Lisbon (Republic) boasts one of the year's most sadistic openings: Super-Criminal Claude Rains begins his morning by scattering crumbs on his windowsill, then brains one of the feeding songbirds with a tennis racket and hands it to his cat for breakfast. Besides birds and cats, Claude's posh villa is equipped with an English butler, an Iberian cutthroat (Francis Lederer), a bevy of nubile females who soothe his cares with piano solos and poetry readings. He also employs Smuggler Ray Milland, "who is a criminal too, but a nice one, since he is in the racket only for excitement, and disapproves of...
Cinema: The New Pictures, Aug. 27, 1956
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