Vautrin

Danger, Faye Robinson, Danger! Pretty entertaining flick, even with that dumb ending. Hey, it's called very extreme suspension of disbelief, And it's always fun to see Scott get his comeuppance, even if it's one that is way out of left field. I never quite understood his M.O. He goes out with a woman, has her write a suicide note, kills her, and then leaves about 2/3s of the moolah in her purse. Maybe he just liked to kill ladies and didn't care about the money, just like Uncle Charlie left cash lying around his room like it was cigarette butts. Still I was disappointed that such a thorough rotter wouldn't grab a big fistful of green and leave just a few bucks to make things look normal. Okay, whatever. Faye Emerson proves that men do make passes at girls who wear glasses, persistent passes in the case of Bruce Bennett, if you want to call his tongue-tied hints passes. I thought she even looked a little sexier in glasses. And it also is true that women like a man in uniform. Before he became a midshipman, Erdman looked like a missing Andy Hardy pal, but once he shows up in that uni, Mona goes gaga. It helps that he's wearing a cap and you can't see his silly haircut. All in all, not a bad little movie.

Sly should have been on double bills with George Jones.

I just got another nasty text. Steed, why is everybody always picking on me?

Yes, Tara King was the new, green agent taken under the wing of Steed. So playing that character Linda was believable. She was a less nuanced character than Emma Peel. Mother was annoying and at the same time just plain weird. Things got even stranger when they gave him that statuesque assistant. I didn't think about it then, but Steed seems a little old to be romantically involved with Tara, which is hinted at sometimes. I took a quick look on YT and they only have the opening credits to various seasons and a few short clips from some episodes. That's what I figured.

I will say something nice about Linda Thorson: But seriously, she stepped into a thankless situation replacing Diana Rigg. Of course she wasn't anywhere as interesting as Emma Peel and was more of an attractive sidekick to Steed than anything else, but the series was still pretty entertaining. I've seen a couple of Rigg's movies and some of her BBC TV shows, but I remember her best as Emma Peel. Many years ago YT still had some of the Honor Blackman episodes and some of the black and white Emma Peel episodes. I doubt they're still available.

I saw Brucie back in the late 1970s. I can't recall if he jumped into the audience, but he was hopping all around the stage like a kangaroo. Good show.

Not only had Verhoeven seen Night Editor before, but he screened it a few times every week while shooting Basic Instinct, just to make sure he got everything copied correctly. But he was not the first to do this. Adrian Lyne was also a long-time fan of Night Editor. He switched more things around for Fatal Attraction as he didn't want anyone to discover that he never had had a good idea of his own but had to rely on some old low-budget crime flick for "inspiration."

A cinematic version of good ol' Erich Von Daniken's ancient aliens theory. "Primitive" humans could not have built the pyramids or Stonehenge without some help from ancient aliens. Eszterhas and Verhoeven could not have made Basic Instinct without first seeing a 45 year old movie.

Sure, I'll have a Guinness.

I wouldn't be surprised. I'm sure that between 1946 and 1992 there was a person killed by an ice pick in a movie. Maybe they saw Night Editor too. Maybe they should have titled Night Editor Ex-Cop Selling Cigs. That would have lured people in.

I have seen both films, though it's been a while since I've seen Basic Instinct, which is why I took a look at the plot summary. The death by ice pick thing seems to be the thing that jumped out at people, though there were other similarities. Those other similarities are just standard characters who appear in any number of crime films and I'm not surprised they appeared in both films. I find it totally possible that the people behind Basic Instinct could come up with that idea on their own without having have seen Night Editor, which isn't exactly a well-known movie. I just find it somewhat silly that on such a tenuous basis one film was supposedly copied from another one, one that came out so long before the later film.

Yeah, he came from a rough and tumble background, including being security. He certainly had the build for it. I wouldn't go so far as to call him a monster. He was only a manipulative dirt bag.

I realize that. I just think that Grant was a bigger bastard than Bonham, bigger in every respect.

As I've already noted, these characters, while they're individuals, are also classic noir/crime types that one might expect to show up in this genre. That doesn't equate with one movie with such characters being influenced by a particular earlier movie with similar characters. That's why any such similarities don't lead me to think that the earlier movie influenced the later. I find it perfectly plausible that the one has nothing to do with the other. It was the Jeanne Tripplehorn character that was the actual murderer, at least according to the plot summary. And in Night Editor the ice pick just happens to be handy; in Basic Instinct it's part of the killer's MO. So while there are similarities I don't see them as evidence that the earlier movie was an influence on the later one.

