[Hey guys, hope you are all well. I haven’t posted here - or anywhere - in a while, but I put up this short review at my blog today and thought, well maybe you’d be interested.]

Sharp cinematography and elegant ‘Scope compositions, with some great overhead shots: I can allow these merits to Appointment with a Shadow (1957), directed by actor Richard Carlson. But overall, I didn’t much cotton to this tale of an alcoholic journalist’s redemption. The screenplay definitely needed some more revisions, since as it stands the plot is completely unbelievable even by the loose standards of these things. The movie would have been MUCH stronger if the journalist, and not his girlfriend, had set himself the challenge of getting through a day without a drink. George Nader is fine in the lead role, but his performance is undercut by our awareness that this Appointment offers nothing that hadn’t been done much better in The Lost Weekend. There was a decent film here potentially, with a pretty good twist at the mid-point, but the result is half-baked.