Those Wonderful People Out There In The Dark

Send us Fan Mail My top noirs are Double Indemnity and Out Of The Past , in that order, but Falcon is special. Right out of the hard-boiled school of writing, the character of the unstoppable but human private detective as a noir mainstay, one of the more fatale of the femmes in the genre, the moody lighting and framing, the inevitability of the conclusion of a twisted scheme. Hey, all it lacks is...

Send us Fan Mail We’ve gone through quite a few pods on film, especially film noir and police procedurals, but this might be the first that has a female protagonist as the main character! More’s the pity! But what a protagonist! Perhaps to make up for the previous imbalance, we’re going to encounter one of the fiercest, most insightful, and action-oriented characters yet, regardless of gender. She...

Send us Fan Mail When film fans speak about directors, they often go on about idiosyncratic styles or bellwether looks and techniques. You can rapidly identify a Hitchcock film. Same for something from Orson Welles. Scorsese has tendrils that can be traced through most of his films. But few directors inject themselves into the films they create to the extent that the trials and agonies of the prod...

Send us Fan Mail Film is such a wonderful art form --- in some instances, almost the entirety of the world may be encompassed. Or the artist makes the attempt to capture the world. And thereby capture timeless subjects that are repeated down the years. Imagine developing a film that looks at the humanity of man. Classism. Racism. Antisemitism. War. The rise of fascism. Nationalism. Accomplished ne...

Send us Fan Mail Many of us strive to accomplish great things in our lives. A smaller group reach the heights in terms of those dream accomplishments. Then what do you do? How do you follow that when you’ve climbed a steep hill and, perhaps exhausted, look back? Where do you go now? Some, accomplished though they are, will turn away and pursue other, but less vaunted goals. Others will try to repl...

Send us Fan Mail But there was the antithesis of noir as well. A small movement to capture some feelings of life, of positivity. People went to the movies weekly, and often they simply wanted one thing --- hope. That things would be better, that life would go back to normal, whatever that was. That things would work out, for society and individuals. There was a small ripple of films, also of the 4...

Send us Fan Mail I can see him coming out of a run-down building, into a rain-swept, darkened street. He’s wearing a fedora pulled down over his forehead, with a large, rumpled trench coat to match. He moves wearily, a big man, not plodding, but not stepping lively either. If he speaks, it’s laconic, with a somewhat slow pace to the words, seldom rising above a conversational tone. Not much bother...

Send us Fan Mail Sales is often spoken of as the tip of the spear for any enterprise. That’s not true --- marketing is the tip of the spear. But we’ll leave that alone. Sales is often the first time a customer or buyer experiences a company --- the ethic, the product, the approach. Sales as a career attracts a certain type of person --- driven, very focused, sometimes with big but usually at least...

Send us Fan Mail History repeats first as tragedy --- radio evangelism and the good, hard business sense of Christianity in the 1920s, but next the farce --- the co-opting of religion for political and financial purposes in the 21st Century. And, in both cases, railing at, to quote a fictional preacher, “Harvardism, Yaleism, and Princetonism.” The shadowy and evil elites, of course. Woops, throw i...

Send us Fan Mail But the way Hollywood of the classic era liked it best was for the actor to be “discovered.” That’s right. You’re sitting at Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard in 1937 and the next thing you know, you’re Lana Turner and making $1000 a week. By the way, it wasn’t Schwab’s, it was the Top Hat Malt Shop. Hollywood even has a genre for this, the films of “You’re going to be a star,...

Send us Fan Mail Take that impossible set of circumstances to make a film described at the top. Now, place over those hurdles the desire to change up a recognized genre. To take a fixed idea and make it new, fresh, and vibrant. Not so easy, is it? Try to make something old work in a new and exciting way in any part of life, let alone something as evanescent as film. It doesn’t happen often. When i...

Send us Fan Mail Scary Season Part Two! The guest hosts and I spent some time last week on a true classic of the horror genre, House Of Wax … now let’s be frightened out of our wits by… well, it’s actually a Scary Season “so bad, it’s good” classic from the master of inexpensive horror, the Orson Welles of the Bs, the ne plus ultra employer of marketing gimmicks --- it’s a William Castle film! And...

