Vautrin

I'm not religious either, but I have always enjoyed Christmas, including all the eating and drinking that goes on. I like many of the usual suspect Christmas movies, but once a year is usually enough. Hard to get excited about Christmas in Connecticut in July, but in December it hits the spot. Blasphemy--What do you mean, batteries not included? What kind of a cheapskate are you, Santa?

Psssst. When you're walking up that staircase watch out for someone coming at ya from the left. Just in case.

True. I wasn't expecting too much, but it seemed pretty tame, even for 1946. I'm sure if they needed some more stuff Albert Dekker could have scrounged up something from his dressing room, if he had his own dressing room.

I kind of felt sorry for ol' Barry. Sure he was messin' around with the boss's wife, which is a no-no, but a lot of people do that. I don't think it deserves an assassination attempt. And later on Barry might have killed Dekker in self-defense. By the Code he had to bite the big one, but that doesn't seem fair. I thought Bonita was pretty sexy, so he should have taken as much hard cash as possible and left town with her, after which they could have lived their second-rate nasty lives for as long as they could stand each other. I don't know about that so-called dominatrix skating outfit. Looked pretty tame, like it was designed by Walt Disney. The skating provided a little break from the noir plot and the movie was pretty good. Still, I would have gone with less skating and more peanuts.

The only one I watched today was Torn Curtain, which I haven't seen in 15 or 20 years. Besides the basic plot, the scene I remember best is the prolonged killing of the East German bad guy in the farmhouse. You know he is a very bad guy because he wears a black leather jacket instead of a suit like the rest of the commies. This is a return to the let's visits lots of different places while spying plot of some earlier Hitchcock films instead of individual focused themes of films like Rear Window and Vertigo. It's also like other similar spy films of the mid 1960s. Maybe a little too much of going over well trod ground, but it's entertaining enough. The whole Cold War outlook of the movie is something that seems to have taken places ages ago, though it's fairly fairly recent historically.

I would have yelled out HEY THORWALD, WHAT THE **** KIND OF NAME IS LARS! I got a kick out of Thelma Ritter talking about petting parties. That's an expression you don't hear too much anymore. DirecTV is having a free HBO, Starz, Cinemax, etc. preview through Sunday. There must be about 40 or so channels to choose from. I meant to watch some of the Dallas game just to see the Boys get their rears kicked, but I totally forgot about it. This has been a great football season. Steelers are 10-0. The Cowboys, Patriots, and Panthers all suck. Sweet.

Thunderball and You Only Live Twice are the only James Bond movies I saw in a theater. After adolescence I quickly lost interest in James Bond. Sorry 007. I will watch them both tonight because it's been such a long time and it will almost be like seeing them for the first time. I bought a chocolate fudge cake for Thanksgiving dessert, but I think I will start on it tonight during the Bonds flicks. Neither shaken or stirred.

Another minor point. I found the cop played by Wesley Addy a real pain the the neck. He kept hassling Hammer for no very good reason. If I hadn't seen the movie before, I might have thought he was somehow in on the whole thing. Kind of creepy. From what I recall, Addy often played slick, unsympathetic characters, though he do so very well.

It might be too long for a movie and go the TV mini-series route.

When Hammer slammed Percy Helton's hand into the desk I figured Well that hurt at first, but how long can the pain last. Certainly not as bad as if Hammer had kept opening and closing the drawer. Then again, it wasn't my hand in the drawer. While Albert Dekker was good, he certainly didn't have much screen time, excluding the time the audience just sees his shoes and pant's legs. I found Maxine Cooper believable in her role. That's the way I usually judge acting. Perhaps a bit simple, but it works for me. There's the scene where Hammer goes to the gym and the guy tells him about his great new boxing prospect and Hammer thinks he's pulling his leg. Then when Hammer is tied to the bed in the beach house there is a fight on the radio. Maybe that was the same boxer they were talking about earlier at the gym and he's winning the fight. I'll have to pay more attention to that angle next time.

Especially at the first glimpse at the beginning of the intro. Get back, **** cat. I think the camera got a bit closer and the resemblance was a little weaker, but still pretty close. I read somewhere those buildings were razed. They were certainly spooky, especially at night. That's what gave it something of a horror movie vibe. And Gaby's bare bones room wasn't exactly inviting to say the least.

I always get a kick out of Kiss Me Deadly. It's pretty out there for a 1950s p.i. flick; part horror movie, part detective movie, and part advertisement for the 1950s Playboy life style--girls, cars, music, though Hammer is not as sophisticated as Hef would have wanted. And yeah, who knew Elton John would show up on Noir Alley. All those rundown apartment buildings are so sad and lonely and creepy too. On a minor point I'm glad the untalented opera singer wasn't killed, as I could just imagine the two hoods coming into his room and starting to smash all his treasured opera records, a la The Blackboard Jungle. Lots of fun and I suppose people can speculate endlessly about what the box, or as Velda called it the what's it, was about.

