The Pink Smoke podcast

We're joined by Steven Sheil, co-curator of the Mayhem Film Festival, to discuss this fantastic 50's crime novel written by H. Vernor Dixon, a truly obscure author who deserves more attention. Sheil describes the surprisingly literary book as Westlake's Parker combined with The Great Gatsby!

“Jim, you don't ask the Almighty for his I.D.” It’s something you didn’t dream was possible, the unlikeliest scenario in all the universe: four people sitting down together in praise of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Hosts John Cribbs and Christopher Funderburg are joined by a pair of friends the show (perhaps the best friends of the show), John Arminio and Bill Teck, in defense of one of the le...

Hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg discuss the "voodoo" thriller that was adapted for the screen into John Schlesinger's The Believers as well as the real-life criminal enterprises inspired by the book/movie. It's a story of oblivious racism, NYC grime, goofy acronyms & the endless recounting of what our hero read in research files.

“The Experiment is The Experiment.” We’re joined by critic & filmmaker Martin Kessler to discuss the Strugatsky Brothers’ magnum opus, The Doomed City. Long self-suppressed by the brothers due to fears of retribution by Soviet government under which it was written, the book has a potency and imagination that rivals their best work like Hard to Be a God (adapted into the legendary film by Alexei Ge...

The great Bill Duke, immortalized onscreen for his roles in Car Wash, Predator, Action Jackson, The Limey and Mandy, also boasts a distinctive five-decade career directing film and television. On this episode, hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs welcome back Pinnland Empire guru Marcus Pinn to discuss Duke's 1984 feature debut, The Killing Floor. After premiering on the PBS American Playh...

"I do know my room was so cold in winter and so hot in summer I couldn't sleep. Your house looked like heaven, high up there. That's how I began to hate you." On this episode hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs discuss the namesake of this very site, Akira Kurosawa's intense crime masterpiece High and Low! A long-standing favorite of the Pink Smoke, its founders are always excited to dig...

"Move over Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins... JUICY!" - Booklist Cupid's arrow has struck the Pink Smoke on St. Valentine's Day, and they've decided to give some love to that most disrespected of genre fictions: the romance novel. Recruiting beach-read paperback enthusiast Melanie Daniels from the Cinema Parlor Podcast, hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg access the world of glamorous wome...

Hosts Christopher Funderburg & John Cribbs discuss the new, posthumously-published novel from the great crime novelist, Donald Westlake - author of the Parker & Dortmunder books. Westlake is a Pink Smoke favorite and the podcast has previously covered Forever and a Death (a script for a James Bond movie converted into a novel) and Double Feature (a pair of novellas about violence in Hollywood.) Th...

We pay tribute to the recently deceased Peter Bogdanovich, considering his work both as a filmmaker and a cinephile by exploring his list of the best American films of 1939 (the year of his birth). We’re joined by Bill Teck, the director of One Day Since Yesterday, a loving celebration of Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed - a box office & critical failure only now being rediscovered in no smart part...

Host Christopher Funderburg is joined by his old friend Adam Leon to discuss Leon’s new film Italian Studies. Starring Vanesse Kirby (The Queen, Mission Impossible: Fallout, Pieces of a Woman), the film follows an author who suffers a psychotic break and wanders Manhattan, joining up with a group of random teenagers in attempt to take ahold of herself and her identity once again. The discussion to...

Hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg discuss the year in movies. The conversation naturally touches on their favorite films of the year but more than that, the duo discusses why they rarely do these “year in review” pieces anymore and how their approach to cinema has changed as they’ve gotten older. By the end of the conversation can they find a way to balance their negativity about the curr...

"Not even death is static like a picture is. If you look at a corpse long enough, you see things move beneath the skin, as real and liquid as the blood in your own veins." What is Generation Loss? Is it a crime novel about a jaded never-was photographer turned leather-clad gumshoe? Is it a horror story about furry weasel-like "fishers" stalking tourists in rural Maine? Or maybe it's a dark melodra...

