Those Wonderful People Out There In The Dark

But there was the antithesis of noir as well. A small movement to capture some feelings of life, of positivity. People went to the movies weekly, and often they simply wanted one thing --- hope. That…

I can see him coming out of a run-down building, into a rain-swept, darkened street. He’s wearing a fedora pulled down over his forehead, with a large, rumpled trench coat to match. He moves wearily,…

Sales is often spoken of as the tip of the spear for any enterprise. That’s not true --- marketing is the tip of the spear. But we’ll leave that alone. Sales is often the first time a customer or buy…

History repeats first as tragedy --- radio evangelism and the good, hard business sense of Christianity in the 1920s, but next the farce --- the co-opting of religion for political and financial purp…

But the way Hollywood of the classic era liked it best was for the actor to be “discovered.” That’s right. You’re sitting at Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard in 1937 and the next thing you know,…

Take that impossible set of circumstances to make a film described at the top. Now, place over those hurdles the desire to change up a recognized genre. To take a fixed idea and make it new, fresh, a…

Scary Season Part Two! The guest hosts and I spent some time last week on a true classic of the horror genre, House Of Wax… now let’s be frightened out of our wits by… well, it’s actually a Scary Sea…

It’s Scary Season here on the pod and we have a double feature to frighten you this year, two classics of the screen that star the inimitable Vincent Price. The first is a true classic, that helped t…

Picture Show is absolutely authentic, due to two behind-the-scenes craftspeople and two actors who transform the film. The story of Picture Show began with the novella of the talented, but at the tim…

The person of Orson Welles is a loaded one for an observer of film --- he was so many things in his lifetime, he wore so many hats. Welles had incredible triumphs and unbelievable lows in his chosen …

It’s a small, grimy, smoky, desperate film, just like the arena in which much of the action takes place. It’s either a prime example of film noir, or some form of noir with boxing and drama  thrown i…

The films I talk about on the pod are usually ones that I saw when I was younger and then returned to over and over because they struck an emotional chord with me. A very few are films that I’ve hear…

I’ve made fun of film sequels, universes, and series on the pod, accusing Hollywood of taking anything that’s successful and knocking it off repeatedly, for the dollars. As well as the yuan; many of …

When I saw Yojimbo, at last, from Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, I thought, this is the greatest samurai film ever. But, I thought, he stole it all from Sergio Leone and A Fistful Of Dollars. Boy,…

In the glorious days of the 70s and early 80s in the US, there was a birth of auteurs and a move towards independent films and away from huge legacy studio systems. Just a few of the names associated…

I’ve seen The Music Man at least once a year, since age ten, usually around the 4th of July, which is when the story takes place and is the holiday it embodies so well --- the All-American, fireworki…

The Asphalt Jungle came out of MGM (yeah, MGM. Not exactly a wonderful musical as we shall see) in 1950, the classic era of film noir in the US. But Jungle might also be pegged with a label that some…

I can count on one hand the number of films whose introductions startled or entranced me. Citizen Kane, yes, 2001, sure. But one that fascinated me was at a free showing (thanks student ID) during gr…

In the film Ed Wood, Wood is speaking in a hospital waiting room to the woman he’d marry, Cathy. She asks him what he does for a living, and he says he’s in movies --- as a writer, producer, director…

But with, first, film noir in the 40s and 50s, then the end of the American century beginning with the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the scandal of Watergate, plus the rise of the counter-culture,…