The Undying Monster (1942)

 

THE UNDYING MONSTER  (1942)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Brahm

    James Ellison, Heather Angel, John Howard,

    Bramwell Fletcher, Heather Thatcher, Halliwell Hobbes,

    Aubrey Mather, Holmes Herbert, Eily Malyon

When a man and a woman are brutally attacked on the cliffs outside their ancestral home, a Scotland Yard detective gets called on to investigate. The house is a drafty old place with a crypt in the basement, everybody's a suspect, there's talk of ghosts and monsters, and it appears a family curse may be involved. Those sure sound like wolf howls out there in the frosty night, and if it's occurred to you that Lon Chaney's "The Wolf Man" had come out the previous year, you're on the right track. There's even a little four-line werewolf poem that gets repeated. It's not as good as the one in the Chaney film, and there's no Maria Ouspenskaya to recite it this time, but you get the idea. It takes, like, forever for the beast to finally appear, and by then, even finding out who the werewolf might be feels a little anticlimactic. 

Trick or Treat

Kiss of Death (1947)

 

KISS OF DEATH  (1947)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Henry Hathaway

    Victor Mature, Brian Donlevy, Richard Widmark,

    Colleen Gray, Taylor Holmes, Howard Smith,

    Karl Malden, Millard Mitchell, Mildred Natwick

The Great Victor gives one of his better performances as Nick Bianco, a hood who gets sent up for his role in a jewel heist and decides to go straight by ratting on his accomplices. Brian Donlevy plays the assistant D.A. Colleen Gray plays Victor's girl. It was done on location by Henry Hathaway and it's a classic film noir, but here's the thing: Richard Widmark, an old woman in a wheelchair and a flight of stairs. Whatever else you take away from watching this movie, you won't forget Richard Widmark.

Movie Star Moment: Jean Arthur

 

Jean Arthur as Wilhelmina Clark

in "The Whole Town's Talking" (1935)

    In "The Whole Town's Talking", directed by John Ford, Jean Arthur and Edward G. Robinson play office drones working for an ad agency. In this scene, they've been hauled into police headquarters because they were out on the street and Robinson has the bad luck to look exactly like a notorious gangster named Killer Mannion (also played by Edward G. Robinson). They're being questioned in separate rooms, and when the cops tell Jean, "Mannion's confessed," she sees right through their ploy and decides to have a little fun with them, striking a mock-tough pose, complete with a cigarette that she never takes out of her mouth. She knows her timid pal from the office is anything but a criminal, and the cops have messed up, so whey they ask her a series of rapid-fire questions about a long list of robberies and murders, she responds to each one by saying, "That was Mannion." She's punking them, and they're buying it, and she's enjoying herself, and the cigarette never leaves her lips.

    Arthur would soon become Frank Capra's favorite leading lady, in movies like "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" and "Mr Deeds Goes To Town", but this was the movie that got her noticed, after a decade of mostly B pictures and supporting parts. And the thing in this film that put her over the top? You might say "That was Mannion."

Red Hot Mamma (1934)

 

RED HOT MAMMA  (1934)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Dave Fleischer

Betty Boop dreams she's in hell. Hell doesn't stand a chance.

Minnie the Moocher (1932)

 

MINNIE THE MOOCHER  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Dave Fleischer

Betty Boop runs away from home and ends up in a nightmare world where a ghostly walrus sings the title tune. Cab Calloway appears in a live-action segment and references to death abound.

There's Something About a Soldier (1934)

 

THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT A SOLDIER 

    D: Dave Fleischer                                 (1934)  ¢ ¢ ¢

Would you join the Army to get a kiss from Betty Boop? Well, if you were in a Betty Boop cartoon, sure, why not?

So Young, So Bad (1950)

 

SO YOUNG, SO BAD  (1950)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Bernard Vorhaus

    Paul Henried, Catherine McLeod, Grace Coppin,

    Anne Frances, Anne Jackson, Rosita Moreno,

    Cecil Clovelly, Enid Rudd, Mike Kellin

The newly arrived psychiatrist at a girls' reformatory runs into a wall of institutional resistance when he suggests that abuse and torture might not be the best way to rehabilitate delinquent teenagers. Hard-hitting (and effectively realized) pulp, with Frances, Jackson and Rosita (Rita) Moreno all in their first big-screen roles. Director Bernard Vorhaus and screenwriter Jean Rouveral were up against the blacklist at the time. Both would leave the country the following year. 

Blood Simple (1984)

 

BLOOD SIMPLE  (1984)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

    John Getz, Frances McDormand, M. Emmet Walsh,

    Dan Hedaya, Samm-Art Williams, Deborah Neumann

The Coen Brothers' first movie, a discourse on how important it is not to do anything stupid when you're trying to get away with murder. John Getz works at a bar owned by Dan Hedaya, whose wife (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with Getz. M. Emmet Walsh plays a private eye hired by Hedaya to stake out the lovers, which he does, gleefully, and everything goes horribly, comically wrong from there. Two favorite bits: the part where the camera glides up and over a passed-out customer as it tracks down the bar, and what happens to the detective when he reaches out the window and into the room next door. A career role for Walsh, and the screen debut of Frances McDormand (aka Mrs. Joel Coen). 

