"Ernest Hemingway’s superb eight-page short story is the jumping-off point and inspiration for these two essential and very different movies (Stacy Keach reads the story magnificently in one of the DVD extras). I don’t understand why more people don’t know the 1946 Siodmak film. For my money, this is not only the best noir movie of all time but is just about my favorite Hollywood drama from the 1940s. The complex narrative structure begins as a jumbled Rubik’s Cube, and, slowly but surely, each piece falls into its precise place by movie’s end (the stuff Quentin Tarantino’s dreams are made of). The moody atmosphere provided by Siodmak and his technicians is a marvel. The cinematic execution of a heist has never been better. Here marks the birth of two glorious stars: Burt Lancaster (a beautiful caged animal, all teeth) and Ava Gardner (wow). Paul Schrader’s seminal essay on film noir, as a DVD extra, is invaluable. For those of you who wonder why Siegel’s 1964 violent, stylish, quirkily entertaining B version (the first TV movie ever made) is on this list, I have two words for you: Lee Marvin. There has never been a star like him before or since. Words simply cannot do justice to the magic of this guy—the timbre of his voice, the calm, paranoid, roughneck danger in his physical moves. In a spectacular extra on this DVD, fellow actor Clu Gulager gives a very moving (and, one feels while watching it, very truthful) account of working with Marvin, Siegel, and Ronald Reagan (who hated the movie—yet another reason to see it!)."

"It was was directed Max Ophuls and it stars Robert Ryan as a character who was intended to be based on Howard Hughes. Max Ophuls had been hired by Hughes’ production company, RKO, early to make the film that was actually supposed to be Faith Domergue’s big starring vehicle, and that movie just turned into a disaster. The production of it dragged along over five or six years with many different directors. After Ophuls got fired from it, he got hired to make an adaptation by another company of a novel called Wild Calendar. He told the screenwriter that he was paired with that he didn’t want to actually adapt the novel; he wanted to use the structure of the novel to make a film about how terrible he thought Howard Hughes was. They basically culled the notes of everything that they’d ever heard about Howard Hughes and Ophuls’ personal experiences, and the screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, went out and he met women who had had encounters with Hughes and then put it all together in this film which is about a shop girl who gets involved with a mysterious millionaire. The mysterious millionaire’s played by Robert Ryan, who was an actor who made a lot of different kinds of movies, and to a lot of film noir fans and B-Movie, genre film fans, he’s considered a great star, but he really looks like Howard Hughes in a lot of ways. They’re both very tall and lanky and have kind of a similar jaw. Even though Hughes knew this movie was being made – he insisted that he be sent dailies – he asked for some changes so that people wouldn’t think it’s him. The character and the performance are a lot like him. Nowadays, especially given everything we know about Howard Hughes, the similarities are impossible to ignore."