Wise Blood is a 1979 Southern Gothic dark comedy-drama directed by John Huston. It’s based on the 1952 novel of the same name by Flannery O’Connor.

The screenplay was adapted by brothers Michael and Benedict Fitzgerald.

The film stars Brad Dourif, Harry Dean Stanton, Amy Wright, Dan Schor and Ned Beatty.

Hazel Motes (Dourif), a young man recently discharged from the army heads back to his hometown of Taulkinham, Georgia. He meets a collection of eccentric characters who all claim to be touched by god in some way; a blind street preacher and his adoptive daughter (Stanton & Wright), a dumb guy who believes everything (Schor), and a traveling preacher who takes money from every town he travels through (Beatty). Seeing the hypocrisy of these false prophets, he decides to start his own church called “The Church of the Truth Without Christ” which preaches the gospel of no one is more or less divine than anyone else.

The screenplay was developed by first time screenwriters Michael and Benedict Fitzgerald. The Fitzgerald brothers’ father Robert was the literary executor who handled all of Flannery O’Connor’s work. O’Connor babysat the Fitzgerald brothers when they were children.

Director John Huston originally wanted Tommy Lee Jones to play Hazel, and reached out to Dourif to play Enoch, the part that eventually went to Dan Schor. Dourif had his sights set on Hazel, claiming Enoch was a little too similar to his character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Wise Blood and Eyes of Laura Mars were two movies that came out a year apart, and were the first to solidify the Brad Dourif image we know today. The intense, gravelly voiced Dourif that would go onto embody Chucky in the Child’s Play franchise.

I really love the work of Flannery O’Connor. She wrote two novels, and 31 short stories, as well as movie reviews and poetry. Her writing and characters were described as grotesque. Her stories were about morally flawed characters from the south, and she often drew upon real life experiences.

She was also obsessed with southerners obsession with religion, and how religion treated the disabled, or “the afflicted”, as she had been from her struggles with lupus, which she suffered from for most of her adult life.

She died at the age of 39.

American psycho Tom Ripley is sent to Italy by the wealthy father of handsome fucboi Philippe Greenleaf. Tom is to bring Philippe back home to San Francisco, but there’s one problem; Philippe doesn’t wanna leave Italy.

Luckily something weird happens. Tom becomes obsessed with Philippe and his girlfriend Marge. He has so much fun being a third wheel, and desperately wants this life for himself.

Philippe becomes really sick of Tom, and starts to emotionally abuse him. One day Philippe catches Tom dressed in his clothes that Tom took from Philippe’s closet. This is Philippe’s last straw, and he pranks Tom on a yacht trip, leaving him stranded in the middle of the Mediterranean on a small dinghy.

Tom then devises a plan to kill Philippe and steal his identity, because that’s what friends are for, after all.

The Talented Mr. Ripley is one of my favorite novels of all time. It is a masterpiece of American literature. Patricia Highsmith has this very uncanny ability to weave a story that puts you in the head of a sociopath, and gets you to identify with them. She shows you how this character thinks step by step, and the events that led them to make their decisions.

Then that scares you because you’re identifying with a guy who just killed someone with a small green Buddha statue.

It terrifies you, but you can’t help but read on because you’re afraid of what they’ll do next.

The first time I read this book was the first time I had read Highsmith’s work. I was a senior in high school and just started to get into “classic literature.” I could not put this book down. I read it every free moment I had for a week, and couldn’t stop thinking about it.

There is a specific quality about Highsmith’s writing that is funny, because even though she gives you an intimate view of her characters, she’s also very cruel to them. Very cruel things happen to her characters and she also describes them in very unfavorable ways, so you can identify with them but you don’t automatically empathize with them. There’s an element of judgement in her work, and this juxtaposition is very funny to me.

It’s funny the way Uncut Gems is funny. It’s funny to be stressed out sometimes.

I grew up watching French language movies with my mom. She showed me a lot of movies she saw when she lived in France while she was going to University. She loves this movie. She loved showing me these kinds of movies.

It was a huge international success and made Alain Delon a movie star all over the world. Alain Delon was maybe the most beautiful human being on the planet at the height of his stardom. He had these impossibly gorgeous blue eyes that pierced through the lens of the camera. He was like if Leonardo DiCaprio and young Brad Pitt fused together and spoke French. My mom used to tell me “every girl in France thought they were going to marry Alain Delon some day. Of course none of them did, because you can’t marry a fantasy.”

Purple Noon is a gorgeous looking movie. The film stock looks like it was bathed in sunlight. The colors are so bright and appealing, you just want to reach into the screen and taste it.

It really sells a sailing trip to Italy.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a 1972 American comedy/drama/science fiction/military/satirical film (phew) directed by George Roy Hill. It is an adaptation of the 1969 novel of the same name by Kurt Vonnegut.

Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. We see the story of his life in fractured, out of sequence vignettes; His time as a POW in WWII, where he survived the firebombing of Dresden, his flourishing optometry business, the time he survived a plane crash, and when he gets abducted by aliens. We experience him jumping from his past, his present and his future.

This is a really underrated movie, and a surprisingly good adaptation of the novel. It’s not perfect. The novel has so many other moving parts, and elements that would be impossible to fit in a film that’s only 100 minutes long. They really just streamline it by focusing on Billy’s temporal crisis, and specifically dealing with his PTSD.

The first time I tried to read Slaughterhouse-Five was when I was too young to appreciate it. I was in middle school, and it was so dense I could not get my head around it. Cut to college and I’m reading it specifically because I was going through Vonnegut’s work. I had just read Cat’s Cradle and Player Piano and loved both of them, so I decided to give S-F another try. Today my favorite novels gravitate around Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith or Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, depending on the day you’re talking to me.

The thing the movie adapts best from the novel is giving the audience the disorienting feeling of time jumping from Billy’s perspective. It’s maybe the best visualization of trauma that I’ve seen in a movie. That feeling of not being present in your current surroundings, your mind being stuck reliving the worst moments of your life, experiencing your past and your present all at once. One example of this is when, in the movie, they show Billy being apprehended by the Nazis, and they’re taking his photo to be like “look at all these hostages we caught” and they intercut footage of him later in his life, having his photo taken with his family to celebrate his optometry practice officially open for business. He might be posing for a picture with his wife and kids, but he is also in those barracks being tortured years earlier.

George Roy Hill is probably best remembered for directing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman in 1969. It won 4 Academy Awards; best original screenplay, best cinematography, best original score and best song (Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head).

Slaughterhouse-Five was Hill’s follow up to Butch & Sundance. It won the grand jury prize at the 25th annual Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for the Palme d’Or. I’ve always been really curious as to why this was never embraced as a great movie. It’s not held in high regard like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Network.

This was Hill’s blank check film after making one of the most beloved movies with two majorly beloved movie stars and he could have had anyone he wanted to be in the movie, which brings me to my theory as to why this movie isn’t better remembered or held up to the other great films of the 70’s; it doesn’t have any stars. The cast is great, and there are many stand out performances, like Ron Liebman as the maniacal Lazzaro or Eugene Roche as Derby.

The lead actor playing Billy Pilgrim is Michael Sacks and… gah, I’m sorry but he’s just not a leading actor. I don’t think you need a star for this role, but Michael Sacks just doesn’t have that charisma you need to lead a movie. There is a genuine sweetness to his performance, which you do need because that’s who Billy Pilgrim is in the book, but I just don’t get the interiority of what the character is going through, mostly because I just don’t care about Michael Sacks.

