cigarjoe
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Posts posted by cigarjoe
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Blackthorn (2012) Directed by Mateo Gil, beautifully shot, by cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía. This is, hands down, one of the best Westerns, albeit actually a "Southern American" Western, of this century. It has what Tarrantino Westerns lack and that is breathtaking landscapes, it fits perfectly in the same time period as The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, The Good The Bad The Weird, and the "Northern" Death Hunt. The plot is plausible enough. About an 8/10
This is the second feature connected to director/screenwriter Mateo Gil that was impressive. The first was as screenwriter for Agora (2009)
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Blackthorn (2012) Directed by Mateo Gil, beautifully shot, by cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía. This is, hands down, one of the best Westerns, albeit actually a "Southern American" Western, of this century. It has what Tarrantino Westerns lack and that is breathtaking landscapes, it fits perfectly in the same time period as The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, The Good The Bad The Weird, and the "Northern" Death Hunt. The plot is plausible enough. About an 8/10
This is the second feature connected to director/screenwriter Mateo Gil that was impressive. The first was as screenwriter for Agora (2009)
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6 hours ago, EricJ said:
Not vaudeville, but burlesque--There's a difference.
Vaudeville might be a duo routine, like their playing "Who's On First?" to a vaudie audience in Naughty Nineties. But the kind of burlesque played at Minsky's was a more improvised "comic jazz", where there were a certain number of set comic sketches, that proceeded to be destroyed by walk-ons, ad-libs and whatever random gags struck the comics' fancies to pad it out--The style generally took the form of the two characters (A as the city-slicker sharpie and C as the lovable motormouthed/obnoxious child-like nebbish who gets all the good one-liners off the sharpie) trying to do some simple task on the street corner, while bit players, like Barber, barge in, do one crazy gag, and run off again, leaving the comic to react.
Burlesque was dying by the forties after LaGuardia outlawed the theaters, which were moving to movies anyway, so A&C deliberately looked for excuses to preserve their Minsky's classics by writing them into their movies--If you know the two styles, that's the appeal of A&C movies. THE classic burlesque routine every banana had to know was the "Nuthouse" sketch that Costello does in Ride 'Em Cowboy, but you can get a clearer taste of classic walk-on-traffic burley-Q when A&C used In Society to enshrine the Susquehanna Hat Company routine for posterity:
The original script was studio-written, and reportedly had an ending where A&C defeat Dracula and the monsters with a mad-scientist's shrink ray. Lou makes money showing the monsters in a flea circus, but the only antidote to the ray is pickle juice, and Lou was keeping the monsters in his lunchbox...
Lou reportedly took one look at the script and said "My kid could write a better one!", and A&C took over the writing, since they were thinking of doing a stage show with the Monsters already. (The bit where Frankenstein is scared by his first look at Lou was a frequent stage gag.)
Thanks for the correction, and the clip. Reminds me of the Niagara Falls routine.
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8 hours ago, TomJH said:
I loved Bud and Lou when I was a kid, and it seems to me that Keep 'Em Flying came on TV more often than most. I guess I recall it for Martha Raye as twin sisters, one brash, the other reserved, more than anything else.
In retrospect, having seen all their films again within the past decade or so they now leave me fairly cold. With two exceptions: A & C Meet Frankenstein is still a marvel, and deserves to be ranked as a classic. Their other good one is less well remembered but still a charmer: The Time of their Lives, with Lou and Marjorie Reynolds as a pair of ghosts from the Revolutionary War haunting a 1946 house, which has Bud as a modern descendant of a louse who had abused Lou 150 years before. This film has one of Costello's most affecting performances, as it successfully mixes sentiment with its slapstick.
I loved them too, A & C Meet Frankenstein, and The Time of their Lives I agree with you on, I'll add Hold That Ghost, A & C Meet the Mummy (with Marie Windsor BTW) to my list.
But my fondest memories of the team though are from their 1952 to 1954, half-hour TV series, The Abbott and Costello Show. It really gave you a feel for more of their vaudeville backgrounds, with all their various routines, and the routines of their vaudeville background costars, Sidney Fields (Mr. Fields, and his various relatives), Joe Besser (Stinky Davis), Joe Kirk (Mr. Bacciagalupe).
TV in the 1950s ealy 60s was filled with Abbott & Costello.
