Those Wonderful People Out There In The Dark

Send us Fan Mail Before we get to the meeting of the minds, what about the Brothers, or as they were later known, Minnie’s boys, in honor of their mother. Minnie came from a performing family, was the sister of vaudevillian Al Shean, and guided their early career. Minnie’s emigree family moved to NYC and she met and married Sam Marx, so the Brothers were Jewish lads with a mixed French and German...

Send us Fan Mail As you age, you may have these half-wispy thoughts enter your consciousness --- have I done anything worthwhile? Why, if at all, will I be remembered? It may not be a subject that’s brought up in polite company, but it was the arena for one of the most moving films of a director who made many --- Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa was famous for his samurai films, for his remarkable achieve...

Send us Fan Mail On a Saturday it was nothing for a kid to go to the theater, get a ticket, candy, popcorn, and spend all day there. And teenagers had after-school jobs. They had real dollars! So, while not all of Hollywood’s offerings focused on children, as there were plenty of adult-themed movies, which TV also couldn’t provide, a good percentage of films were oriented towards the boomers, espe...

Send us Fan Mail Now, as for most of the US, Weitzel Elementary wasn’t on the Soviet list of primary targets for a hydrogen bomb blast. The film, made in 1951 by the Civil Defense Administration, was designed to allow civilians a chance to preserve their eyesight, avoid flying shards of glass, and minimize the radiation burns and absorption of radioactivity that would take place from a nuclear bom...

Send us Fan Mail About six months ago, I did a pod on Goodfellas , Martin Scorsese’s 1990 magnum opus on the wise guys of New York, which to me was sweeping, magnetic and a triumph. And as I said then, it’s a young man’s film --- it had all the adrenaline, obstinance, the hubris, and the self-belief that young men often possess. A lot of water under that bridge since 1990, with Scorsese directing...

Send us Fan Mail For me, there are some films that are so emotional and fraught that I have a difficult time watching them. Some examples from my life are A River Runs Through It , Kurosawa’s Ikiru , which I’m going to do a pod on in the future, Scorsese’s Raging Bull , and one of the greatest examples of Italian Neo-realism, Bicycle Thieves . Until reviewing Thieves for the pod, I hadn’t been abl...

Send us Fan Mail One of the perks, I suppose, of being a writer, is that you may get to write your own epitaph. Billy Wilder is buried at the Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park under a big, dark marble stone that has the inscription: Billy Wilder    I’m A Writer      But Then Nobody’s Perfect …a paraphrase of the closing line delivered by Joe E. Brown to Jack Lemmon in Wilder’s Some Li...

Send us Fan Mail Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State for President Truman, penned a memoir in 1969 he entitled Present At The Creation, which always struck me as a bit of hubris, but kept reoccurring to me as I thought about this film. Not nearly as important as post – WWII American foreign strategy or the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the war in Vietnam, but still a reminder of what it is to be in on...

Send us Fan Mail What unfolded was a nightmarish world of gas explosions and eruptions, darkness stabbed by beams of light, flying cars, omnipresent rain on the ground, cops, magnificent buildings, garbage and hovels. The quirky and great minds of Phillip K. Dick and Ridley Scott had flung me into a world far in the future (Ha! LA in 2019 to be exact) and then caused me to question society, religi...

Send us Fan Mail Out Of The Past has the coolest, most laconic, world-weary noir character ever portrayed, the standard for the type. You can’t take your eyes off him. And America never did. He’s the prototype for the anti-heroes to follow, but was never equaled: Robert Mitchum. And he wraps this film up in his hand, puts it in his trench coat pocket, and makes me want to watch it over and over. I...

Send us Fan Mail It’s the Golden Age of Billy Wilder in this sharp, insightful, and funny comment on the wonderful, wonderful world of business (and love), The Apartment . Released in 1960 by United Artists, it’s Mad Men come to life at the beginning of the 60s, if Mad Men was about all the people four levels below Don Draper and how they’re victimized by those one level below Draper. It’s, in my...

Send us Fan Mail Haven’t you heard of the suspension of disbelief? We’re in the second part of Scary Season here on the pod and we’re diving into one of the wittier, more tender portraits ever created of a person who wasn’t successful. And I don’t mean like VanGogh, as in never sold a picture before death and then esteemed as a genius later. I’m talking about an artist who’s been recognized as the...