Who was a young actor in 1972 who could play the same character in very different phases in his life? Who could have pulled it off better at the time? It’s a tough role for an actor. Maybe Sacks had the best audition.

Kurt Vonnegut loved this movie. He was quoted to have said “I drool and cackle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book.” That’s a pretty great quote to have about your own work.

This is another movie where the only consistent love Billy has in his life after the war that seems genuine is for his dog, Spot.

The film is about an elderly man living in Rome who’s trying desperately to keep his rented room for him and his dog.

Umberto Domenico Ferrari is a retired civil servant who only wants one thing in life; to receive a 20% increase on his pension so he can afford to live in his one room apartment with his very funny, well trained dog, a Jack Russell Terrier named Flike.

Umberto’s landlady wants to kick him out so she can move her rich new fiance into her house. She makes daily living really difficult for Umberto, even going so far as to rent his room for couples to have sex. She gives him a month to pay his overdue rent, which he can only partially pay off, but she insists it’s all or nothing, as incentive to get the hell out.

I could go through the plot of Umberto D. and what the film meant to the Italian neorealism movement, but I’d rather let this Martin Scorsese intro from 2002 sell it for me.

De Sica used all nonprofessional actors in this film. Carlo Battisti, who stars as the titular Umberto, was a linguistics professor at the university of Florence, whom De Sica happened to meet. His performance is very naturalistic and heartbreaking. It’s just so real.

The real star is Flike, who is probably the best movie dog in cinema history. Jack Russell Terriers have always been pretty common movie dogs. They’re small, cute, obedient, friendly, and can learn tricks pretty easily, as flike demonstrates throughout the film.

He puts the dog from The Mask, My Dog Skip, or Frasier to shame, but to be fair they might all be the same dog.

I watched this movie for the first time only a week ago. It had been on my watchlist for many years, but I kept putting it off. I knew Umberto would be waiting for me when I was ready.

When I was first looking for a dog to adopt, I was told that the dog I was meant to take care of will find me. If you’re lucky, and in the right headspace, the stars will align to bring you two together. I feel the same way about romantic relationships and movies. Sometimes the air is just right.

Sometimes a movie makes an impression on you at exactly the right moment you were meant to see it. Cut to me crying my eyes out at the end of Umberto D. and putting it in my top 10 movies of all time list.

If I had seen this movie when I was younger, I would have probably dismissed it for being too treacly or too simplistic. “The story just unfolds” my insufferable 23 year old self would have said.

Now I’m a 37 year old man, living by myself, struggling financially and in a codependent relationship with my own dog. This movie hit me really hard. It really speaks to the unique relationship people have with their dogs, and the sacrifices they make to have this love in their life

I know it’s sad to say, but my relationship with my dog Smokey has been longer than any romantic relationship I’ve ever been in. Your relationship with your pet is an emotionally intimate one. You get to know each others patterns, and you take note of when those patterns change, and how to adjust. You spend every day worrying about her, and in constant fear of “am I going to be able to take care of her?” or “will I make enough money this month to buy her food?” or “wtf why is pet insurance going up as she gets older?” The scenarios that run through your head can get pretty dark. Then you feel a cold nose brushing against your leg, or a tongue gently licking your hand, or a paw on your foot, as if to say “I’m here” and you know that everything is going to be ok as long as you’re together.

Umberto D. is available to watch on the Criterion Channel.

I’ve always thought of Lee Marvin as the ultimate “dad movie star.” He’s not an actor that my dad particularly loved but every movie he’s ever been in played on WPIX 11’s sunday afternoon movie, which is classically associated with dad movies.

The Dirty Dozen, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Bad Day at Black Rock, The Professionals, and The Caine Mutiny are all dad-core movies about the toughest guys in the world. They get the job done, and they’re a little scary.

Who’s Lee Marvin?

Lee Marvin was an American actor who was best remembered for his signature “tough guy” roles. He was born Lamont Marvin, Jr. and his career spanned from the 1940’s all the way into the 1980’s. He got his start playing scary henchmen in movies like Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat. In 1966 he won the academy award for best actor for his performance in the Jane Fonda western Cat Ballou.

There’s this unspoken quality to a lot of actors from the 40’s and 50’s, which is that they have been to war. I look at a performance from Lee Marvin and I think “shit, this guy is intense. Has he killed people?” He was a no bullshit sort of guy, and there was a no bullshit style of acting to his roles. There’s no character there, this is a real guy.

Recently, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, when I decided to save some money and stay home, I had a little double feature in the comfort of my own living room.

The Killers and Point Blank are two Lee Marvin movies from the 60’s, beautifully shot in Panavision technicolor, also starring Angie Dickinson. In both films, Marvin plays a killer on a mission; one of vengeance and one of truth.

The Killers (1964)

“There is more than one way to kill a man!”

The Killers is a 1964 American crime film produced and directed by Don Siegel. It’s loosely adapted from Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short story of the same name.

It stars Marvin, along with Dickinson, John Cassavetes, Clu Gulager and Ronald Reagan in his final acting role, before retiring and getting into politics.

Two hitmen enter a school for the blind and gun down a non resistant teaching aid, Johnny North (Cassavetes). One of the hitmen, Charlie (Marvin) is puzzled by why his target didn’t try to escape or beg for his life. He then goes on a mission to find out more about the people who hired him, and why they wanted Johnny North bumped off.

The Killers is the second adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story.

Steve McQueen and George Peppard were both strongly considered for the role of Johnny North, but newcomer John Cassavetes won the part due to the insistence of director Don Siegel. After Cassavetes was cast, the crew found out he could barely drive.

This marks Ronald Reagan’s final acting performance before going into politics, and his only villainous role in a film. He would later go on to be a villain in life.

Point Blank (1967)

“He thrived on two kinds of people… his victims and his women!”

Point Blank is a 1967 American crime film directed by John Boorman.

It stars Marvin who is paired again with Dickinson, along with Keenan Wynn, John Vernon and Carroll O’Connor.

In this film, Marvin plays the enigmatic professional heist man named Walker. Walker teams up with an old friend, Mal Reese to rob a major crime outfit, and meet up with a courier on Alcatraz Island. Mal double crosses Walker and shoots him, leaving him for dead on the abandoned prison island. Walker recovers though, and goes on a revenge mission against everyone who set him up.

Point Blank is an adaptation of the pulp novel The Hunter, written by Donald Westlake, under the nom de plum, Richard Stark.

This film’s real hero is the editor, Henry Berman. Point Blank revolutionized the way Crime cinema looked with it’s elliptical, French-New wave inspired editing techniques. Berman and director, John Boorman use fractured flashbacks, jarring cuts and overlapping sound to create this dream-like atmosphere, which blurs the line between Walker’s reality and a dying man’s fantasy. Two shows that come to mind that seem to be heavily inspired by this film are The Sopranos and True Detective.

Another fun fact; Point Blank was the first movie ever shot in Alcatraz after it had ceased to operate as a prison in 1963.

Hud is a 1963 American contemporary western produced and directed by Martin Ritt. The screenplay was written by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., based on the novel Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry.

The film stars Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, Melvyn Douglas, and Brandon DeWilde.

Hud Bannon (Newman) is the ambitious, but unprincipled son of Texas cattle rancher, Homer Bannon (Douglas), a man who is of strong moral convictions. Lonnie (DeWilde) is Homer’s teenage grandson that lives with him. Lonnie’s father Norman died when Lonnie was a baby. Lonnie looks up to his grandfather, but also looks up to his uncle Hud, who’s viewed by the town as the local bad boy.