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10 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
I checked this out via the Netflix dvd service a loooong time ago.... the dvd is nice because it had quite a few bonus features (maybe a featurette about the movie too?)
I WAKE UP SCREAMING has a lot of fans here, but I remember disliking it, although I was MOST INTRIGUED by the repeated use of SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW, I Remember thinking the overall tone was a bit glib.
Definitely what I would try to give it another go though, I read the Steve Fisher novel and liked it
Remember the next time you watch it that it was released just after The Maltese Falcon on Halloween, October, 31st, 1941. Its one of those films that don't fit the paradigm touted over and over that it was the German Expressionist directors combined with the hardboiled stories of the thirties that gave us "Film Noir" as we know it. A lot of the "look" was as also influenced by the sensational tabloid photo journalist images think WeeGee, and by the very real econmic necessities imposed by the electrical blackout regulations imposed by WWII. Most of the lighting went towards the big budget "A" pictures.
"The biggest problem of some critics and chroniclers of Noir with the film I Wake Up Screaming is that they don't know how to categorize it. It doesn't fit the carefully crafted "German Expressionism" influence scenario that they have worked out as the origin of Noir. It's Director H. Bruce Humberstone, never made another Noir, it's brilliant cinematographer, Edward Cronjager, never filmed another Noir so conceptually and visually it's a one off, one of a kind.
I'm calling it a seminal "Gateway Noir" because the film serves the same purpose as a gateway drug, it functions as a sort of gateway to Noir for those unfamiliar, at that point in time, with what eventually came to be known stylistically, and hard boiled narratively, as Films Noir.
Look at the film in chronological context, only Stranger On The Third Floor (1940) approaches it in Noir visual stylistics, while The Maltese Falcon (1941) released only twenty eight days ahead of it on October 3, has the hard boiled story by Dashiell Hammett, but barely any of the signature visual stylistics. I Wake up Screaming not only was based on the hard boiled novel by Steve Fisher and also has the brilliant Noir stylistics in abundance but it has much much more. You can say that the film has dissociative identity, multiple genres if you will. It's also a bit of a Screwball Comedy, a Romantic Drama, and almost a Musical. This seamless genre bending provides the "gateway" for Comedy, Romance, and Musical audiences at that time into the films that eventually will be pigeonholed into the future Noir cycle."
(source Noirsville)
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Noirsville - I Want To live (1958) The Visual Noir Imprint
Barbara Graham (June 26, 1923 – June 3, 1955) was a California criminal convicted of murder. She was executed in the gas chamber on the same day as two of her convicted accomplices, Jack Santo and Emmett Perkins, all of whom were involved in the robbery and murder of an elderly widow. Sensationally nicknamed "Bloody Babs" by the press, Graham was the third woman in California to be executed by gas.
The story of Graham's life was sympathetically dramatized in the 1958 film I Want to Live!, in which she was portrayed by Susan Hayward, who by the way, won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Graham.
The film also belongs to a small sub genre of Film Noirs that could be termed the Bio Noirs. It also fits into those late 1950s early 1960s Noirs that I like to tag the "Beat Noir"s and "Tailfin Noirs."
The film was Directed by Robert Wise (Born to Kill (1947), The Set-Up (1949), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) and the cinematographer was Lionel Lindon (The Blue Dahlia (1946), Alias Nick Beal (1949), and Quicksand (1950).
Judge it's noir-ish-ness for yourself from the opening sequence screencaps.
Notice the whole Jazz Club sequence is shot with Dutch Angles 
Jazz Club 
Jazz Musicians 
JAZZ! 
Beatniks! 
Boozers! 
Hookers! 
Smokin' reefers! 
Taking a hit 
A Hooker and her John More caps at Noirsville
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I Want To live (1958)
The story of Barbra Graham's life was sympathetically dramatized in the film in which she was portrayed by Susan Hayward, who by the way, won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Graham.The film also belongs to a small sub genre of Film Noirs that could be termed the Bio Noirs. It also fits into those late 1950s early 1960s Noirs that I like to tag the "Beat Noir"s or "Tailfin Noirs."
It has a great opening Jazz Club sequence, check it out in Film Noir/Gangster threads. 7/10
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The Naked City (1948) New York Policier Noir Masterpiece
Hollywood gave us it's slick, artistic ersatz New York cleverly weaving skimpily lit, dark back lot sets, and matte painted backdrops with second unit footage and often has downtown L.A. subbing in for many US cities.
