Vautrin

Just about anything can be funny, though not everybody will be along for the ride. I truly think the country will be back to normal fairly quickly once Trumpy Bear is gone. Of course it will take longer if the sentence is eight years instead of four. I remember as a kid our teacher assigned the class to write their own play/puppet show, breaking up the class into four or five groups. Our group came up with Dracula vs. The Beverly Hillbillies. The older I get, the better it sounds.

That time and place certainly makes for a lot of dramatic possibilities.

It certainly has all the visual flare of a Perry Mason episode, not very much. The short running time helps a little. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but I would find it hard to rank this as one of his better American movies. Maybe by this time the old boy was running on close to empty. A person of Lang's talent can afford a miss like this one.

I remember seeing this one a long time ago. I couldn't remember the exact twist ending. I thought it was that Andrews had actually committed the murder, but I wasn't 100% sure. Frankly, it was hard to believe a smart guy like Andrews would allow himself to get trapped into cooperating with Balckmer in that particular murder. But then again he was dumb enough to use the real name of the victim when talking to Fontaine. Back on the path to the chair, dummy. Yes the direction was mostly ho-hum, though the puzzle piece plot of the movie makes that secondary to a certain extent. Barbara Nichols is okay, but I found her dancer friend to be sexier. Finally, the Blackmer character would be pleased to know that now 22 states have no death penalty, many of which abolished it in the last twenty years.

Interesting. So I assume it takes place before Czechoslovakia split into two countries. Despite my light-hearted tone, anyone who completes a play, novel, or other work of literature to their own satisfaction is to be congratulated.

Last I heard they were in a recycling center just outside of Chicago.

That will be one of the purposes of my novel-restoring the cuckoo clock to its rightful place in Western art and time keeping.

For the past couple of years I have been working on the great Swiss novel. This is a somewhat difficult task as I am not fluent in French, Italian, German, or Romansch.

The MM connection was just the basic plot of two kids from the same neighborhood, one grows up to be bad and the other to be good. Not much of a connection as we don't see them as youngsters and only see that as adults they had known each other for a long time. Yeah, you know the production code meant that Conte would come to a bad end. The gritty big city at night vibe has been done before too, but still this movie does it very effectively.

The Lady from Shanghai is one of those films I've seen a number of times, so if I'm in the mood I'll watch it again, if not I won't. Last night I wasn't. Cry of the City was pretty good, nothing very original, but well done. In Maltin's book, he or whoever wrote the entry said it was a rehash of Manhattan Melodrama. Yeah, sort of, but it didn't have those dull flashbacks about how the bad kid shoplifts from the corner drugstore and the good kid refuses to join in and so on. Yeah, we get it. Cry of the City just shows that Mature has known Conte and his family for a long time. I was impressed by that one shot at the end where we see the dead or near dead Conte holding the knife in his hand and not moving.

The INSP network, which shows reruns of The Virginian, has been running a PSA about the COVID-19 virus with James Drury and several other actors. It must have been shot very recently. Yeah, the ownership of the Shiloh ranch changed pretty frequently, especially in the last few seasons as older actors died.

I figured the baby wasn't their biological child but a Lebensborn adoption, the result of a wild and crazy night at SS headquarters nine months earlier.

Yes the visuals add something to the movie, though I think that after a while they become somewhat obvious. I think the best sequence was the mob cutting through the theater curtain as Griselle makes a run for it and the pursuit across the muddy field. Not a bad movie, just one that didn't make much of an impression on me.

A touch above the usual anti-Nazi flick. The Baron gave the whole thing a little touch of class, though he didn't seem as sinister as he could have. And the usual street fighting thugs weren't around, which made a things a bit dull. I found the plot not very believable, I mean even more unbelievable than the standard unbelievability of Hollywood movies. Schulz should have figured out after the Baron's last visit that he was in deep doo doo and gotten the hell out of Munich. Maybe his nerves were just too addled to figure that out. Sure there were some interesting visual touches, but they seemed too familiar and well worn. I sort of checked them off in my mind as they appeared one after another. Got it. I can see why Address Unknown, though it has a few interesting points to it, isn't better known or more popular.

To commemorate this great actor's birthday, I will drink a full bottle of corn **** tomorrow. Happy birthday Mr. Tracy.

I think the senior citizens would have been prudent to hire Mifune to guard their meds and masks. He would probably do so for some rice and sake. OAN, Yojimbo proves that the guy who brings a gun to a knife fight doesn't always win.

Many of the 1970s Warhol/Morrissey flicks were set in NYC.

Most, if not all of them, were Kurosawa movies too. I doubt sweet old ladies would be caught dead in that hotel.

I thought the schedule and the intros made it obvious. It was a celebration of Toshiro Mifune's 100th Birthday. It did last all day. Unfortunately, I had some business I had to take care of so I missed most of them, though I have seen them before. I did catch Yojimbo again. In my mind I'm picturing the reaction of old ladies as they watch Mifune scratch himself and kill dozens of people with his sword. Yikes.

I saw The Innocents and The Snake Pit on the schedule. They also had two movies from the 1970s.

One of the best sci-fi movies of the 1950s IMO. I was in a TDTESS trance for a few weeks. I know Fox Movie Channel has changed its name, but I couldn't remember exactly what to. I should pay more attention to the 3 a.m. to 3 p.m. line-up. They did the same thing with Laura back in the not so distant past.

FMC used to show some of the studio era movies a number of times a week. Not sure if they do that anymore. They showed The Day the Earth Stood Still in that manner and I became addicted to watching if as often as possible. It helps if one likes the film in the first place.

The Germans can usually pull if off with or without the cig holder. Whenever I hear some guy is the "brains" of the outfit, I know the outfit will probably be in trouble. Happened to see Hank Worden playing a small part on Green Acres last night.

Hollywood Bullets. Didn't he shoot the cop a second time just to make sure?

But an ex-con doesn't have the legal power a cop has to screw up your life. Sims couldn't figure out until the end that Lacey was acting under duress. If someone put me through the wringer like Sims did to Lacey I sure as hell wouldn't call him for help.