Lonnie has a crush on his grandfather’s housekeeper Alma (Patricia Neal), but Hud has been making moves on her too. Alma repeatedly rejects Hud’s advances, because she’s been mistreated by self centered men in the past.

When one of Homer’s cows suddenly dies, he sends Lonnie to pick up Hud in town and bring him back to the ranch. When a doctor inspects the dead bovine, he tells Homer that it died from foot-and-mouth disease. Homer is devastated because this means his entire cattle is infected, and he has to kill every animal on his ranch in order to control the outbreak. Hud blames the dad for not noticing the sick cattle before he purchased them, and suggests they just keep the outbreak quiet and sell off every last cow as soon as possible before word gets out. Homer is repulsed by this suggestion.

The first time I saw Hud was in 2022, in a Criterion Movie Club that sprung out of the early days of COVID lockdown. I’ve seen it 4 times since then.

I love this movie. Paul Newman is amazing, but it’s really hard to pick a bad performance in this movie. Every member of the cast gets a scene where they sink buckets. Every line from Melvyn Douglas has the weight of a thousand years behind it.

The first thing you notice about this movie is the haunting original score by Elmer Bernstein. It starts even before the picture fully fades in from black. The score is sparse, kind of reminiscent of Johnny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood soundtrack. It’s this very somber guitar strumming that drives the story, immediately placing the audience in the atmosphere of the story.

The second thing is the cinematography. James Wong Howe, the legendary formerly blacklisted cinematographer shot this movie. Wong Howe used high contrast black and white panavision, unbalanced lighting, and reflected light from the ground. This visual style emphasizes the vast, empty Texas landscape and mirrors the moral decay of the characters.

The director of this film was Martin Ritt. Ritt got his start in theater and the early days of TV. He belonged to the group theater and was involved with many left leaning theater movements. His plays were often socially conscious. In the 50’s he was blacklisted, and he testified in front of congress that he was not a member of the communist party, but refused to name names. He struggled for a while, teaching acting, but then struck gold by directing 3 films in a row starring Paul Newman; The Long Hot Summer, Paris Blues and Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man. This was Newman’s blow up period. He was just starting to get hot. This brought Ritt back into the director’s chair.

Hud belongs to a series of films Ritt made in the 60’s that tackled major cinematic genres, often shaping their traditional motifs to suit his own evolving cultural visions. The other films on this list include:

• Five Branded Women (1960)

• Paris Blues (1961)

• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)

• Hombre (1967)

• The Brotherhood (1968)

Hud is an interesting example of what is now called “revisionist westerns.” It has all the tropes of a classic western, (riding horses, wide shots of landscape, the power of good and evil) even though it’s set in contemporary times. If the western, as a genre is a fantasized narrative of how America sees itself, the revisionist western is the “um, actually” response to that fantasized narrative. It holds up a mirror to America and says, “if we’re not careful, this is how we could end up.”

We are not meant to like the character of Hud Bannon. Hud is Trump. Hud is all of Trump’s sycophants. Hud is late stage capitalism at it’s worse. Hud is the republican party’s response to COVID 19. Hud is quite literally the CEO of Taylor farms, which is responsible for the current outbreak of cyclosporiasis (diarrhea parasite) that’s ravaging the country right now.

Hud takes and takes and does not care what happens to the lives he’s ruined.

It’s a shame we don’t really have a Martin Ritt that can make a movie about the country we’ve become. The country he warned us we would turn into.

I just purchased this movie on Blu-ray, which was recently put out by The Criterion Collection. I ordered it on Barnes & Noble during their July 50% off flash sale. It was a pre-order, so I waited two weeks for it’s arrival. It finally came yesterday. It’s a beautiful disc.

What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? is a 1962 American psychological thriller starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The screenplay was adapted by Lukas Heller, from the novel of the same name by Henry Farrell.

The film was directed by Robert Aldrich.

The film tells the story of two sisters, both former stars, as they age while fading into cultural obscurity in their Hollywood mansion.

CAST

Baby Jane Hudson - Bette Davis

Blanche Hudson - Joan Crawford

Edwin Flagg - Victor Buono

Mrs. Bates - Anna Lee

In 1917, Baby Jane Hudson is a child star on the vaudeville circuit. She’s a spoiled brat who’s indulged by her father, who acts as her manager. Jane’s older sister Blanche lives in the shadow of her shitty sister, and their father treats her cruelly. Their mother tells Blanche “look I know your father and sister are pieces of shit, but don’t hold it against them, k?” Blanche spends her childhood swallowing her tongue.

When the sisters reach adulthood, the tables have turned. Jane can’t transition from child star to movie actress as an adult, but Blanche is a famous, and respected movie star. One night after returning home from a party, the sisters crash their car into the front gate of their mansion, and Blanche is left a paraplegic.

Now it’s 1962 and the Hudson sisters live reclusive lives in their manson off of Blanche’s film earnings. Jane has become a miserable alcoholic, who’s physically and verbally abusive towards Blanche, who’s confined to a wheelchair. She’s also developed a skill for perfect vocal mimicry which is extremely unnerving.

Blanche’s movies are starting to play on TV, renewing her popularity among her fans, which further increases Jane’s jealousy and resentment of her.

Jane soon discovers that Blanche plans to sell the mansion and commit Jane to a psychiatric hospital. Jane traps Blanche in her room by locking the door from the outside, and tying her to her bed. She also pulls the phone off the hook in her room, cutting her off completely for the outside world.

This movie is legendary for the famous feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Multiple TV shows have explored this aspect of it’s legacy. Watch Ryan Murphy’s show The Feud, if you want more sensationalized details of the story.

I want to focus on the sub genre this movie kicked off; The Hagsploitation Picture.

Also known as “the psycho-biddy,” or my personal favorite, “Grande Dame Guignol” these are films about older women who lose their minds and are driven to kill.

Although technically, Sunset Boulevard is the movie to plant the seed of this sub genre of thriller/horror, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was so successful, it launched many copycats, either starring Davis, Crawford, or other movie stars of a previous generation, trying to recreate that same magic.

The following is a list of other Grande Dame Guignol films.

Strait-Jacket (1964)

Joan Crawford returns in a film who’s script was written by Robert Bloch, the author who penned Psycho. Crawford portrays Lucy Harbin, a woman who was just released from a mental hospital, where she served her time after murdering her husband and his lover with an axe 20 years earlier.

Now she’s trying to get her life back on track, reconnecting with her daughter, but there’s one problem… more people keep dying around Lucy.

Who Slew Auntie Roo? (1972)

A 1970’s contemporary take on Hansel and Gretel starring Shelley Winters.

Every year, Rosie Forrest (or “auntie Roo”, I guess, played by Winters) holds a Christmas party for the ten best behaved children at the local orphanage. Auntie Roo seems all warmth and smiles, but she secretly keeps the mummified corpse of her daughter in the attic, who died playfully sliding down the staircase bannister. Auntie Roo holds regular seances to try and communicate with her daughter, held by a crooked medium and his assistant.

The medium gaslights poor Auntie Roo into thinking her daughter’s spirit is actually talking to her, all the while driving Roo stark raving mad. As Roo’s mental instability grows, the well mannered orphans are the ones who end up suffering.