This film is the real deal, shot on the sidewalks, the streets, The neighborhoods the els, the bridges. They used real New Yorkers, capturing them with two way mirrors and hidden cameras, as extras, playing what else, real New Yorkers. It's a film loaded with New York City archetypes some frozen in time others now long gone, and it's brimming with three second vignettes that illustrate scenes from hardboiled stories never filmed. There, is the milkman and his horse Mamie, from Cornell Woolrich's "Mamie 'n' Me," or the rickety rattling el going through the Coneties Slip "S" curve recalling his "Death in The Air." Other shots are reminiscent of the 87th Precinct police procedural writings of Ed McBain and still others the hard boiled violence of Mikey Spillane's Mike Hammer.
The film, for New Yorkers of a certain age, me for instance, shows a snapshot of the New York that existed just before I was born. Growing up in the city, quite a few of the sequences jog distant early childhood memories, imprints, that's the way it was, others verify the stories my mother and her sisters would tell. Curiously certain things survived beyond the film others didn't. For instance, the Third Ave. el and some swaths of Lower East Side neighborhoods it served, that show in the chase climax of the film, were completely wiped off the face of the earth in 1950 to be replaced by urban renewal projects like the high rise Governor Alfred E. Smith Houses.
Another Academy Award went to Paul Weatherwax for film editing. The music was by Miklós Rózsa and Frank Skinner.
The film stars Barry Fitzgerald (Union Station (1950)) as Detective Lt. Dan Muldoon, Howard Duff (Brute Force (1947), Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949), Private Hell 36 (1954), and ensemble Noir While the City Sleeps (1956)) as Frank Niles, Noir second tomato Dorothy Hart (Larceny(1948), Undertow (1949)) as Ruth Morrison, Don Taylor as Detective Jimmy Halloran, Frank Conroy as Captain Donahue, Ted de Corsia (no less than six other classic noir as Willie Garzah, House Jameson as Dr. Lawrence Stoneman, Anne Sargent as Mrs. Halloran, Adelaide Klein as Mrs. Paula Batory, Grover Burgess as Mr. Batory, Tom Pedi as Detective Perelli, Enid Markey as Mrs. Edgar Hylton, Walter Burke as Pete Backalis, Virginia Mullen as Martha Swenson, along with many uncredited parts with actors of note among them Paul Ford, James Gregory, John Marley, David Opatoshu, Kathleen Freeman and Arthur O'Connell.
As the cops get closer and closer to capturing the murder Grazah, the cinematography stylistically gives the impression that it is not only the investigators, but the city itself, it's grids and diagonals, the physical parts of its various superstructures, like nets of steel, brick, and concrete, are begining to slowly enclose around him.
Watched the Criterion DVD, 9/10. Fuller review with some screencaps here in Film Noir/Gangster pages, and with full review and more screencaps in Noirsville
PS - The only comparable film that I've seen that does a snapshot in time for L.A. similar to the way The Naked City does for New York is the Experimental Noir The Savage Eye (1960)
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The Naked City (1948) New York Policier Noir Masterpiece
"There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."
One of the first and great police procedural films.
Directed by Jules Dassin who gave us (Brute Force(1947), and a number of films that highlighted various iconic cityscape's, San Francisco/Oakland, California in Thieves' Highway (1949), 1950 London in Night and the City, '55 Paris in Rififi, and greater New York City in this. The film was based on a story by Malvin Wald and the screenplay is credited to Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald. Wald claimed he found the story in the actual New York police files, and just changed a few details to fit the narrative.
An Academy Award, went to cinematography for William H. Daniels, and it well should have, though in reality comparatively for a Noir, it's not for the most part a "visually" dark film. What it does have is a heavy dose of gritty reality. A reality inspired and starkly documented by the crime scene photography of the original "nightcrawler" Arthur "WeeGee" Fellig, a freelance press photographer who during the 1930s and 1940s, developed his signature style by using a police band radio to monitor the city's emergency calls.
Hollywood gave us it's slick, artistic ersatz New York cleverly weaving skimpily lit, dark back lot sets, and matte painted backdrops with second unit footage and often has downtown L.A. subbing in for many US cities.
