Megan Abbott

"I first discovered this movie, and director Samuel Fuller, more than fifteen years ago via A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. I’ve never been the same since! The first four minutes take your breath away, and it only gets better and stranger, almost hallucinatory, after that. Did anyone understand the grand beauty and horror in pulp like Samuel Fuller?"

"Film noir at its most delicious and perverse. It’s iconic for Rita Hayworth’s striptease, but that’s its least dirty part, a tease for everything else that is sneaking in under the Production Code’s radar."

"I adore Robert Altman, and in some ways this feels like the least-Altman Altman, but it’s like no other movie I’ve ever seen. Putatively the story of two women who became roommates in a resort town, it’s about so much more: female identity and the slipperiness of the self. I first saw it, cut up by commercials, when I was ten or eleven, and I felt like it was whispering secrets about the nature of womanhood into my ear and I’d better listen close. I still think that."

"Exquisite John Ford, breaking all our hearts. This is the western I recommend to people who don’t think they like westerns. The scene when Victor Mature as the tubercular Doc Holliday recites Hamlet’s famous soliloquy shouldn’t work, but it absolutely dazzles."