The Nanny (1965)

Move over, Fran Drescher. Bette Davis is stepping in to show us how Grande Dame Guignol is done. In this film, a troubled boy, who’s being blamed for his younger sister’s sudden death, suspects the family’s long-serving nanny (Davis) is responsible.

That Cold Day In the Park (1969)

In this Robert Altman film, Sandy Dennis plays Frances Austen, an unmarried woman in her late 30’s/early 40’s who has inherited her late parents apartment. One day she sees a young man sleeping in the park, during a heavy rainstorm.

Frances takes in the man, who is mute, and gives him a bath and a place to sleep. When he settles into the guest room, she locks him in. Twists follow as the lonely spinster trope is turned upside down in this intense psychological drama.

Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

The spiritual sequel to Baby Jane, also directed by Robert Aldrich. They tried to reunite Davis and Crawford after Baby Jane’s success, but the two refused to work together again. This one stars Bette Davis and Olivia de Haviland in the intended Crawford role.

In 1927, young southern belle Charlotte Hollis and her lover John Mayhew (Bruce Dern) plan to elope during her father’s party on their antebellum mansion in Louisiana. John Mayhew is found murdered at the party, and 37 years later, Charlotte becomes an elderly recluse (Bette Davis), living in the mansion, with the murder case remaining unsolved. Now she’s facing eviction from the highway commision, but when you tell Charlotte to leave her home, she’ll drop a statue right on your head.

That’s what’s fun about the Grande Dame Guignol. They are slasher films starring the best movie stars to have ever graced the screen. In most cases these actresses have won or have at least been nominated for Academy Awards.

What if Michael Myers was Meryl Streep, and instead of killing his sister, she killed her husband for stepping out on her and has now become a hoarder in her dilapidated house?

The term “Hagsploitation” is problematic in it’s agist labeling, but Grande Dame Guignol sounds more operatic, more official.

In many cases, these roles gave their leading actresses a second or third act in their careers, and got to play challenging, larger than life characters.

The Grande Dame Guignol movie is not simply saying “check out this crazy old broad swing an axe!” It’s saying “look at what society has done to this woman, and holy shit she has an axe! Watch out!”

I’ve been trying to figure out how to balance some new life obligations and writing here.

In January I started writing for a podcast called The Truth. It’s a fiction podcast that produces original radio plays of all different genres. It’s the brainchild of my boss, Jonathan Mitchell who’s one of the best audio engineers I’ve ever worked with.

It’s been a really great, experience being back in a writer’s room and producing fiction.

My first episode was published back in May. It’s called Midnight Screening, and it comes from a personal place for me.

Something else I’ve been dealing with since January is my mom’s declining health. My mom has had 3 brain tumor surgeries since 1993. The last one in 2016 almost killed her. Tumors keep growing back if they are not cut at the root, like a weed that destroys the foundation of a house.

Over the last 10 years that weed has slowly grown back. Since my mom is in her 70’s, another surgery wouldn’t be able to help her, because she wouldn’t be able to recover from the operation. The tumor affects her memory, her motor skills, her basic daily functions of living. She has become reclusive, paranoid, scared, not the mom that raised me. It’s very hard to watch her physical and mental decline.

I wish I knew how to talk about it more, but I can really only do so through movies.

Midnight Screening is about a complicated father/daughter relationship and the movie theater they run together.

I hope you enjoy it, and listen to all the other amazing episodes of The Truth.

CAST

Chet Siegel as Hannah

David Deblinger as Louis

Jackie Hoffman as Aunt Rina

Jim Wetzel as Bill

Sadie Mitchell as young Hannah

Featuring the voices of The Truth writers room; Hunter Nelson, Mac Rogers, Mary McDonnell and myself as the movie theater patrons.

Directed and sound designed by Jonathan Mitchell.

• The Introduction/Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach - The film opens with the MC, Deems Taylor talking directly to you, the viewer, introducing the film and the orchestra, as they tune their instruments in half light/half shadow.

• The Nutcracker Suite by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Selections from the 1892 ballet suite underscore scenes depicting the changing of the seasons from summer to autumn to winter. A variety of dances are presented with fairies, fish, flowers, mushrooms, and leaves, including “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”, “Chinese Dance”, “Arabian Dance”, “Russian Dance”, “Dance of the Flutes” and “Waltz of the Flowers.”

• The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Paul Dukas - Mickey Mouse stars in this segment as the young apprentice to sorcerer, Yen Sid. Mickey attempts some of his master’s spells, but cannot control the army of broom people he’s created.

• The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravisnky - A visual history of the Earth’s beginnings is depicted to selected sections of the ballet score. The sequence progresses from the planet’s formation to the first living creatures, followed by the reign and extinction of the dinosaurs.

• INTERMISSION - We meet our hard working orchestra.

• The Pastoral Symphony by Ludwig von Beethoven - A mythical Greco–Roman world of colorful centaurs and “centaurettes“, cupids, fauns and other figures from classical mythology is portrayed to Beethoven’s music. A gathering for a festival to honor Bacchus, the god of wine, is interrupted by Zeus, who creates a storm and directs Vulcan to forge lightning bolts for him to throw at the attendees.

  

  Dance of the Hours by Amilcare Ponchielli - A comic ballet in four sections: Madame Upanova and her ostriches (Morning); Hyacinth Hippo and her servants (Afternoon); Elephanchine and her bubble-blowing elephant troupe (Evening); and Ben Ali Gator and his troop of alligators (Night). The finale finds all of the characters dancing together until their palace collapses.

• Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky and Ave Maria by Franz Schubert - On Walpurgis Night, the giant devil Chernabog awakes and summons evil spirits and restless souls from their graves to Bald Mountain. The spirits dance and fly through the air until driven back by the sound of an Angelus bell as night fades into dawn. A chorus is heard singing Ave Maria as a line of robed monks is depicted walking with lighted torches through a forest and into the ruins of a cathedral.

This might come off as a contrarian take, and I might piss off some hardcore Disney fans out there, but I think Fantasia might be my favorite film in that initial run of Disney classics. There, I said it.

Surprising no one, when I first watched this at like 4 or 5 years old, my favorite part was Night on Bald Mountain. I was transfixed by the mountain demon unfolding his leathery bat wings, and playing with the fiery satyrs dancing on his hands. Now watching that segment, I can’t believe anyone animated it. It’s so CREEPY and there is so much detail in the movement. It’s what I think of when I think of the term “pure cinema.” It’s a story that can only be told through the medium of an animated film. I struggle to think of anything that even compares to it.

An amendment to last week’s post, THIS was probably the first horror movie I ever saw, technically.

The sorcerer Yen Sid is supposedly based on Walt Disney himself (it’s just ‘Disney’ spelled backwards.) The tell tale sign is the disappointing eyebrow raise.

I like throwing this on during the holidays. Maybe it’s because of the nutcracker segment, or just the memories of watching this around the holidays with my mom, but it gives me a christmasy feeling when I watch it.

Watership Down is a 1978 British animated animal drama, written, produced and directed by Martin Rosen.

The film is based on the 1972 novel of the same name by Richard Adams.

It tells the story of a colony of rabbits who, in the wake of their warren being destroyed by land developers, search for a new home. Their journey towards greener pastures is as long as it is treacherous, filled with deadly perils, such as viscous predators, and the weapons of man.

CAST

Hazel - John Hurt

Fiver - Richard Breier

Bigwig - Michael Graham Cox

Woundwort - Harry Andrews

Kehaar - Zero Mostel

The movie starts off with some of the most beautiful world building ever drawn.

