamiliar with the type of story telling which needs a little concentration and attention to plot development. Black Widow leads us into a situation few of us would want to experience. Being involved more and more deeply in something out of our control, finally being suspected of murder. I saw this movie when it was released over 50 years ago and it still holds interest for me today. Rating:
Date: 2008-06-23
daisy kenyon
I thought this was a very good movie of Joan Crawford's. Would recommend it if you like the actress. Rating:
Date: 2008-06-20
Great Cast Wasted in a Mediocre Movie
The cast was so great - Ginger Rogers, Gene Tierney, Van Heflin, etc - that I really wanted to like this movie. Even the premise seemed interesting - All About Eve goes film noir. It starts out fine and then slows down. Heflin is a producer & husband of star Gene Tierney. While she's out of town, he meets a wanna be young writer and befriends her, then finds himself caught in a trap when the girl turns up dead in his apartment.
Unfortunately, the movie just plods along and at times seems like a badly directed stage play (why is there no background music in this thing? Anything would have helped) that the actors are stuck in as they stand around and say their lines at each other. What a waste of a good cast. Good idea badly done. Worth a look, but not worth buying, unless you're a fan of the stars. Rating:
Date: 2008-05-26
More puce than noir
The year after the success of HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE Nunnally Johnson did another Cinemascope feature for Twentieth-Century Fox that this time featured two fabulous Manhattan swank and spacious apartments instead of just the one. Although BLACK WIDOW (the ill-fitting title is never explained) has been released for DVD as part of the Fox Noir series, there's almost nothing noir about it (except for one sequence, probably the best in the film, when the murder victim's hanged body is discovered); it's more of a melodramatic whodunit populated with many of Fox's slightly over-the-hill stars from the era, like Ginger Rogers, Gene Tierney, George Raft, and Van Heflin. The story (which like the direction is by Johnson) is extremely awkwardly constructed, and involves a very young writer (Peggy Ann Garner, giving the best performance in the film) whom Heflin takes into his life because of her apparent sweetness and naivete: only after she dies does he begin to see her story was much more complex than he had figured.
This is more of an ensemble piece than a star vehicle but Ginger Rogers, as a gossipy and catty theater diva, still dominates. She gives the part her all and is quite excellent in her final scenes, but she is almost singularly miscast in a part that was originally intended for Tallulah Bankhead. There's not much competition from the other performers: Gene Tierney is almost completely wasted, Raft gives an annoying one-note performance, and Reginald Gardiner is even more hilariously miscast than Rogers. He's supposed to be her "kept" husband--a kind of boytoy--, even though he's over fifty, fancies ugly ascots and has about zero muscle tone in his entire body. The film's real star might be said to be not even Rogers but rather its elaborate color scheme of blues, lavenders, roses, and (especially) puce. |