Send us Fan Mail It’s Scary Season here on the pod and we have a double feature to frighten you this year, two classics of the screen that star the inimitable Vincent Price. The first is a true classic, that helped to launch a trend in film in the 50s and Price’s career as the King of the Horror Bs. The second is so bad it’s good --- a thriller that was even more impactful in its marketing than in...

Send us Fan Mail Picture Show is absolutely authentic, due to two behind-the-scenes craftspeople and two actors who transform the film. The story of Picture Show began with the novella of the talented, but at the time, little-known author, Texan Larry McMurtry. McMurtry worked on the screenplay with the director, who had only released one pretty good previous film, after moving on from researching...

Send us Fan Mail The person of Orson Welles is a loaded one for an observer of film --- he was so many things in his lifetime, he wore so many hats. Welles had incredible triumphs and unbelievable lows in his chosen work. He was such a consummate actor that it was hard to tell when he was serious and when he was still acting, when seen outside a theater, radio studio or soundstage. If you ask him...

Send us Fan Mail It’s a small, grimy, smoky, desperate film, just like the arena in which much of the action takes place. It’s either a prime example of film noir , or some form of noir with boxing and drama  thrown in. It has the heroic performances of two noir stalwarts who were more often cast as the miscreants in their films. It has a director who was successful in almost every genre and honor...

Send us Fan Mail The films I talk about on the pod are usually ones that I saw when I was younger and then returned to over and over because they struck an emotional chord with me. A very few are films that I’ve heard about due to their impact and finally got around to watching when I was middle-aged (or older!). Today, allow me to wander around a film that, while we may in 2023 need to interpret...

Send us Fan Mail I’ve made fun of film sequels, universes, and series on the pod, accusing Hollywood of taking anything that’s successful and knocking it off repeatedly, for the dollars. As well as the yuan; many of the cinematic universes are action/hero/comic book films, which are short on plot and long on thrills and special effects, thus not needing extended passages of subtitled exposition. W...

Send us Fan Mail When I saw Yojimbo , at last, from Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, I thought, this is the greatest samurai film ever. But, I thought, he stole it all from Sergio Leone and A Fistful Of Dollars . Boy, was I naïve. That was backwards, of course, if I’d cared to check the dates of release. But the story was even more layered than that. Kurosawa, Leone, Sergio Corbucci, they were al...

Send us Fan Mail In the glorious days of the 70s and early 80s in the US, there was a birth of auteurs and a move towards independent films and away from huge legacy studio systems. Just a few of the names associated with this movement, captured controversially by author Peter Biskind in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, were Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielb...

Send us Fan Mail I’ve seen  The Music Man at least once a year, since age ten, usually around the 4th of July, which is when the story takes place and is the holiday it embodies so well --- the All-American, fireworking, head-back-looking-up-at-the-sky, patriotic singing holiday of holidays. And all due to the enthusiasm, good-old American stick-to-it-iveness and talent of Meredith Wilson. The ent...

Send us Fan Mail The Asphalt Jungle came out of MGM (yeah, MGM. Not exactly a wonderful musical as we shall see) in 1950, the classic era of film noir in the US. But Jungle might also be pegged with a label that someone walking down the street would now recognize: it’s a heist film. The story comes from the wonderful author of crime, W. R. Burnett, and his 1949 novel. Burnett came up the hard way,...

Send us Fan Mail I can count on one hand the number of films whose introductions startled or entranced me. Citizen Kane , yes, 2001 , sure. But one that fascinated me was at a free showing (thanks student ID) during grad school. The film was Aguirre, The Wrath Of God . Besides an interesting title, the opening sequence showed a trail of people traversing a huge, verdant mountain, surrounded in dee...

Send us Fan Mail In the film Ed Wood , Wood is speaking in a hospital waiting room to the woman he’d marry, Cathy. She asks him what he does for a living, and he says he’s in movies --- as a writer, producer, director and actor. Awww, no one does all that, she replies. Yes, two people do, says Wood, he and Orson Welles. But there was an individual who did all that and went some better, helping to...

Send us Fan Mail But with, first, film noir in the 40s and 50s, then the end of the American century beginning with the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the scandal of Watergate, plus the rise of the counter-culture, heroes became more and more difficult to identify, or identify with. The 60s and 70s gave rise to the idea of the anti-hero, still the protagonist of the film, but someone who had a m...