We are introduced to the world via a biblical style tale of the prince of rabbits, El-Ahrairah. Long ago, god (referred to in the rabbit folklore as Frith) created all the animals and made them all grass eaters, living harmoniously. The rabbits multiplied too fast though, and took over all the grass to eat.

The other animals prayed to Frith for help, and Frith warned El-Ahrairah to control his people. El-Ahrairah was all snotty about it, and told Frith he’d think about it. This angered Frith, who then gave each animal a different gift, and made most of them predators that could kill rabbits. Satisfied that El-Ahrairah had learned his lesson, Frith gave the rabbits the gift of speed and cunning.

Then we actually start the story, where we see a colony of rabbits eating and hanging out in their adorable little rabbit community. They sit on their asses all day, eat grass, and twitch their little pink noses.

A young rabbit named Fiver has an apocalyptic vision of their warren being destroyed by some devastating event. He tells his older brother Hazel, who takes Fiver’s premonitions seriously, while the other rabbits scoff at them. Hazel brings up the dreams to the elder chief rabbit, but he’s like “uh… yeah, thanks for stopping by.”

Hazel and Fiver, along with other rabbits in tow with names like Bigwig, Blackberry, Pipkin, Dandelion, Silver and Violet all leave the warren in the middle of the night, in search of a new home.

Meanwhile they are being hunted by the ugliest rabbit in the world, the evil General Woundwort.

Watership Down is my favorite animated movie of all time, full stop. It’s one of those movies that has always been with me in my life. I remember watching it, as far as my memory goes back.

I must have been 5 or 6 years old the first time I watched it, because I can remember the couch I was sitting on with my mom at the time. I will forever connect the memory of seeing woundwort lunge at that vicious dog, with the rough texture of that grey and black striped couch in our Forest Hills home.

In many ways, this was probably the first horror movie I ever watched.

This was a movie that played on WPIX every Easter, which is hilarious. At one point I taped it onto a blank VHS tape on tv, and watched that for years. My mom would be horrified, and be like “you’re watching that movie where the rabbits die again?”

There’s something about the idea of taking something so cute, and using it to tell a story of struggle and despair, that has always appealed to me. Cartoons in the 70’s were good at incepting the idea of existential dread into the minds of many soon-to-be-anxious children.

Richard Adams wrote the novel, after years of telling his daughters these episodic stories about rabbits that he would make up on long car rides with them.

Has your dad published a book based on his weird stories he told you growing up? If he did, that’s really cool.

Watership Down stirred up a lot of controversy since it’s initial release, because of it’s G rating. Despite the fact that there is animate blood and gore, and depicts extreme violence between animals, it was still considered suitable for all ages. The idea of animation even being appreciated by adults was unheard of back then.

After over 40 years of angry letters from parents to the British Board of Film Classification, the film was finally re-rated PG. Cowards.

Let’s turn back the clock to 2020.

It’s the middle of the pandemic, but my girlfriend at the time and I decide to leave the city and stay in an isolated carriage house in the middle of Connecticut. We end up staying there for over a month. Some day I’ll write more about this time in my life, because it was truly insane.

One night I showed her Watership Down. She had never seen it before. I tell her something so many men have told so many women that I’m sure they all roll their eyes at because it’s so stupid; “This movie means a lot to me. It kind of defined my personality.”

I always get very excited when I introduce a movie to someone. When you grow up as a movie obsessed nerd with not a lot of friends, sharing a movie you know backwards and forwards is a very big deal. It’s a sign that they want to let you into their world.

Under the cover of a large quilted blanket she found in the linen closet, we watched Hazel and Fiver lead the rabbits to the promised land. When the person you share an “important” movie with enjoys it, it’s a pretty life affirming feeling.

I do this annoying thing, where I look over to observe other people’s reactions when we watch a movie or show. Friends and romantic partners have called me out on it before, because it’s objectively off putting. I’m trying to get better about that. It’s just how I express my enthusiasm.

She’s liking it. She’s really liking it. She’s asking me questions about the production, and I can answer it immediately. This is pathetic, but I felt like I was 9 feet tall.

The movie ends, then she asks the most romantic question I’ve ever heard; “Can we watch that again?”

We watched it again from the beginning. There were some nice moments in 2020.

DAY 30

Hollywood Blacklist #5

Body and Soul is a 1947 sports noir film directed by blacklisted director Robert Rossen. The script was written by blacklisted writer Abraham Polonsky, and the film stars John Garfield, one of the blacklist’s most tragic casualties.

The film tells the story of the life of a promising boxer, and the lure of success and money that ultimately leads to his downfall. It is considered one of the greatest boxing movies of all time. Martin Scorsese has cited it’s influence on him when he made Raging Bull.

CAST

Charley Davis - John Garfield

Peg Born - Lilli Palmer

Alice - Hazel Brooks

Anne Revere - Anna Davis

Quinn - William Conrad

Shorty Polaski - Joseph Pevney

Ben Chaplin - Canada Lee

Charley Davis is what they used to call “a real palooka.” A dumb kid from the lower east side. He likes fighting and hanging out with his boys at the pool hall. He’s a high school dropout, but ultimately a good guy with a lot of moxie. He’s got a crush on a girl named Peg, who’s aspiring to be a painter, and he’s got a friend named Shorty who’s “the funny one.”

It’s everything you think of when you hear of tenement life in New York.

Charley wins an amateur boxing match and is taken on by promoter Quinn.

Charley’s parents own a candy store. They’re honest, hard working immigrants. His mother doesn’t want him to fight, but when Charley’s father (played by Art Smith) is accidentally killed, and the candy store goes out of business, Charley sets up a fight for money to pay for the funeral costs.

His career blooms as he wins fight after fight, but soon an unethical promoter named Roberts begins to show an interest in Charley, and Charley finds himself faced with increasingly difficult choices.

This is one of those classic movies that has been largely forgotten, even though it sets the template for the sports movies to come after that have become permanent fixtures in pop culture. Movies like Raging Bull, Rocky, Million Dollar Baby, Cinderella Man, and The Fighter, just to list off some boxing films.

This movie was mostly made by artists who would later be blacklisted.

Here’s something you gotta understand about the blacklist, that might resonate with people today; In 1946 the Republican party gained an overwhelming majority in the congressional elections, and used this power to penalize leftists in media.

Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it was considered a radical viewpoint for America to enter World War II. The right treated being anti fascist in 1942, the way they treat being anti fascist in 2025. Anyone even associated with leftist politics had to go.

Body and Soul’s director Robert Rossen was one of the so-called “unfriendly nineteen” witnesses subpoenaed in October 1947 by HUAC but was not called to testify. The ‘unfriendly nineteen” eventually dwindled down to the “Hollywood Ten.” After being put on the blacklist, Rossen couldn’t work for two years. He was eventually reinstated back into Hollywood, because he wound up providing congress with the names of other communists he knew working in the industry. A practice known as “naming names.” A decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Abraham Polonsky had started off a promising career in screenwriting with Body and Soul. He even directed his next feature Force of Evil, also starring John Garfield, which has been hailed as one of the greatest crime films of all time. Unfortunately, Polonsky was also blacklisted in 1951.

Polonsky refused to name names, telling congress “it’s none of your business.” He had written scripts on and off, for both the big screen and TV, under fake names or “fronts.” He also pursued a career as a novelist, but he didn’t direct again until 1969.

