Rehearsal For Murder stars Robert Preston two years after his career revival in Victor/Victoria as a playwright searching for his fiancee's killer; she is played by Lynn Redgrave at her prettiest, with dark red hair and perfect skin, in a series of flashbacks. Mystery was written by Levinson & Link, who did all of those great Columbo episodes, and is up to par to the point that the final reveal surprised me and the fact that this flick is PD even moreso.
Dreck like How Awful About Allan I can understand lapsing. This embarrassing waste of Joan Hackett's and Julie Harris' respective talents as unrequited lover and sister respectively of the title character plods along with virtually zero chills, even though it's based on a book by Henry Whatever Happened to Baby-Jane? Farrell. Starring a near-catatonic Anthony Perkins in the lead as a man suffering from hysterical blindness, I frankly wanted to push him down a flight of stairs so Miss Julie could go get a life. Trivia note: the wacky redhead screaming at Perkins in the first reel was Farrell's real-life wife, actress Molly Dodd.
Another "classic" I didn't care for is The Man With The Golden Arm, a relentlessly dreary tale of a junkie horn-player (Frank Sinatra), his dealer (Darren McGavin), and his ladylove, Kim Novak, whose youth and beauty is the flick's sole saving grace. Of all the outrageous (for the time) Preminger pictures available, why did this stinker wind up PD? Oh, wait---
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