There are some dogs in Hitchcock’s filmography, with some of the more notable missteps being the dry stretch from Marnie to Topaz.  His feature after that period (and second-to-last overall) was Frenzy, a movie critically lauded for being an alleged return to form, but which I found to be simply a deeply unpleasant experience. 1957’s […]

Many of the memories of summers from my childhood are of playing the board game Clue with my grandmother at the picnic table on the back patio of her house.  The set was the 1963 edition, with a mid-century modern design which influenced my tastes more than I would think possible.  Thinking back, I can […]

Only in noir would a pet store be open as late as the one in 1953 noir 99 River Street.  I couldn’t help but recall the Simpsons episode about prohibition, where Moe’s continues operating as a bar under the ruse it is now a pet shop.  When the law raids it, the agent leading the […]

I remember being infatuated with 1984’s Cloak & Dagger on its original release, but I am surprised I was enough of the fan that I had the board game.  The board was a simplified map of the world with only a few available cities.  One of those was Reykjavik, and this was the first time […]

I tend to think of the atomic scare as being something long in the past and confined roughly to two eras of the 20th century, the 50’s and the 80’s.  Go figure, it is 2025 and, as I write this, there is uncertainty as to whether the US and Israel have taken out Iran’s capability […]

As the kind of person who greatly values their privacy, I never enjoy being somebody’s houseguest.  I can’t begin to imagine how I would handle having a houseguest, something I have had the good fortune to avoid thus far.  I worry I would be like John Hurt in 1978’s The Shout and have Alan Bates […]

Paul Douglas seems to play frustrated guys.  I last saw him getting cuckolded by wife Barbara Stanwyck in 1952’s Clash by Night.  Two years later, he is an easily agitated businessman in The Maggie (a.k.a. High and Dry).  The man has much to get worked up about.  He is only trying to get his company’s […]

Something that encapsulates what is wrong with 2010’s Tron: Legacy is the Tron game cabinet in Jeff Bridges’s arcade.  First, it is weird that Garrett Hedlund, as Bridges’s now-grown son, finds any of the cabinets still there, as the premises appear to be disused since the events of 1982’s Tron film.   Secondly, the place still […]

For lo, a great plague came to pass over the land.  In the first year, there was the Captive Wild Woman.  And it was a warning to the people, a horrible thing made largely out of The Big Cage, a picture made a decade before.  But the people did not change their evil ways, and […]

Joan Crawford played enough stiff-backed, dominating, wealthy women that I wish somebody had been able to cast her as a dominatrix.  I imagine she could really put the “ow” in wealthy dowager.  I’m thinking mostly of the character she played in Queen Bee.  Five years before that, she was a textbook definition of such a […]

Did anybody ever order those X-ray specs advertising in comic books back in the day?  Obviously, they weren’t something that worked, but I just wondered how they convinced the gullible consumers of the product that they had not been duped.  My guess is the spiel was something akin to the trick P.T. Barnum played on […]

1944’s Jungle Woman is a sequel surely nobody asked for to 1943’s Captive Wild Woman, which itself repurposed a ridiculous amount of footage from circus picture The Big Cage made a decade earlier.  Some this feels like an endless regression or an infinity mirror, as footage from 1933 as reused in 1943 returns in 1944. […]

Judi Dench seems to do whatever she feels like doing.  She is infamous for not suffering fools, and to the extent that she elaborately embroiders pillows with choice four-letter words on them for some people.  It is one thing to be the kind of person who is always saying “fuck you” to people, and a […]

A famous zen koan asks what is the sound of one hand clapping, but I think a far more interesting twist on that would be speculate that the sound of one hand strangling Peter Lorre would sound like.  And we will learn that in 1946’s The Beast with Five Fingers. Actually, there isn’t much sound, […]

The 70’s were a bleak time.  Like weeds growing in the cracks in concrete, it was fertile ground for cynical, dystopian sci-fi such as, well, No Blade of Grass.  But one of the bleakest is 1973’s Soylent Green, a picture which may, unfortunately, be the most prescient of the bunch. Before we go any further, […]