Canada Lee, who plays Ben Chapman, the other hopeful prizefighter, was a pioneer for African Americans in the performing arts. A legendary actor, who was sadly more famous for his stage and radio work which is now mostly lost. Langston Hughes would write plays specifically for him. He had very few films, and was blacklisted in 1951, because he was a champion of civil rights, which HUAC hated. He died in 1952 at the age of 45, of a heart attack shortly before he was to appear in front of HUAC to testify.

The director of photography of this film was Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe. He was put on the “greylist,” which was a list of communist associates that not a hard and fast baning from work, but it didn’t make things easier. He was put on the list, because he married a white communist organizer and playwright named Sanora Babb, back when interracial marriages were still illegal in California. Even when that law was abolished in 1947, they were still pressured by the studio to keep their relationship a secret. Babb moved to Mexico city to protect Howe.

The star of this film is John Garfield. He received an Academy Award nomination for Body and Soul. He was known for playing brooding, rebellious, working class characters. In fact you could say he set the template for playing those characters, even before Humphrey Bogart.

John Garfield worked extensively with the Group Theater in the 1930’s and originated stage works like Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing, both plays about workers rights and lower middle class life written by anti fascist writer Clifford Odetts. In the 30’s the Group Theater and it’s member were all anti fascist and communist. It’s for this reason that Garfield was also blacklisted and called to testify before HUAC. He also died of a heart attack in 1952, at the age of 39, mere days before he was supposed to testify.

To quote the last words of Charley Davis, maybe the most noir sentiment ever uttered on screen, “everybody dies.”

Thank you to all of you who have read my daily posts for the past 61 days. It’s been an enlightening journey of what I can do as a writer if I apply myself, and I appreciate anyone who has liked and read all my write ups.

After today, I will go back to the once a week format, mostly to give myself a break, and to not flood my subscribers inbox with continuous movie essays.

December will be all about “Holiday Favorites” so keep your eyes peeled on Fridays when those will come through your feed.

Until then, keep watching movies, friends. More importantly, share movies with your loved ones.

DAY 29

Hollywood Blacklist #4

Time Without Pity is a 1957 British noir thriller film directed by blacklisted director Joseph Losey. The screenplay was written by fellow blacklisted writer Ben Barzman, based on the 1953 play Someone Waiting by Emlyn Williams.

The film is about a father trying to save his son from being executed for a murder he did not commit.

CAST

David Graham - Michael Redgrave

Honor Stanford - Ann Todd

Robert Stanford - Leo McKern

Brian Stanford - Paul Daneman

Alec Graham - Alec McCowen

Jeremy Clayton - Peter Cushing

Vicki Harker - Lois Maxwell

Alec Graham is sentenced to death for the murder of his girlfriend Jennie Cole, with whom he was spending the night at the parents of his friend Brian Stanford.

Alec’s father David, an alcoholic writer, returns to England after spending time in a sanitarium in Canada to dry out.

Alec and his father have been estranged for several years. David has had no access to news of the outside world for some reason. He missed the news of Alec being charged with murder, his trial, his sentencing, and finally shows up THE DAY BEFORE Alec is to be hanged to stand by his son’s side.

Despite this tenuous relationship, David believes his son is innocent and sets out to prove as much in less than 24 hours.

David questions everyone involved with the case hoping to get answers;

• Brian Stanford, Alec’s friend

• Robert Stanford, Brian’s father

• Honor Stanford, Robert’s wife

• Vicki Harker, Robert’s secretary, with whom he is having an affair.

Let’s focus on Robert for a second because Robert is volatile. A successful automotive magnate, Robert will fly off the handle at the drop of a hat, and has been known to be violent.

Can David Graham stumble his way through this investigation and save his son’s life without breaking his sobriety? With British drinking culture, it’s gonna be tough.

I covered a Joseph Losey film a few weeks ago called The Prowler. I really love his movies. He was called “the most European of American directors.”

Losey’s films are very baroque, visually distinctive, and pessimistic. His work often explores themes of class, power and social isolation.

Losey had been blacklisted in the early 50’s. He wasn’t necessarily a communist, but he had many communist and politically left associations, including his first wife Elizabeth Hawes, who was on an FBI list of known subversives. He moved to England in 1953, due to being unable to find any work in America.

Time Without Pity was Losey’s first film he directed under his own name, since being blacklisted. He had used a fake name, Victor Hanbury, to direct his previous film, The Sleeping Tiger, because the stars were afraid of being blacklisted if it was discovered they worked with him.

Losey would later become known for his collaborations with Harold Pinter, directing three of his films, The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between.

Like a lot of kids who wanted to appear like the most intellectual person in the room, I had a Harold Pinter phase in high school. I will absolutely cover The Servant on this newsletter at some point.

Screenwriter Ben Barzman was also blacklisted in the 50’s. His wife Norma Barzman was an active member of the communist party from 1943 - 1949.

This was Dame Joan Plowright’s feature film debut as Agnes Cole, sister of murder victim, Jennie Cole.

Time Without Pity can be streamed on HBO MAX or The Criterion Channel.

DAY 28

Hollywood Blacklist #3

Gun Crazy is a 1950 American crime film directed by Joseph H. Lewis. The script was written by blacklisted writer, Dalton Trumbo (under the pseudonym Millard Kaufman).

The film is about two misanthropes who fall in love and go on a crime spree together.

CAST

Laurie Starr - Peggy Cummins

Bart Tare - John Dall

Packett - Berry Kroeger

This is the story of Barton “Bart” Tare and his obsession with guns, and how it led to a dame.

As a teenager Bart (played by a teenage Russ Tamblyn) breaks into a hardware store to steal a gun. He’s put on juvenile trial and his family and friends beg the judge to show some leniency. They plead, saying “he’s not a killer, your honor. He’s just obsessed with guns.”

The other thing you gotta know about Bart, is that it’s not just an obsession with guns. Bart is a REALLY GOOD SHOT. He can hit a canteen 3 times in the air. The judge considers the testimony very carefully and sends Bart to reform school.

After reform school, and a stint in the army teaching marksmanship. His childhood buddies take him to a carnival where they watch a sharpshooter show. Bart is fascinated with the star of the show, Laurie Starr, a modern day Annie Oakley, who can shoot the flame off a candle.

The two gun nuts challenge each other to a sharpshooting contest and become smitten with each other in the process. Laurie arranges a job for Bart on the road to keep him around, which enrages their jealous boss, Packett, who wants Laurie all for himself.

One night, Packett tries to assault Laurie, when Bart fires a warning shot at Packett’s head. Packett fires both of them, and the two set off on the road and get married. Before they see the justice of the peace, Laurie warns Bart that she is bad, but that she will try to be good.

The honeymoon period ends when Bart’s savings runs out, and Laurie gets restless. Laurie puts a crazy ultimatum on Bart; “embark on a life of crime with me, or I’m leaving you.”

What’s a guy to do?

One thing’s for sure, these two love birds are GUN CRAZY!

Much like They Live By Night, released two years earlier, Gun Crazy is loosely based on the exploits of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. However unlike in They Live By Night, Gun Crazy is less romantic. It presents to the audience two very visibly broken people trying to exist in a world where the chips are stacked against them.

If They Live By Night is Bonnie and Clyde for the soft boys and girls out there, Gun Crazy is the emo kid version of Natural Born Killers.