Maybe by that time Zeppelin was so popular that Page thought he could do whatever he wanted and people would accept it or not care. No one doubts that he is a very talented musician. I just found some of his playing in the movie excessive. That still pales compared to all the wonderful music he produced with Zeppelin. I remember some guy telling me how Page bowed his guitar when he was still with The Yardbirds. He was so excited about it I thought he was going to pass out.

I got out my dusty copy of Hammer of the Gods. According to it Bonham's main problem was that he was a very mean drunk and he was often drunk on tours. When sober he wasn't bad at all. Grant was a full-time bastard. Plus Grant was a lot fatter than Bonzo.

That's certainly true, though I think Scorsese was more obsessive about watching old movies than other directors. Whether Verhoeven ever saw Night Editor before and "copied" parts of it for Basic Instinct I have no idea. I just don't see any necessary connection between the two films.

The rich, bored, sexy, nutso with a clueless hubby is kind of a noir/crime stereotype, though she isn't always a blonde. The cop who goes gaga over a woman involved in a crime he is investigating is pretty familiar also. I haven't seen Basic Instinct in a while, so I took a quick look at the plot. Unlike Night Editor, neither Douglas or Stone is married. Stone is a novelist who makes her own living while Carter seems to leech off men, nttawwt. And apparently Stone isn't even the killer. So there are just as many superficial differences as there are superficial similarities between the two movies. Now whether the people who made Basic Instinct had seen Night Editor and copied some of its plot and characters I don't know. It's possible, but I find it just as likely that any similarities are coincidental and not the result of one film "borrowing" from the other.

Of course the audience saw a bit more of Sharon Stone than they did of Janis Carter. I'm not sure that the screenwriter or director of Basic Instinct were influenced by Night Editor. The ice pick may just have been organic to the whole plot of Basic Instinct. While there are superficial similarities, I don't know it there was any actual connection between Night Editor and Basic Instinct, especially there being a more than forty year gap between the two movies.

I'm not a musician, but some of Jimmy's solos seemed rather self-indulgent and overlong. Maybe if you were there and on something they were just fine. Right in the middle of Stairway to Heaven it just clicked in my mind that they were going to play Moby Dick. Time for a snack break. The fantasy sequences were dull, though knowing that Robert Plant had an interest in medieval history and Jimmy Page was into the occult, they made sense. It was laughable to see Peter Grant going ballistic over some poor schlub selling Zeppelin posters without proper permission. Yeah, that put a huge hole in Zeppelin's profits. At least that fat bastard is dead. Good riddance.

Yeah. Man, I've had a backache for years. Just won't seem to clear up. I also got a kick out of Carter giving her cuckolded hubby a very deep kiss while Gargan looks on, boiling mad. What a crazy dame.

I watched the first forty minutes of Night Editor on Saturday on YT and was going to finish it today. But I figured I might as well get up a bit early and catch the last 26 minutes on TCM. Neat little low-budget flick and very well done. It would have been funny if the ice pick was left in Gargan's back as he walked out of the party with Carter. I was glad to see he was smart enough to change the tire on his car. Some of these noir types are so dumb it's hard to take. I thought the night editor and the police captain looked like brothers. The big city police captain who wore white socks to work. I was glad that Gargan survived the ice pick, but he needs to expand his offerings. Just cigs won't make it. Stock some newspapers, candy, magazines, and maybe a little porno on the bottom shelf behind the counter. There you go.

Very well could be. Some of my local PBS stations are showing similar music shows over the weekend. Thank goodness TCM doesn't have those darn pledge breaks.

Nope. When I first saw the title Divine Madness I figured it was about Divine. He was a little....eccentric. Then I read the description. That she was called The Divine Miss M was way back in the recesses of my mind.

I thought the guitar player took care of the hooks. When I first saw the title Divine Madness I thought it was a documentary about John Waters' Divine. I'll probably watch the Zeppelin flick. I saw it when it first came out. The concert footage is pretty good, but those god awful individual fantasy sequences. Yuck. They should have put all of them at the end so one could walk out of the movie twenty-five minutes earlier. Whole Lotta Lousy.