Sure could. That's one of my favorite lines in the movie. I laugh even though I know it's coming. Hey, put that away, my mother might be around.

Hey Marty, wanna go down to Lowe's Paradise and **** *** on the heads of those girls on the main floor? Nah, Ang, we just did that last week and remember the usher caught us and kicked us out. C'mon Marty, it'll be fun. Nah, they might call my mother. I don't want that Ang. Just last week she caught me in the bathroom. You're gettin' to be a real drag, a real drag, you know that Marty.

Riddim.

I like Peggy. She occasionally turns up on a TV show from the 1950s or 1960s. I often don't recognize her as an adult, but she was still pretty cute.

It's a long way from St. Petersburg to Poverty Row, in more ways than one. I would call this one a comic book version of a Classic Illustrated version of the novel. Taken as an adaption of the novel, it's pretty thin and weak. Taken on its own as another crime movie, it's okay, but nothing special. The low budget sets and look go with setting of the original story, but otherwise not very good. And then here's another dumb criminal. Doesn't take the money and run, starts throwing himself in the way of the police inspector. The trick ending is kind of lame, but it also goes with the whole quickie vibe of the movie. The crime was the idea of adapting the novel on the cheap, the punishment is sitting through most of it. Thank goodness the sentence is only 68 minutes.

I was clicking between this flick and Newsmax for some comic relief. The idea of guys trying to make it with Joan was......a little off putting. I'm sure Miss Joan liked the ego stroke that idea gave her. And I would have replaced Ty Hardin with Try Harder. I wonder if the Rolling Stones were influenced by that scene of a spike right through someone's head. A funny line from a review by Leslie Halliwell--"Grisly and unattractive thriller with an ageing star in a series of unsuitably abbreviated costumes." Actually Joan didn't look too back from the front, but when she was in profile, yikes. I did like the sharp suits that the London detective wore, so it wasn't a total waste of time.

I think the first time I saw Norman Lloyd was when I was spending part of my summer vacation with mt grandparents and one of the stations ran Alfred Hitchcock Presents reruns in the afternoon. In this episode Norman played a conman in the old West. One of the more amusing episodes of AHP.

I went to their Wiki page out of curiosity and yes they are still around. Fifty years is quite a milestone, even though only one original member is still in the band. I haven't listened to my albums in a while, but they were pretty decent. After that they kind of fell off my radar.

I liked it also despite some of the pretty unbelievable aspects of the movie. I just about rolled my eyes when the insurance investigator said he wasn't carrying a gun. Hey, this isn't some fraudster trying to collect disability you're going after. Film fans just learn to roll with the punches when it comes to improbabilities. They're all part of the biz.

I had never seen Nightfall before. Pretty well done with a good balance of urban and rural locations, though I could have done without the butter/cornmeal debate. The Ray~Bancroft romance was more interesting than many of these noir romances, more down to earth than usual. And among other things, Ray says he paint soup cans. A pop artist ahead of his time. I couldn't decide whether I wanted Red to be killed because he was such a nasty psycho or because of all his dumb jokes. Maybe a com- bination of both, though I felt a little sorry at his ultimate fate. There certainly were a lot of improbabilities. The most glaring to me was the two robbers not looking in the bag to make sure it was full of cash and not the doc's medical equipment. Hard to believe.

A Rolling Stone critic's review of an early Heep album became somewhat notorious when the critic said she'd commit suicide if Heep made it. Of course she didn't. I have a few Heep albums from the early 1970s which was their most commercially successful time in the U.S. After that their U.S. sales went down rather quickly.

I'm old enough to remember the Art Fleming version of Jeopardy. The short clip I saw on one of the TV news shows about Trebek's death had the clue Band who sang Crush with Eyeliner. None of the contestants got it. I should have been there that day.

The problem with Silas Marner as a soporific is that it's a relatively short novel, so if one is reading it consecutively, it won't last that long and one will have to find a new book as a sleep aid. Elster killed his wife. He already had Judy pretending to be Madeleine and hired Scotty to follow her because he knew when it came time to throw his wife off the tower Scotty would not be able to follow Judy through the trap door and up so he would not see Elster throwing his dead wife off the tower and thus Scotty would think Judy was the wife and had been killed, when she really hadn't. I think it's implied that Gavin was doing Judy, though it's never made all that explicit. Kim Novak was made up to look like Elster's wife to fool Scotty. After the murder she returned to her original look. It was stupid to stay in SF, but maybe she figured the chance of running into Scotty in a big city was minimal.