A Lawless Street (1955)

 

A LAWLESS STREET  (1955)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joseph H. Lewis

    Randolph Scott, Angela Lansbury, Warner Anderson,

    Jean Parker, Michael Pate, Wallace Ford, James Bell,

    John Emery, Don Megowan, Ruth Donnelly

A square-jawed U.S. marshall and his six-gun are all that stand between the town of Medicine Bend and the crooks who want to take it over, so the crooks hire a gun of their own to take out the marshall, which he does. Luck would seem to favor the crooks at that point, except for two things: The marshall's not really dead, and he's played by Randolph Scott. It's not one of Scott's great westerns - most of those were directed by Budd Boetticher - but Angela Lansbury turns up in it, playing a musical-hall entertainer and Scott's estranged wife. Randolph Scott and Angela Lansbury - that's a combination you don't see every day. 

Angela Lansbury

(1925-2022)

Muhammad Ali (2021)

 

MUHAMMAD ALI  (2021)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Ken Burns

A Ken Burns documentary on the larger-than-life life of Muhammad Ali, the brash, controversial, lightning-fast heavyweight boxing champion, who proclaimed himself "the greatest," and then got in the ring and proved it. Burns is an admirer - not surprising, considering his career-long preoccupation with race - but the movie risks being too reverential. Burns acknowledges Ali's imperfections, most notably an ugly capacity for cruelty, but the talking-head witnesses, who include Bob Arum, Don King, Walter Moseley and Larry Holmes, come down squarely in Ali's corner. There's a lot of footage of Ali beating guys up and getting pounded, but no expert medical testimony about the role of all that pounding in his agonizing decline. Still, when you see him between the ropes, dancing and jabbing and taunting an opponent before delivering a knockout in the appointed round, one thing is clear: F0r a few years there, when the world was young and so was he, Ali really was the greatest. 

To Live and Die In L.A. (1985)

 

TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.  (1985)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: William Friedkin

    William Peterson, Willem Dafoe, John Pankow,

    Debra Feuer, John Turturro, Darlanne Fleugel,

    Dean Stockwell, Steve James, Robert Downey Sr.

Willem Dafoe plays an artist whose primary source of income is printing $20 bills. Of course, printing your own money is a form of creative enterprise the Treasury Department does not favor, and government agents led by hotshot BASE jumper William Peterson go after Dafoe. So Dafoe makes money (you can see step-by-step how he does that) and Peterson drives the wrong way on the freeway in a slam-bang car chase and John Barry's jazz score pulses along and cinematographer Robby Müller paints the sky orange over some of the bleakest parts of Los Angeles, while Friedkin keeps things moving at a relentless clip. Welcome to L.A.

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within (2010)

 

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: A MAN WITHIN  

    D: Yony Leyser                                       (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢

Wm. S. Burroughs queer junky rule breaker rich kid finger amputee Beat icon acid head novelist gun nut wife killer punk godfather shotgun artist lover of cats and isn't it all some great cosmic joke well Bill would think so a crazy cut up goof for which he was the keeper of the punchline.

They Died With Their Boots On (1941)

 

THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON  

    D: Raoul Walsh                 (1941)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Arthur Kennedy,

    Charley Grapewin, Gene Lockhart, Anthony Quinn,

    Sydney Greenstreet, Regis Toomey, Hattie McDaniel

Errol Flynn plays George Armstrong Custer, from West Point to the Little Big Horn. That's pretty good casting, really, and the movie's a lively piece of storybook history, as long as you buy into the storybook without asking too many questions about the history. Custer's legacy is complicated. The last of eight films Flynn and Olivia de Havilland starred in together. Anthony Quinn, already ethnically typecast, plays Crazy Horse.

The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974)

 

THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123  (1974)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joseph Sargent

    Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, 

    Hector Elizondo, Earl Hindman, Jerry Stiller,

    Tony Roberts, Kenneth McMillan, Doris Roberts

Four heavily armed men, all wearing eyeglasses, mustaches, brimmed hats and overcoats, hijack a New York subway car and demand a million dollars for the release of its 17 passengers. When the call first comes in to transit security, it just seems too crazy - what is this, anyway, a movie? - but the hijackers aren't kidding. A tense, white-knuckle thriller, unencumbered by anything resembling a subplot. You're in the story from the opening minute, and that's where you stay for the duration. Walter Matthau plays the plainclothes security officer who takes over the hostage negotiations, Robert Shaw (lethally understated) is the lead hijacker, and Woody Allen's buddy Tony Roberts plays the mayor's troubleshooting deputy. This was filmed during John Lindsay's time as mayor of New York, but see if you don't think the mayor in the movie looks suspiciously like Ed Koch.