The Rise and Fall of Clementi Sabourni

Imagine Citizen Kane (1941) on a miniscule budget with a much more ruthless and totally despicable protagonist and you have Death of a Scoundrel (1956), a contemporary take on The Rake’s Progress. Like the former film, it was shot on the RKO backlot and unfolds in a flashback structure, starting with Bridget Kelly (Yvonne De Carlo), personal assistant to self-made tycoon Clementi Sabourni (George Sanders), revealing to the police the circumstances that led to the millionaire’s murder. “He was the most hated man on earth,” she declares, “But he could have been one of the great men in history. He was a genius.”

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Cinerama Disaster

In the disaster film genre, Krakatoa, East of Java (1969) holds the distinction of being the only one presented in the Cinerama widescreen format but is also the most erroneously titled movie of all time. As many historians and movie critics have pointed out, Krakatoa is west of Java but veracity is not one of Hollywood’s strengths in producing historical epics. And Krakatoa, East of Java is not a factual recreation of the famous 1883 volcanic eruption in the Indian Ocean but a lavish B-movie adventure that uses the cataclysmic event only as the background and climactic resolution to its cavalcade of international stars and multiple subplots that play out as pure soap opera.  Continue reading