This film is the real deal, shot on the sidewalks, the streets, The neighborhoods the els, the bridges. They used real New Yorkers, capturing them with two way mirrors and hidden cameras, as extras, playing what else, real New Yorkers. It's a film loaded with New York City archetypes some frozen in time others now long gone, and it's brimming with three second vignettes that illustrate scenes from hardboiled stories never filmed. There, is the milkman and his horse Mamie, from Cornell Woolrich's "Mamie 'n' Me," or the rickety rattling el going through the Coneties Slip "S" curve recalling his "Death in The Air." Other shots are reminiscent of the 87th Precinct police procedural writings of Ed McBain and still others the hard boiled violence of Mikey Spillane's Mike Hammer.
Milkman 
3rd Ave el, Coneties Slip "S" Curve The film, for New Yorkers of a certain age, me for instance, shows a snapshot of the New York that existed just before I was born. Growing up in the city, quite a few of the sequences jog distant early childhood memories, imprints, that's the way it was, others verify the stories my mother and her sisters would tell. Curiously certain things survived beyond the film others didn't. For instance, the Third Ave. el and some swaths of Lower East Side neighborhoods it served, that show in the chase climax of the film, were completely wiped off the face of the earth in 1950 to be replaced by urban renewal projects like the high rise Governor Alfred E. Smith Houses.
A few makes of the GMC city buses shown in the film still ran on into the early 1960s, but the "sky view" taxi cabs no. There is a shot of string of BMT Standards coming up the grade from the 60th Street tunnel under the East River into Queensboro Plaza Station. I either used to ride that very same train home. Or it was the view, as in the film, I witnessed personally many times on my way from Manhattan back to Queens standing on the South platform waiting, if I had rode instead the IRT and had to make a transfer. It's quite a unique shot for it also shows, what would be the last NYC trolley, traveling across the Queensboro Bridge and the last vestiges of the 2nd Avenue el tracks (the elevated was completely demolished in Manhattan in September of 1942.
BMT Standards rolling into Queensboro Plaza
I remember getting milk delivered by a milkman, albeit by my time he had already switched to driving a truck. The only horses I remember are the ones still around, the Central Park Carriage's and the NYPD mounted police. There was also a guy that drove around the neighborhoods who sharpened scissors, knives, tools.
Another Academy Award went to Paul Weatherwax for film editing. The music was by Miklós Rózsa and Frank Skinner.
The film stars Barry Fitzgerald (Union Station (1950)) as Detective Lt. Dan Muldoon, Howard Duff (Brute Force (1947), Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949), Private Hell 36 (1954), and ensemble Noir While the City Sleeps (1956)) as Frank Niles, Noir second tomato Dorothy Hart (Larceny(1948), Undertow (1949)) as Ruth Morrison, Don Taylor as Detective Jimmy Halloran, Frank Conroy as Captain Donahue, Ted de Corsia (no less than six other classic noir as Willie Garzah, House Jameson as Dr. Lawrence Stoneman, Anne Sargent as Mrs. Halloran, Adelaide Klein as Mrs. Paula Batory, Grover Burgess as Mr. Batory, Tom Pedi as Detective Perelli, Enid Markey as Mrs. Edgar Hylton, Walter Burke as Pete Backalis, Virginia Mullen as Martha Swenson, along with many uncredited parts with actors of note among them Paul Ford, James Gregory, John Marley, David Opatoshu, Kathleen Freeman and Arthur O'Connell.
Jules Buck and Mark Hellinger were the producers, with Hellinger also providing the narration. Hellinger interestingly was also one of the first "Broadway columnists" along with Damon Runyon and Walter Winchell.
"Hellinger, like the other great Broadway columnist and raconteur 'Damon Runyon', was a purveyor of stories of New York's demimonde, filled with wise-guy jargon. His stories were different from Runyon's, which relied on mythic archetypes, as they featured realistic depictions of actual people. Many of Hellinger's characters were composites of people he met on the Broadway beat."
(source IMDb)
The story
Two goons, one of them, Willie Garzah (de Corsia), the other Pete Backalis (Walter Burke) in the first noir sequence in the film, attack and chloroform a woman, Jean Dexter, in her shadowy apartment. To make sure she's dead they dump her in a bathtub full of water. Later, on an East River pier, Garzah's now drunk partner is remorsefully babbling, dangerously out loud, about how he never killed anyone before. This stew bum is now a definite liability. Garzah grabs up a two by four and crushes his skull. He then picks up his body and tosses it in the river.
