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, […]

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 […]