Lizzani’s Wake up and Kill. Quite a bummer
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The Greatest Show on Earth (De Mille / 1952) 2/10
Possibly the worst film ever to win Best Picture at the Oscars. In fact it also won De Mille the statue for Best Director and also scooped Best Story and Editing plus some others.
Awful from start to finish.
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Haven’t seen that one but I doubt it can be worse than Everything, Everywhere All at Once.
Don’t remember much of that one, but De Mille was a gifted enough director that it is hard to imagine for me that it could be worse than the mega boring Ben Hur, but wait, that one had a once gifted director too …
What makes it so bad is it is so dominated by celebrating the circus as an institution that it is more a mockumentary than an actual film. The story is trite and seems like an add on to allow for clown sequences and high wire acts. The characters are cardboard and the dialogue is awful. As a consequence it is just really baggy and uninteresting.
So worse than Everything, Everywhere All at once and Ben Hur? I would say definitely yes.
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I love High Noon. I definitely agree it was an influence on Leone as well.
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I’ve had the blu of this for years but never got round to watching it. I’ve always been interested in it because of how early on it came out. I’ll temper my expectations though 
The film itself is well made, and benefits from a nice Morricone soundtrack, but the lead character is such a pathetic wimp, it’s difficult to muster any empathy … especially towards the end of the film - Plus, I’ve never seen a lead actor in a bio-flick that looked less like the person he’s playing.
Worth checking out, but not as good as it could have been.
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Watched a handful of Hollywood films from 1952 over the weekend.
Horizons West (Boetticher / 6/10)
Walk East on Beacon (Werker / 3/10)
A Girl in Every Port (Erskine / 4/10)
We’re Not Married (Goulding / 5/10)
Pat & Mike (Cukor / 7/10)
Horizons West is a decent Budd Boetticher western but doesn’t reach the level of some of his others which follow a few years later. Walk East on Beacon is less a movie and more a propaganda exercise for the FBI. There are commies everywhere folks and the bureau is relying on you to turn them in! A Girl in Every Port is Groucho comedy without his brothers and We’re Not Married is nice enough comedy weaving 5 different stories into one. An early role for the blossoming Marilyn Monroe being the chief draw but the Ginger Rogers episode is probably the best. The best of the bunch by a mile was Pat & Mike and it is one of Tracey and Hepburn’s best films together I think. Best bit for folk on here though would be the scene where Katherine Hepburn beats up a hapless hoodlum played by Charles Buchinsky or Chuck Bronson to you and me. I think it might have been Bronson’s first credited role and he plays the comedy surprising well.
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You’re on a real Hauerpocalypse, a tour de Rutger
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Yes. I have pretty much every thing he was ever in apart from 4 films that for one reason or another have not been released in any format. I expect they’ll turn up at some time in the future. 
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Frankenheimer’s DEAD BANG. Okay, not great.
One of those movies I re-watch intermittently, hoping it will get better… It never does! 
Currently watching Criterion’s 4K of ‘Performance’ for the second time in as many days. Nice to finally have a decent version with the correct soundtrack.
Riz Ortolani has the score credit on The McKenzie Break but there really isn’t all that much music in it.