Willie Garza: Thought you were off the liquor. Liquor is bad. Weakens your character. How can a man like me trust a liar like you? I can't.
A cleaning lady finds Jean's body and emergency services are called. The medical examiner tells the beat cops he suspects foul play so a 22 year veteran Homicide Detective Lt. Dan Muldoon (Fitzgerald) and his protégé, Det. Jimmy Halloran (Taylor), are assigned to Jean's case.
Piece by piece the two put their case together, their clues come from a bottle of sleeping pills, an address book, and a few names they get from the cleaning lady, one of them Jean's friend Mr. Henderson. He left his pj's at her apartment, you know what that means, wink, wink, scandalous for 1948. The other name she divulges is her other friend Frank Niles.
The policemen question Ruth Morrison, Jean's fellow dress model and best friend, and Dr. Stoneman her doctor. They get no leads on Henderson. When they get around to grilling Frank Niles, Jean's former business associate, they find out, after checking out his story, that he's a pathological liar. He wasn't a captain in WWII in fact he wasn't even in the service. He turns out to be a schemer who has half a dozen rackets cooking along on the back burner to keep him afloat. It turns out he's also engaged to Ruth, who didn't really know the fullest sleazy extents of his relationship to Jean. Muldoon assigns two detectives to follow him.
From the coroners examination, i.e the bruises on Jean's neck, they deduce that it must have been two men who killed her. Frank's alibi checks out so he's ruled out as one of the killers. However Frank continues to act suspiciously. He sells a gold cigarette case at a pawn shop, and then buys a one-way airline ticket to Mexico with some of the doe. The police trace the the case to a list of stolen items from Dr. Stoneman, they also check a ring fond on Jean's body that also turns up on another stolen property list of items stolen from a Mrs Hylton.
When the police bring the stolen ring back to Mrs. Hylton, they discover, when her daughter walks in the door, that she is Ruth Morrison's mother. Muldoon and Halloran next ask to see Ruth's engagement ring and discover that it is also on a stolen property list.
The detectives, with Ruth in tow, head next to Frank's apartment to confront him about the stolen property. They get there just in time to save him from Garzah who has just chloroformed Frank to clean up his loose ends. Garzah heads out the fire escape and Halloran gives chase, but Grazah gets away on a 3rd Avenue el.
<spoilers for those that have never seen this>
Back at the apartment, Frank comes to, and after questioning, tells the police that he got the cigarette case and the engagement ring from Jean. He's immediately arrested. On the hot seat at police headquarters, a jeweler from Boston fingers Frank as the man who sold him stolen jewelry. The man produces a letter of introduction for Frank that was signed by Dr. Stoneman. Franks story was that he had to sell the jewels to raise money for an operation for his sister.
Muldoon now tells Frank he's going to the pen for jewel theft, for how long is up to him. Muldoon wants to know who Mr. Henderson is. Frank cracks and tells the whole story. Henderson was an alias for Dr. Stoneman. Stoneman was basically **** stupid. Jean used Stoneman. Stoneman's wife was a notorious party giver, from her guest lists Jean would finger wealthy attendees for burglary. Tipped off, Grazah and Backalis would do the jobs during the parties Garzah, however, wanted a bigger cut of the swag and confronted Jean who told him basically to go to hell. That got her dead.
Meanwhile Halloran working another angle also gets Garzah's identity. From a lead from Garzah's brother he gets some old publicity photos and a manhunt and chase through the Lower East Side of Noirsville is on.
Noirsville
3rd Avenue el 
As the cops get closer and closer to capturing Grazah the cinematography stylistically gives the impression that it is not only the investigators, but the city itself, it's grids and diagonals, the physical parts of its various superstructures, like nets of steel, brick, and concrete, are begining to slowly enclose around him.
