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Reviews
Face to Face (1952)
A very cool film, but why are these movies stuck together?
Face to Face is quite good, but it is, essentially, two different movies based on two different books, stuck back-to-back for no apparent reason. Personally, I think the two stories share a sneaky anti-Christian undercurrent, but other than that they don't share a lot of similarities. The first story is based on a book by Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness), which is about a first-time navel officer who, while on watch, finds a murderous refugee from another ship swimming in the ocean. It had a thoughtful and steady pace, and was fairly serious in its storytelling, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. The second story is based on a Stephen Crane book about the gunslinging Marshall of a small western town who gets married in San Antonio. It's a more light-hearted story which is surprisingly funny at times, especially when the town drunk puts on his 6-shooters and decides to stumble around town raising heck. I don't know why these two 40-odd minute movies were stuck together in order to make a feature length film, but it seemed to work pretty well because it told two complete short stories in under 90 minutes. A neat and enjoyable film. Whee!