Ricardo Montalban is likely best remembered for starring on TV’s Fantasy Island, so it is odd to see him a couple of decades younger than he was on that show, and in a serious role.  He is the lead in 1949’s Border Incident, a noir about an illegal immigrant smuggling operation.  Alas, when we first […]

I asked for water and they gave me rosé wine a horse that knows arithmetic and a dog that tells your fortune -Elvis Costello, “Uncomplicated” There isn’t much I was asking for from 1990’s Bright Angel.  The description on Kino Lorber’s site made this sound like a neo-noir.  I knew it was set in Montana […]

The 70’s disaster movie is a curious genre but, at least, the vast majority of those pictures are complete works of fiction.  What makes 1975’s The Hindenburg difficult is it is based on the near meltdown at nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island.  Fine–you got me–it’s about the blimp disaster in 1937.  You know what […]

I don’t have the best memory for faces, but I like to think I’d remember that of somebody whose chest I had helped to drive a spike through.  But not Frieda Inescort.  Even if it had been two decades since she and Gilbert Emery did this to a vampire played by Bela Lugosi in the […]

For anybody who thinks my taste is movies is too high-falootin’, and skewed to disproportionately favor older cinema, I present to you my feelings concerning 1955’s Mister Roberts.  This film was nominated for Best Picture, and has four screen legends top-billed: Henry Fonda, James Cagney, Wiliam Powell and Jack Lemmon, the last of whom won […]

I have already written about a couple of movies written and directed by Bill Forsyth, a Scotsman with a unique filmmaking sensibility.  The more of his work I see, the more I am reminded of the work of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki.  Each has a distinctive style, and I like how both have a deep […]

Jacques Tourneur is a name everybody should know, as he directed three movies everybody should see: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and Out of the Past.  He also made a great many other features.  Unfortunately, most of those failed to really catch fire.  One such film is 1958’s The Fearmakers.  This is not […]

I have come to begrudgingly tolerate product placement as part of modern moviemaking.  At least, it’s better than the ads all theatres seem to be showing before the trailers.  Now, that I find unacceptable.  Still, I wondered when placement in films would cross a line for me, and now it has in Shazam! Fury of […]

I have seen a lot of vintage film noir.  A lot of it concerns the red scare at the time.  Y’know, the McCarthy hearings and all that.  That material hilariously locks those films so firmly in their time that they might as well be insects preserved in amber. 1988 neo-noir The House on Carroll Street […]

Despite my best intentions, I am still always comparing Joan Crawford to Bette Davis when I see the former in a picture.  That isn’t fair to her, and there are definitely movies where she is better suited to a role than Davis would have been.  A great example of such is 1950’s The Damned Don’t […]

Maybe somebody can prove me wrong, but I doubt there has ever been a good movie where running moonshine is the chief mechanism driving the plot.  The first such picture off the top of my head is White Lightnin’ Road, and what an abomination that was.  It is the kind of subject matter that consistently […]

It is awfully sad when a film cast as its lead somebody only because they are the relative of a famous actor.  Consider the pathetic Operation Kid Brother from 1967, which is one of the very few pictures to star Sean Connery’s younger brother, Neil.  I thought about that feature a great many times while […]

A great many comedies of the 60’s were riffs on James Bond.  In retrospect, one would think there had to be at least one film in cinemas on any given week after 1964 that had some sort of spy hijinks in a foreign country and featuring at least one beautiful, “international” woman.  The lead actor […]

It’s weird how many films in the Disney canon are compilations of shorter films.  In some of these portmanteaus, the associations between the films will be stronger than in others.  It was a trend starting with Fantasia, and look at how tenuous the connections are between the pieces of that film. 1949’s The Adventures of […]