1944’s Address Unknown has an interesting setup.  In the years leading up to Hitler taking power in Germany, ex-pats Paul Lukas are Morris Carnovsky together run an art gallery in San Francisco.  Despite the tensions in Germany, and Carnovsky being Jewish, it is obvious these two are great friends with a long history together.  Now […]

Buster Keaton is rightly regarded as a god in the pantheon of comedy.  His best work was almost entire in the silent era ending around 1930.  He definitely is not primarily remembered for 1966’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, his last film.  This was 16 years after he played a […]

I immediately thought of trouble dolls, also known as worry dolls, when we see Wanda Hendrix all dolled up in 1947’s Ride the Pink Horse.  She did this with money provided by, and per the insistence of Robert Montgomery, who cruelly told her to go make herself look human.  Her: “Do I look human? Should […]

It can be difficult to fairly judge a work when it is later alleged somebody behind its creation engaged in unsavory activity.  Myself, I try to judge something entirely by its own merits.  If Hitler has actually done any great paintings, I would stand by those works even when the creator was a monster.  On […]

Mark Stevens and Edmond O’Brien play rather peculiar patrol cops in 1950 noir Between Midnight and Dawn.  They served together in the Marines in the war, bringing back a grass skirt among their souvenirs.  After the war, they both joined the force and somehow end up partnered.  And they share an apartment, which raised my […]

1976 occult horror picture The Devil’s Men checks a few boxes which put it in my wheelhouse.  It stars (allegedly) Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence.  It has a touch of folk horror, as an entire village in remote Greece are devil worshippers.  It, inexplicably, has a score by Brian Eno. Alas, it actually stars Kostas […]

1959’s City of Fear has a strange plot.  Vince Edwards is an escaped convict who has a container he believes is full of heroin which he can resell for a fortune.  Instead, it is filled with Cobalt 60, a highly radioactive element.  It was being used in controlled experiments in the prison, which baffled me […]

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 […]