When piano man Al Roberts (Tom Neal) gets the news that his best girl Sue Harvey (Claudia Drake) wants to ditch NYC for LA, all the dreams he’d been building up in his head vanish in a puff of smoke. No more getting married and settling down in The City for him. Instead, he’s lost […]
Read more "The Doomed Travel Slowly: Detour (1945)"Although he would find creative gold in his fruitful collaborations with James Stewart, Anthony Mann worked quite nicely without that actor. Case in point, 1950’s steamy family melodrama The Furies, starring Walter Huston and Barbara Stanwyck. When their father T. C. Jeffords (Huston) rides home to The Furies, the largest and most valuable ranch in […]
Read more "I Hope You Can Chew What You Just Bit Off: The Furies (1950)"Dan Evans (Van Heflin) is a rancher whose two boys Matthew (Barry Curtis) and Mark (Jerry Hartleben) are caught up in the legacy many young men dream of: that their dad is a tough guy who could kill bad men with ease. When they follow their cattle only to discover outlaws have used them to […]
Read more "They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait: 3:10 to Yuma (1957)"When the regulars come over to Miss Maybell’s (Esther Rolle) for a Saturday Night house party, they expect some singing, some dancing, some drinking, some feasting, and maybe cake. It’s a twentieth birthday celebration for young Earnestine (Rhetta Hughes), so there should be plenty of good cheer. They don’t expect to encounter a couple of […]
Read more "Ain’t No Party Like a Saturday Night Party ‘Cause a Saturday Night Party Don’t Stop: Don’t Play Us Cheap"Melvin Van Peebles (Mario Van Peebles) has found some degree of success in Hollywood. After directing Watermelon Man (1970) for Columbia, his agent has finagled a three picture deal. All Melvin has to do is make some more comedies, and he’s on easy street. Unfortunately, Melvin doesn’t want to make comedies. It’s tumultuous times, and […]
Read more "How to Get The Man’s Foot Outta Your Butt: Baadasssss!"When he was a Depression era boy, Sweetback (Mario Van Peebles) was fed by a gang of prostitutes, given work at the brothel, and ultimately indoctrinated into manhood by one of the workers there. He never left that business and, as an adult, Sweetback (Melvin Van Peebles) remains a live sex show worker, a hustler, […]
Read more "Come On Feet, Do Your Thing: Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song"Turner (Harry Baird) is an American soldier at war with himself over the latest situation he finds himself in. On the plus side, his Captain (Hal Brav) gave him a promotion and a three day pass off base to go and enjoy the French country where he is stationed. On the minus side, this promotion […]
Read more "J’ai Très Envie De Faire L’amour Avec Toi: The Story of a Three Day Pass"Today, we continue to look at the kinds of crime stories told along borders with a second example of Japanese film. As with Black River (1957), today’s film employs a situation where an American military base is positioned just outside the Japanese area of interest: the port town of Yokosuka, Japan. Here, yakuza gangs are […]
Read more "Misunderstandings and Assumptions: Pigs and Battleships"Borders and barriers often play a role in film noir, whether it’s a physical border such as la frontera between the U.S. and Mexico or the checkpoints between East and West Berlin (in films made or set during the era of the Iron Curtain) or a more metaphoric one. I’d wanted to do a full […]
Read more "A Parasol Covered in Blood: Black River"After Kurosawa made a splash with the two tales of his masterless samurai in a lawless land, 1961’s Yojimbo and 1962’s Sanjuro, Kurosawa Akira shifted away from the jidaigeki (samurai/period films) to a contemporary crime story inspired by Ed McBain’s 1959 crime novel King’s Ransom. That book is the 10th entry in the author’s long […]
Read more "Violent Games: High and Low"
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