Dalton Trumbo is possibly the most famous name associated with the Hollywood Blacklist. He was certainly my foray into learning about what it was, mostly because of the infamous photo of him writing in the bathtub, and that was how he enjoyed writing. That was so badass to me as a young screenwriting student in college. “This guy writes so much, he even does it in the bath. His mind is always firing off stories.”

Trumbo was one of “The Hollywood Ten”, Ten men who worked in the film industry, who were called to testify in front of HUAC on whether or not they were members of the communist party, but instead told congress to stuff it, and were all cited for contempt of court. Trumbo was a member of the communist party since the 1930’s. Back during the Spanish civil war, most people who declared themselves to be anti fascist, were also in the communist party. It was a safe space for left wing idealists who wanted to oppose fascism all over the world, and warned Americans of the oncoming threat of the Nazi Party in Germany.

In less than 15 years, the media and certain American politicians completely reframed what the party was, and it suddenly became less fashionable to be a communist.

Trumbo actually saw jail time and spent 11 months in the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky. When he was released from prison, Trumbo was unable to find work, so he moved to Mexico with his family and two other blacklisted writers, and started churning out scripts under fake names. Gun Crazy was one of these scripts.

Other Trumbo scripts during this time period included;

• Roman Holiday (1953)

• The Brave One (1956)

• Exodus (1958)

• Spartacus (1960)

It was not revealed until 1992 that Trumbo had authored this script. In 1998, Gun Crazy was selected for preservation by the National Film registry, for being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

Gun Crazy is available to watch for free on YouTube or Tubi.

DAY 27

Hollywood Blacklist #2

Obsession is a 1949 British crime film directed by Edward Dmytryk. It is based on the 1947 novel A Man About A Dog by Alec Coppel who also wrote the screenplay.

It’s about a British psychiatrist who discovers that his wife is having an affair with an American, and exacts his revenge by trapping his wife’s lover in a secret dungeon.

This film doesn’t have a traditional trailer. Either one was never made or it has since been lost, but here is a short sequence from Obsession.

CAST

Dr. Clive Riordan - Robert Newton

Storm Riordan - Sally Gray

Bill Kronin - Phil Brown

Clive Riordan is a psychiatrist living in London and he’s loaded! The dude is rich, and his beautiful wife is named Storm, like the weather pattern, or the second in command of the Marvel Comics team, The X-Men.

Clive discovers that Storm is having an affair with the adorkable American ex-pat, Bill Kronin. Clive kidnaps Bill at gunpoint, and takes him to a bomb damaged part of the city, to a hidden underground room only accessible from a nearby garage.

Clive chains Bill to a wall with plenty of slack to freely walk around within a range of 8 feet, and go to the bathroom, but he can’t leave the space. The room has also been sound proofed, and no one is around for miles. Bill is imprisoned like this for months.

Clive’s plan is to keep Bill alive for as long as he can, until people just forget about him. Then he can kill him, and dissolve his corpse in an acid bath. This is Clive’s idea of the “perfect murder.”

During the day, Clive delivers food, newspapers, and martinis to Bill.

The only hope Bill has is a scrappy little dog named Monty.

British noir from this time period were often shot on location, giving the films a neo-realist quality. Today it gives contemporary audiences a glimpse in what Post WWII London looked like after the blitz.

Filmmakers who cut their teeth working in the German film industry, who then fled Nazi Germany and immigrated to England, used their training to inject German expressionism into their films. The tilted angels, and use of shadows in the wreckage of bombed out London gives Obsession a very spooky atmosphere.

Obsession was released in America as The Hidden Room, which is a little too on the nose.

Director Edward Dmytryk was Blacklisted in 1947, and was one of the “Hollywood Ten” who were called to testify before The House Un-American Activities Committee (aka HUAC), but refused, and were cited by Congress for contempt and were given prison sentences. Dmytryk was fired by RKO and fled to England to escape jail time, as did a lot of artists at the time.

Dmytryk directed two films while living in London, but had to return home when his passport expired. He ultimately decided to cooperate with testifying before HUAC, in order avoid incarceration, and be reinstated in Hollywood.

American actor Phil Brown was also blacklisted because of his association with left wing theater movements, even though he was never officially a card carrying member of the Communist Party (or a “fellow traveler” as they were also called). He was simply a liberal actor who stood for workers rights, and HUAC was like “whoa, take that bullshit back to Russia, comrade!”

Brown moved to England in 1949, where he remained for the rest of his life, working steadily. He’s most well known for playing Luke Skywalker’s uncle Owen in the first Star Wars film (Episode IV - A New Hope). He’s so charming in this movie as Bill Kronin, the American boy toy of Storm Riordan (I mean, this name, c’mon).

Obsession can be streamed on the Criterion Channel.

DAY 26

Hollywood Blacklist #1

Welcome to my final NoirVember series for 2025, The blacklist. The last 5 films of the month are all going to be connected to the period in American history when the government was koo-koo for commie hunting.

The hollywood blacklist is WAY TOO COMPLICATED for little old me to cover in just one post, or even in small chunks across five short movie essays.

In short; from the late 40’s - early 50’s, a paranoid Wisconsin senator named Joseph McCarthy was so convinced that communism was going to destroy American values, that there were spies reporting back directly to Russia from Hollywood, spilling government secrets and spreading communist propaganda in our movies. It was deeply antisemitic, xenophobic, and just plain wrong. Hundreds of men and women lost their jobs, their friends, and in some cases, even thrown in jail. Several artists had to leave the United States to find work in Europe.

If you want to listen to a more comprehensive study on this period in time, take a listen to the podcast You Must Remember This, when host Karina Longworth did a deep dive on the subject back in 2016. She covers a lot of ground.

Brute Force is a 1947 American crime noir directed by Jules Dassin, from a screenplay by Richard Brooks.

The film tells the story of a group of prisoners led by Burt Lancaster who rebel against their power mad authoritarian guard.

CAST

Joe Collins - Burt Lancaster

Captain Munsey - Hume Cronyn

Ruth Collins - Ann Blyth

Dr. Walters - Art Smith

Gallagher - Charles Bickford

Freshman - Jeff Corey

Spencer - John Hoyt

Soldier - Howard Duff

Calypso - Sir Lancelot

Tom Lister - Whit Bissell

Joe Collins is an inmate at Westgate Penitentiary who’s fed up with the mistreatment of the prisoners at the hands of the cruel Captain Munsey.

Munsey is a sadistic chief of security at Westgate, who manipulates the prisoners to inform on each other’s activities and create trouble so he can inflict physical punishment. He whips and tortures the prisoners, and is very Nazi coded.

The prison warden Barnes is a hilariously inept simp, who cannot run the prison with any authority, and allows Munsey to have full run of the place, while he gets brow beat by the governor and nervously smokes.

The prison physician, Dr. Walters is a philosophising alcoholic, unable to face his job without downing a bottle of whiskey. He’s the only man on staff the inmates can trust.

Collins is eager to get out because he has a wife, Ruth, on the outside, who’s very sick. Ruth refuses to have her life saving operation without her husband by her side, a free man.

Collins gathers a crew of other inmates who’ve also had enough of Munsey’s reign of terror. Each of them has a story;

• Spencer, a gambler and self proclaimed ladies man

• Calypso, an inmate who sings in rhyming couplets

• Tom Lister, a man who embezzled funds from his company to buy his wife a fur coat.

• Soldier, who took the rap for his girlfriend, who murdered her father.