"A captain's job is a lonely one. He's easily misunderstood." On this episode, we welcome back John Arminio and his father, Captain Tom Arminio, USN, Retired, to tackle a double feature of classic WWII-set Naval melodramas: 1954's The Caine Mutiny and 1955's Mister Roberts. Both films deal with the tricky subject of bad military leadership, how it trickles down the ranks and threatens the effectiv...

“Perhaps when one is about to die one sees every kind of bird pass; when one sees the crow it means one’s time has come.” A bit of a weird one: hosts John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg each picked a “war story” to discuss. The podcast loves to dig into short stories (in the past it has looked at everything from Edogawa Ranpo to Patricia Highsmith) and, as a way of exploring the short fiction for...

The Daniel Craig Era of James Bond has officially ended, allowing John Cribbs and special guest John Arminio to conclude their comprehensive review of every Bond movie, which they began in April of 2020 (the original premiere date of the much-delayed No Time to Die!) Starting with 2006's series reboot Casino Royale and finishing with their thoughts on the latest 007 adventure, Cribbs & Arminio rem...

“Bad luck isn't brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds.” This is it: our mammoth exploration of the work of Italian aesthete Dario Argento. Hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs are joined by filmmaker and illustrator Patrick Horvath to explore the career of one of horror cinema's most notorious and beloved artists. They cover it all, from the brilliant beginnings of the "animal tri...

“Looks like his pecker was blowed off, Lydell.” Join hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs as they team up with film writer and podcast stalwart Stephanie Crawford for a journey down to Dasharoons, an idyllic Arkansas estate where you can expect scenic sunsets, Creole dishes and the occasional testicle explosion. That's right - for our annual October horror read, we delved into the pages of...

For October's horror fiction pick, The Pink Smoke welcomes back Wendy Mays of the Pet Cinematary and Losers Pod podcasts to talk about the swarm of killer-cats-descending-on-rural-Long Island-community classic Feral by Berton Roueche. Among the topics discussed: if it's possible to sympathize with city couples who abandon kittens on the side of the road at the end of the summer, the right way to d...

“A guy wants to name his cock ‘Macho,’ it’s fine by me.” We’re joined by filmmaker Bill Teck to discuss the latest film from Clint Eastwood, Cry Macho. Mr. Teck previously joined us to discuss Eastwood’s 2019 film Richard Jewell and remains our favorite person with whom to discuss the 91 year-old star-auteur. We place the film within the larger context of Eastwood’s complicated career and its near...

Aleksei German month at The Pink Smoke kicks off with this primer spearheaded by Martin Kessler of the Flixwise: Canada podcast. Kessler is one of the English-speaking world's leading authorities on German - this episode is intended as an entry-point into the filmmaker's work, a titan of Russian cinema who remains surprisingly unknown outside of his native land.

Hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs dig into the work of the Belgian author Georges Simenon via his crime novel La tête d’un homme, featuring his wildly popular character Inspector Maigret. The ultra-prolific Simenon wrote 11 novels in 1931, the year that he wrote La tête, and rarely slowed down during his legendary career - even at the reduced pace of his later years, he would purportedl...

How do you solve the aesthetic-philosophical problem of Michael Ritchie, the not-quite-auteur/not-quite-journeyman director of satirical social comedies like The Candidate and Smile and such eccentric comedy classics as The Bad News Bears and Fletch? Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs decided to go at it the hard way by diving into Prime Cut, Ritchie's sort-of second feature (it debuted a day...

"Bright blazing intuitions may go rushing through a man’s mind, swifter and more terrible than lightning, flashing over a landscape that seems clear in every detail. Then they go out, and there is only a greater blackness." Nothing is what it seems - unless everything is what it seems - in the account of an eloping couple's ill-fated voyage from New York to Vermont. What strange fate befell this A...

Hosts Christopher Funderburg & John Cribbs are joined by Professor of Sociology John Balzarini to discuss the latest installment in the Marvel Comics Universe.

“Don’t gush over the sea. It’s always been there.” It's a “Jean Gabin is getting too for this shit” double feature! On this episode, hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs discuss two unforgettable French crime films: Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) and Henri Verneuil's Any Number Can Win (1963), both starring the grandfather of quiet cool, M. Jean Gabin. Playing aging gangster...