Send us Fan Mail In honor of Scary Season, I’m going to do a two-fer with a lineup of two family “scary” films in two weeks and some guest commentators to talk about them. Now, the films themselves are not especially scary, though one has a few low-key thrills. No, they’re more in tune with the season in terms of theme and resonate with me because of two pillars: do as much as possible with what l...

Send us Fan Mail The music is foreboding and ponderous. We see a No Trespassing sign as we move along a chain-link and ornately wrought fence with a magnificent capital K atop the gates. We continue to move towards what appears to be a castle on a hill, with glimpses of caged monkeys, Venetian gondolas in a canal, a bedraggled golf course. We approach a lighted, high window, and, snap, the light g...

Send us Fan Mail Genius. There, I’ve said it, as so many have. Orson Welles was regarded as a genius, from his youth, a genius in the ability to weave the magic of artistic vision and technique into stories that were beautiful, gripping, and moving. I’m going to do a pod on Welles alone, so deep does he run through the history of cinema, as well as how evocative he is for me. For now, forgive me f...

Send us Fan Mail We start to hear a thumping. The guys ask each other what’s going on, what’s the sound? They pull off the roadway and, by the car lights, open the trunk from where the pounding is coming. There, a bloody man wrapped in a sheet starts pleading with them, “No, no…” One of the three stabs the man repeatedly with a butcher knife, and then another of the guys shoots the body four times...

Send us Fan Mail Hey man, I love a good film noir ! I went on and on about it for Double Indemnity but allow me to recap. Moody lighting, voice-over narration, a femme fatale , suffocating fatalism, nihilistic conclusion with no apparent redeeming social value. Oh yeah! That’s why I’m so keyed up to present a noir this episode that is right out of the school of Raymond Chandler, that typifies the...

Send us Fan Mail This film is VERY personal for me on a number of levels and it’s a difficult one to talk about, as it hits so close to home on parts of my personality and behavior. Also, I like the film itself as a job of work, but there are elements in it that only partially gel for me, which I’ll go on and on about during the pod, just fast-forward through that. It’s The Loneliness Of The Long-...

Send us Fan Mail Oh, I’ve been waiting for this. I’ve seen this movie many times, but it’s like an old familiar friend that you always have time for and is so enjoyable to visit. I’ve said on Twitter that if you’ve seen Double Indemnity and Out Of The Past , you’re a long way down the road to appreciation of film noir . Is Double Indemnity the first film noir ? There’re a lot of other films that a...

Send us Fan Mail I’ve really been looking forward to this episode, as this is one of my top films ever, and the emotions it stirs are one of the reasons I started this podcast. It’s Marty , released in 1955 by United Artists through their distribution deal with Hecht – Lancaster Productions. This is the little movie that could from the 50s, with an unlikely group of professionals banding together...

Send us Fan Mail Let’s go today with one of my favorite movies ever, and perhaps the best example of Euro-noir ever produced, as well as great noir in general, The Third Man . It was released in the UK in fall 1949 and in the US by the Selznick Releasing Organization early in 1950. The film has all the hallmarks of what would become known as classic film noir in the 40’s and 50’s --- the cinematog...

Send us Fan Mail Why, in a world crowded with opinions on movies, do we need another podcast? We’ve got podcasts by professional movie reviewers, pods by amateurs, podcasts on the latest releases (if you seek to release in the COVID world, of course), pods about movies people hate, about classics, about movies according to critical ranking, height, weight. Why another pod?  When I was thinking abo...

Send us Fan Mail One of the touchstones of my childhood and a movie that just about everybody in America has seen, The Wizard Of Oz . A cascade of catchphrases, memorable scenes, lovely music and goofiness, I’m sure everyone listening has their own memories of this wonderful fantasy. All I have to do is hear the entrance music, with its “woooooooo” Kansas wind blowing, not even the first strains o...

Send us Fan Mail I’m kicking off the podcast with one of my favorites of all time, a film that speaks to me about the human condition, the resilience of the heart, the courage of otherwise ordinary people to face the world. It's The Best Years Of Our Lives, released immediately after WWII in 1946 . For me, it captures the spirit of Americans in the backwash of the war, living in the remains o...

Send us Fan Mail Introduction to the podcast Those Wonderful People Out There In The Dark --- what it's about, who it's for and where you can find it. First episode drops May 17th 2022! Website and blog: www.thosewonderfulpeople.com Bluesky: @wonderfulpeople.bsky.social