Near the end of David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Dune, the emperor played by José Ferrer calls out, “Bring in that floating fat man!”  He is referring to Kenneth McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen, but what immediately popped into my mind is the large “Donald Trump baby balloon” which had been used in various protests around the […]

As a fan of jazz standards, I have appreciated a great many renditions of “Body and Soul”.  It is no surprise the tune is threaded through the score of 1947 boxing noir Body and Soul.  James Garfield stars as a man destined for a career as a pugilist, much to the chagrin of mother Anne […]

1994’s Wagons East! is a great title for a western comedy.  Unfortunately, it is far from being a great western comedy.  Even more unfortunate, is it was the last movie on which John Candy worked before his death, which happened during the production. He plays a disgraced wagon master who is going to escort a […]

Lies travel faster than the truth.  If the subject of that untruth has an associated financial aspect, that amount will grow to ridiculous proportions over time. I can imagine a graph with one axis for distance a falsehood travels, and another for time, with the result being an arrow shooting upwards at a 45 degree […]

Dream imagery rarely works in movies.  It is one thing to have a dreamlike moment and another to try to actually convey realistically what it is like to experience a dream.  Something always comes across as artificial about the experience, even when the collaborators are Dali and Hitchcock for 1945’s Spellbound.  But I’m going to […]

It is no secret that the small towns in America are dying, especially those in the most remote areas of the country.  It isn’t the first place to experience the phenomena and probably won’t be the last.  1937’s The End of the World takes place on one of Scotland’s Orkney isles, which the Romans called […]

The producer of 1939’s The Cat and the Canary is one Arthur Hornblow, Jr.  With a surname like that, I like to think he was always bragging—or, to put it another way, tooting his own horn.  I also wonder if, however, unlikely, he was the inspiration for the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch to adopt the […]

1944 horror pic The Soul of a Monster opens with this unusual statement: “You may have lived or, perhaps, dreamed the story you are about to see.”  How did the makers of this know I once dreamed of surgeon George Macready dying of a staph infection after a tear in his surgical glove during an […]

Long before CGI and AI started putting dead actors into movies (and who knows how many other acronyms will soon be involved), there were different ways of accomplishing the same.  Woody Allen’s 1983 mockumentary Zelig managed to incorporate him into archive footage and stills with such figures as Herbert Hoover.  Carl Reiner’s 1982 parody Dead […]

With Ginger Rogers being best known for her musicals she did with Fred Astaire, it is odd to see her as a brassy, rough-edged convict in 1955 noir Tight Spot.  She may not be fully convincing in the role, but damned if she doesn’t give it her all. We first see her in a prison […]

The Beastie Boys once informed the public it was time to get ill, Bill Haley rocked around the clock and Ween told us they’d be our Johnny on the spot.  Mind you, none of these have anything to do with 1947’s Johnny O’Clock, but I thought that would make for a pretty weird opening line […]

I wasn’t much impressed by 1939’s Only Angels Have Wings, a testosterone-fueled Howard Hawks drama about a small airline dying to obtain a lucrative air mail contract.  And they were literally dying to do so, as pilots kept crashing and dying.  I’m sure there are other movies like it, but I was quite surprised to […]

A large amount of the books I read concern movies and filmmaking.  I also tend to watch the special features on the discs for movies, and even sometimes listen to commentary tracks.  Then there are the documentaries about films and it is no surprise most of those are about the worst moviemaking experiences.  The movies […]

Mystery Science Theatre 3000 was more than just making jokes at the expense of movies, as there were also the wraparound segments.  In the Trace Beaulieu years, he was evil scientist Dr. Clayton Forrester, who had an assistant first played by J. Elvis Weinstein and then Frank Conniff.  Not that these characters had any real […]