UN VOYAGE DANS LES TENEBRES: Week 2 – Film Noir Lite?

Warning: SPOILERS ahead!! Not all noir films are whodunnits, but I Wake Up Screaming and Laura most definitely are. If you haven’t watched either film yet . . . well, WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?!!? Put this down, and go watch these films immediately. Then we’ll talk! The two films we watched for our second Film Noir class with Elliot Lavine through Stanford University …

UN VOYAGE DANS LES TENEBRES: Notes on Film Noir – Week 1

Here’s what I think I know about film noir. It’s a style that nobody set out to invent. There was no meeting of minds that said, “Let’s invent a new genre.” Instead, directors – a great many of them expatriates from Europe, allowed the surreal visuals and dark mood of German Expressionism to affect the look …

REEL LAUGHS: Mrs. O’Malley and Mr. Malone

“Forward: The producers of this picture feel that the attorney depicted herein should be disbarred and strongly suggest that the American Bar Association do something about it.” Recently, my friend Scott K. Ratner made the claim that the wild success of the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man (1934) did much to waylay the popularity …

COFFEE TABLE BOOK TALES: Everson’s Trio of Crime Film Classics

William K. Everson (1929 – 1996) was a film historian, educator and archivist who was one of the guiding lights in preserving films from the silent period through the 1940’s. Born in England, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1950 where he put his experience in film publicity to use for Monogram Pictures, a small, …

REEL PROCEDURALS: From Headquarters (1933)

Without a doubt, the most prestigious film studio during Hollywood’s Golden Age was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Under the auspices of its leader, Louis B. Mayer, MGM adapted classics and concentrated on wholesome family fare and “big pictures.” This was the era when actors were mostly shackled to one studio, and MGM boasted of having “more stars than …

REEL PUZZLES: The Phantom of Crestwood

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the 1960 Doris Day mystery, Midnight Lace. A discussion about the variety of cinematic mysteries ensued, and my friend Scott K. Ratner kindly offered a list of what he considered to be “the classic whodunnit films” (despite its twists, Midnight Lace is not a “whodunnit” as we think of classic …

MIDNIGHT LACE or, You Can’t Go Home Again

Growing up, I watched so much television that it’s a wonder I can form words into sentences. Today, with cable and streaming services, we have access to four hundred options at any given minute, and yet all too often I find there’s nothing to watch. In the 1960’s, we had six or seven stations to …

FAST FORWARDING INTO ‘21

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) Does anybody want to hear me vent about 2020? Because, you know, I can do it, and I will . . . that is, if anyone wants to listen. To be honest, however, …

A HUNDRED YEARS OF CHRISTIE – THE FINAL CHAPTER: The Millennium and Beyond

“In my end is my beginning.” Many books begin with an epigraph; Agatha Christie’s characters speak in them. The occasion, more often than not, is dark. After all, these people are bearing witness to – or maybe committing – murder.  “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” …

A HUNDRED YEARS OF CHRISTIE, PART SEVEN: Mistress of Media in the 80’s

When I was a student, focused on the study of literature and theatre, I learned a hard lesson: there was a schism between those works which are deemed “art” and those classified as “popular culture”. As a child, my love of comic books was derided as . . . well, childish. Studying drama at U.C. …