Journalism has always walked an odd line.  At its best, it tries to be an unbiased observer and chronicler of events.  It has to be difficult to be at the sites of crimes and tragedies without interfering or assisting.  Howard Duff’s aspiring photojournalist in 1950’s Shakedown would not have any struggles with his conscience, as […]

Martha Vickers is in a sanitarium, put there by sister Evelyn Ankers because of an alleged glandular issue.  From where I’m sitting, the woman who will be the oversexed younger sister of Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep doesn’t have anything wrong with her.  This facility is ran by mad scientist John Carradine, who intends […]

Not many science fiction pictures seem to make it the seventh planet of our solar system a destination.  That is a shame, because a film like 1962’s Dutch-American co-production Journey to the Seventh Planet should provide many opportunities to feel smug amusement over characters pronouncing its name as “yer anus”.  But the movie couldn’t stoop […]

A bespectacled, but still menacing, Burt Lancaster is walking down a New York City street at night.  Tony Curtis is circling, alternating between behaviors sycophantic and needling.  I could not help but recall Midnight Cowboy and watching Jon Voigt confidently walking down that city’s streets while Dustin Hoffman’s wannabe hustler nips at his heels. Except […]

Everybody has their kinks, whether they will admit it to even themselves.  In any relationship, there is doubtlessly some give and take around each person’s, including whether some are disclosed at all.  I can’t imagine what I would do if I had any illegal vices. 1962’s The Horrible Dr. Hichcock opens with Maria Teresa Vianello […]

It was while watching 1947 noir Crossfire that I realized it would be strange to be in a bar or restaurant in someplace like New York City and see Military Police at the door of every such place.  We see a lot of that in this movie, as police and MP’s together try to find […]

I had been having a rough week, which was rougher than the week before that, and so on.  Basically, it hasn’t been a great year for me up to this point, though I still have blessings I am counting.  I thought I had already relaxed a bit before starting 1949’s Whisky Galore!, only to find […]

I was shocked to recently learn the G, or “all audiences”, rating has been all but abandoned.  It still technically exists, but it is rarely bestowed upon any film nowadays and, when it is, those films are inevitably nature documentaries or fare for the youngest of children.  Apparently, PG is now the new G, and […]

For roughly half of the time I was in the third grade, we lived in Tucumcari, New Mexico.  I do not want to throw shade on the town, as I have not been there in several decades, but there was nothing to do there even at that young age but to go looking for trouble […]

I have the good fortune to live fairly close to a truly world-class opera company.  A couple of decades ago, we used to attend fairly regularly, seeing the complete seasons for a couple of years.  For reasons that elude even myself, my go-to attire for these events was a white suit and straw fedora.  I […]

I used to be a pretty big fan of the original Axe Cop comic, where a 28-year-old artist illustrates the strange and rambling stories spun by his five-year-old brother.  2006’s The Fall has a feel like that, as a partly paralyzed man in a hospital in 1920’s L.A. improvises an epic tale of adventure to […]

When I was just a teen, and my job duties for a community newspaper included that of movie critic, I sometimes found myself at screenings with the other critics, all of whom worked for larger media outlets and who excluded me outright from any conversations.  At one such screening, the critic for the city’s largest […]

Robert Young is the definition of failure to commit in 1947’s They Won’t Believe Me.  He juggles wife Rita Johnson, her friend Jane Greer and co-worker Susan Hayward.  I’m not exactly sure what any of them see in him.  I don’t think any of the three have made good life decisions, as evidenced by at […]

One of the most famous headlines in the history of the New York Post (if not print journalism, period) is “HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR”.  A journalist played by Ted Healy in 1935’s Mad Love doesn’t have quite the same wit in creating headlines, as he envisions a front page topped with “MAN WITHOUT […]

In real life, Barbara Payton was American-born, had a brief Hollywood career, during which time she had some romantic liaisons which received a great deal of negative press and which resulted in her relocating to England to make pictures there.  In 1953’s Four Sided Triangle, she plays a Brit who goes to America, fails to […]