Screencaps from the Criterion DVD, 9/10. Full review with more screencaps here Noirsville
PS - The only comparable film that I've seen that does a snapshot in time for L.A. similar to the way The Naked City does for New York is the Experimental Noir The Savage Eye (1960) -
When I first got Netflix I was hoping it would be like the Library of Alexandria of film, with all the extant avaiable titles on DVD to choose from. I originally got the disc service then went to both. I still have that, but now with streaming I'm not limited to Netflix's shrinking classics list. I can stream whatever I can find, Movies, old TV shows, to the 55 inch screen. I use Youtube (free), and Kanopy (available through your local library, usually limited to 10 titles per month), Dailymotion has films, also Archive. Org. Always search the films English title first, then try it's various foreign titles, A lot of times they will be in English with foreign subtitles, but hey if thats the only way to watch it for free, I not going to complain.
But if it's a film I want to own I buy the disc, you never know when the streaming content will dissappear. But streaming is a good way to judge if the film is to your tastes and worth buying. Always check to make sure the disc is Region free and has English as a language option. The only caveat to Region free discs is that their menue usually pops up in the language of the country of origin. You just have to navigate to English.
But I also have a Region Free Bluray/DVD player, that plays discs from all over the world whatever region, and it like Roku or chromecast it also streams content.
Just go to Amazon.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de, Amazon.au, Amazon.it and search for out of print titles, I go to a films IMDb page and see it's foreign titles and put them in the search. Again always check the info for languages to make sure English is an option or English subtitles.
There is also a big market out there for DVDr's of out of print stuff, you'd be surprised of what you can find or have made.
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2 hours ago, jamesjazzguitar said:
You haven't seen the film Tess? If that is the case (i.e. you didn't make a type-o) how do you know that the film was very good?
It was the first time I ever watched it, I have never read the book or seen the film until I watched it the other day.
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1 hour ago, LawrenceA said:
Texas Rangers Ride Again (1940) - B-western from Paramount Pictures and director James Hogan. Texas Rangers Jim Kingston (John Howard) and Mace Townsley (Broderick Crawford) go undercover as outlaws in order to stop a cattle rustling gang led by Carter Dangerfield (John Miljan) and Joe Yuma (Anthony Quinn). The rustlers have been targeting ornery old ranch owner Cecilia (May Robson), and her recently returned granddaughter Ellen (Ellen Drew) falls for Jim. Also featuring Charley Grapewin, Akim Tamiroff, William Duncan, Harvey Stephens, Eddie Foy Jr., Eddie Acuff, Charles Lane, Tom Tyler, and Robert Ryan.
This is a sequel in name only to 1936's Texas Rangers. The scenario is old-hat, and the lack of mystery (the culprits are revealed at the beginning) drains any suspense. However, the cast makes up for a lot of the script's shortcomings. Howard and Drew have a few "meet-cute" scenes, Robson has a ball chewing up the scenery, Tamiroff lays on his Mexican peasant characterization extra thick, and I liked seeing Robert Ryan (with a pencil mustache) in a very early bit part. (6/10)
At one point May Robson says, "Well, I'll be a ring-tailed Gila monster!"
Howard and Crawford, while spying on the bad guys' rustling operation, have this exchange:
Howard: "This kind of set-up took a lot of planning."
Crawford: "That Joe Yuma is a smart guy."
Howard: "No Indian is that smart."
Source: Universal DVD.
The Texas Rangers (1936) Fred MacMurray, Jake Oakie, and Lloyd Nolan. That was a 7/10.
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6 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
I'm envious, NETFLIX BY MAIL is THE WAY TO GO FOR THE TRUE CINEASTE, I didn't know they still had the service.
(I used to have the mail service, but now i only have the streaming option, which i very rarely use)
The world is at your fingertips with Netflix via mail- if it's on DVD in any form you can get it sent to you, but it can be too much power at the same time...(it's how I saw CALIGULA and some SICK 70's FILMS
i let my Netflix via mail service expire in part because it was TOO MUCH POWER TO HANDLE.
you poor thing...
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7 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
I've stayed away from watching TESS all these years because I LOVED THE BOOK SO FREAKING MUCH...
(has there ever been a book you LOVED SO FREAKING MUCH you just didn't want to see the movie even if it was supposed to be great?... or is it just me?)
Never read the book or seen the film. The film was very good.
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7 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
Ruth Gordon with her ROSEMARY'S BABY Oscar:
nowadays, a stylist would've flattened those flyaways, but the look is still tres chic.
what's a flyaway?
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Add Crossfire
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It just worked OK for me.
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The Savage Eye (1960) is another one of a kind along with Seconds (1966).
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Mulholland Drive was one of a kind.
