Film Intros

The Insider

Directed by Michael Mann, a dab hand at action set pieces in crime thrillers and war films, The Insider (1999) provides two and a half hours of gripping screen drama without, as far as I remember, a gun being fired or a punch being thrown. In this dramatisation of a real-life conspiracy in the tobacco industry Russell Crowe is a revelation as the mild scientist Jeffrey Wigan, the insider trapped between a rock and a hard place, personified by Michael Gambon as the ruthless company CEO and Al Pacino the relentless producer of investigative documentaries Lowell Bergman, both in vintage form, along with Christopher Plummer as CBS veteran Mike Wallace. The chill of the boardroom, the heat of the newsroom, the clash of the courtroom, as well as Wigan’s threatened family life are authentically portrayed in what one of the 90% positive audience reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes describes as “an absorbing, passionate, entertaining … utterly immaculate movie”. I couldn’t agree more.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0140352

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/insider

The Petrified Forest

The lonely Arizona roadside stop, where tired and dusty travellers refuel themselves and their motors before the next unforgiving stretch of desert highway, takes its stark name from the surrounding arid region, strewn with fossils of fallen trees. Robert E. Sherwood also makes it the title of his play, in which young Gabrielle Maple mopes around the family diner and gas station, dreaming of romantic escape. Her boredom is banished with the arrival of an itinerant philosopher poet who seems to be a kindred spirit, followed by the less welcome intrusion of a desperate gangster. With the perfect casting of Bette Davis, Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart in these three leading roles, getting fully stuck into their juicy dialogue under the direction of Archie Mayo, there was never a dull moment for this viewer during the eighty-two minutes of The Petrified Forest (1936).

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028096

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_petrified_forest