I like Lynch's Lost Highway a bit more
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5 hours ago, CaveGirl said:
Now I'm not saying that this kind of film always turns out to be one you want to see again, or even like...as you are first watching it. But it does lend some variety to one's life to watch often mostly unheralded or sine qua non flicks.
One I had heard about years ago and always wanted to see was Dusan Makavejev's "W.R.: The Mysteries of the Organism". Now admittedly any film which is banned or about someone whose books get burned, does usually intrique me. This film from 1971 being about controversial psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich and his Orgone Accumulator Boxes and theories about the dichotomy between sexual rebellion and revolution, might have appealed to Patty Hearst and it's said that the banned Orgone machines were used by people as diverse as Sean Connery, Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger and others, but I can't prove that.
Was Reich a nut or a valuable therapist? His work in Vienna at the Ambulatorium of Freud, and his connections to Einstein make him a figure of history hard to ignore. His ideas put forth in his many books on psychology noted the relationship he believed existed between Fascism and sex, and gun obsessions and reliance on authoritarian governments as a father figure.
The film, due to many basically unprintable sequences, was banned for over a decade in Yugoslavia but it had been highly praised at the Cannes festivals. Reich himself, found himself receiving an injunction from the United States FDA in 1947, for the selling of the Orgone machines and later in 1956 was found in contempt and sentenced to prison, with all his books and publications being burned. Considered to be one of the most highly contested cases ever of censorship in the US, even the ACLU came to his defense to no avail. This could be why finding any books written by Reich is so difficult. Madman or genius, doctor or debatable abuser of patients, his story on film still is rivetting. So that's my choice for oddball film of the day. What's your oddball film du jour you might like to share if you are one of those fans who occasionally likes to take a walk on the wild side?If you remember him commedian Orson Bean who was on quite a few quiz and talk shows, most notably on To Tell the Truth (1956), was a big believer in Organisim he used to talk about it on the talk shows he appeared on, Johnny Carson, Merve Griffin etc., etc.
I've read Reich's "The Mass Psychology of Fascism", and an interesting book "A Book Of Dreams" by his son Peter Reich who tells the story of Orgone Energy, the Orgone Accumulator Boxes and the Cloud Busters from his childhood perspective. Interesting stuff.
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I filtered the list out by Release Date going from '71 back to '57. I've seen these:
The Pick-Up (1968) is an exploitation film noir about two bag men bringing casino skim from Vegas to the L.A. mob who get snookered by a couple of prostitutes. It was though lost until the only copy found left was Sweedish subtitled one. It's avaiable from Something Weird Video.
Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965) Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse, Jan Murray, and Elaine Stritch. Weird but interesting Film Noir, only available on a Region 2 DVD.
The Glass Cage (1964) An experimental Noir starring Arlene Martel, John Hoyt, Elisha Cook Jr., Bob Kelljan and King Moody. Available on DVD from Sinister Cinema.
The Yellow Canary (1963) Horrible print on Youtube starring Pat Boone, Barbara Eden, Steve Forrest, Jack Klugman, couldn't make out enough to really rate it.
Girl of the Night (1960) Interesting Noir starring Anne Francis and Lloyd Nolan
The Savage Eye (1960) an experimental Noir starring Barbara Baxley, Gary Merrill, Herschel Bernardi, Jean Hidey. A very cool snapshot in time of 1960 Los Angeles
The 3rd Voice (1960) Another nice little Mexican set Noir starring Edmond O'Brien, Julie London, Laraine Day. O'Brien is impersonating a millionaire.
Hot Spell (1958) cornpone mellodrama with Shirley Booth, Anthony Quinn, Shirley MacLaine, Earl Holliman it's on Youtube.
Fort Dobbs (1958) an OK Western.
Slaughter on 10th Avenue (1957) Ok Film Noir starring Richard Egan, Jan Sterling, Dan Duryea, Julie Adams, Walter Matthau, and Charles McGraw.
The Long Haul (1957) interesting Brit Noir starring Victor Mature, Dianna Dors, Patrick Allen, Gene Anderson.
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I go with Scarface also
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Add White Heat and Key Largo to Oscar Noirs
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I think he's using a phone.....
Noir Alley
in General Discussions
Posted
The're both great, and The Crooked Way has an L.A. Western Swing Bar in one of the shots.