To quote the last lines of the film, uttered by our enebriated Dr. Walters “nobody ever really escapes.”

Brute Force is a must watch, if you’re getting into film noir. It’s a stone cold classic.

Burt Lancaster leads the cast, but the real stars are every single supporting performance. From Hume Cronyn’s portrayal of authoritarian Captain Munsey, to Art Smith as the drunk and tortured Dr. Walters, to even Sir Lancelot’s light hearted singing inmate Calypso, which should be corny, but you’re glad he’s there, singing about what the characters are thinking. Everyone gets to shine in this movie.

This is another film by the team of director Jules Dassin and producer Mark Hellinger who brought us The Naked City, which I covered earlier this month.

Jules Dassin was first blacklisted in 1947, due to his alliance with left wing political movements, from his days in the Yiddish theater.

This is what’s crazy about the blacklist; most people who were affiliated with communist ideology had no interest in overthrowing the government. They were more concerned with social issues like racial inequality, or systemic abuses of capitalism. Joseph McCarthy and his commie smashing cohorts framed these men and women as being “anti-American” in the press, and that they were traitors to their country.

Sound familiar?

Jules Dassin wound up moving to France, where he directed what most people would consider his masterpiece, Riffifi, which is widely considered one of the greatest heist movies ever made.

Brute Force is available to watch on the Criterion Channel or HBO MAX.

DAY 25

Road Trip Noir #5

The Hitch-Hiker is a 1953 American independent noir film directed by Ida Lupino.

Lupino co-wrote the script with her ex-husband, Collier Young, based on the killing spree of Billy Cook in 1950.

The film tells the story of two men who are taken hostage by a serial killing hitchhiker, while on their road trip to Mexico.

CAST

Roy Collins - Edmond O’Brien

Gilbert Bowen - Frank Lovejoy

Emmett Meyers - William Talman

We open on a man hitchhiking along the side of the road. A couple picks him up, but we don’t see anyone’s faces. They let him out on the side of the road, and then we hear the sound of a gunshot.

Then we cut to one of my favorite movie tropes; spinning newspapers revealing eye catching headlines like “Nationwide manhunt for slayer!” The paper shows a picture of escaped convict Emmett Meyers, and he’s a mean looking guy with one eye bigger than the other.

Two good buddies Roy and Gilbert head out on a fishing trip to Mexico for a dudes weekend. They drive all through the night from California, and cross the border.

A man engulfed in shadow sticks his thumb out, and our heroes, being the good, neighborly American men that they are, pick him up to give him a lift, thinking he’s just a guy who ran out of gas.

Well unfortunately this guy is Emmett Meyers, and he holds a gun on Gil and Roy, forcing them to drive through the desert.

The Hitch-Hiker was the first mainstream noir film written and directed by a woman. Ida Lupino was a trailblazer for independent cinema. Having been a hugely successful star in the 30’s and 40’s, she parlayed her success into starting her own production company and writing, directing, and producing films herself.

The story of The Hitch-Hiker was inspired by the crimes of Billy Cook, who posing as a hitchhiker, murdered a family of five, killed a traveling salesman, kidnapped a sheriff and abandoned him in the desert, all before holding two hunters hostage in attempt to flee to Mexico.

At the time, Mexico didn’t have a formal extradition treaty with the United States, so Mexican authorities “extradited” him back to the U.S. by physically pushing him over the border, where he was taken into custody by waiting American law enforcement. Billy Cook was executed by way of gas chamber in 1952.

Ida Lupino interviewed the two hunters Cook kidnapped and put most of their experiences into the script, so you can really see the story from their perspective.

It’s a mean, nasty, bleak, minimalist thriller, that is highly engaging within it’s tight structure. Also, it’s only 73 minutes, and it cruises. Not an ounce of fat on this baby.

One moment in the movie actually gutted me; When the news bulletin talks about Emmett Meyers on the radio, they identify him as being 28 years old. The actor William Talman was actually 35 years old.

I’m 36.

Emmett Meyers looks, conservatively, 45 years old. Guys back then had miles on their faces.

The Hitch-Hiker is a movie in the public domain, so you can watch a pretty good quality version of it on YouTube.

This concludes our Road Trip series! Tomorrow we’re starting up our final series for NoirVember by diving into movies starring, written or directed by those affected by the HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST!

See ya there, comrades!

DAY 24

Road Trip Noir #4

Drive is a 2011 American neo-noir action thriller directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. The screenplay was written by Hossein Amini, based on the 2005 novel of the same name by James Sallis.

The film tells the story of an unnamed Hollywood stunt driver who also moonlights as a getaway driver.

CAST

The Driver - Ryan Gosling

Irene - Carrie Mulligan

Shannon - Bryan Cranston

Bernie Rose - Albert Brooks

Standard Gabriel - Oscar Isaac

Nino “Izzy” Paolozzi - Ron Perlman

Blanche - Christina Hendricks

A man in Los Angeles, only known as “The Driver” works as a mechanic, stunt double and criminal-for-hire getaway driver. He states over and over again that all he does is drive. He doesn’t carry a gun, and he’s all time based, so if anyone moves outside of his time limit, he peels out, no exceptions. All he does is drive.

The driver’s jobs are all arranged by auto shop owner Shannon who persuades mobster Bernie Rose and his partner Nino to purchase a stock car for the driver to race for a legitimate business for all of them.

Meanwhile, the driver grows closer to his neighbor Irene, and her young son Benicio, but their relationship is interrupted when her husband, Standard Gabriel (what is this name?) gets out of jail. Standard was protected in prison by a gangster named Cook, but of course protection isn’t free, so Cook demands that Standard pull off a pawn shop robbery with a woman named Blanche. The driver offers to help as a getaway driver, obviously.

Unfortunately the robbery is a disaster. Standard and Blanche are killed, and the driver learns that Cook was intending to rip off Standard. He also learns the robbery was all planned by Nino. The driver offers to return the money to Nino, but instead Nino sends a hitman to kill the driver, Irene and little Benicio.

This isn’t a road trip movie, necessarily, but it does have a lot of driving so I’m throwing it in.

I remember seeing Drive when it was first released and being totally amped leaving the theater. The soundtrack is iconic. When that Kavinsky song kicks in up top, it revs up my engines. Vroom vroom, I’m a car.

This movie takes me back to a specific time in my media absorption. The cast is STACKED. We’ve got Gosling on the rise, a pre-movie star Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks at the height of Mad Men popularity, early career Carrie Mulligan, Bryan Cranston at the height of Breaking Bad fever and then Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks with no eyebrows as the villains.

I love a movie where the hero doesn’t talk a lot, is good at only one thing, and has personal code of ethics, but when they deviate from their code even slightly, everything goes wrong. It’s a tried and true formula, that I love seeing every time. From Toshiro Mifune samurai movies, to Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen, I’m here for this genre.

It’s also one of those genres that’s rife for parody. It’s so funny how Bryan Cranston’s character Shannon is the expository character who explains the driver’s backstory to Carrie Mulligan’s character Irene, who is a stand in for the audience. Also the driver is one of the least inconspicuous getaway drivers anyone could hire. Like can my dude where a less flashy outfit? Even if he had nothing to do with the heist, everyone would notice a guy wearing a white leather jacket, with an embroidered gold scorpion on the back driving a souped up convertible really really fast.

A meditative study of loneliness and identity, the film is a thrilling but melancholy tale of one man’s isolation in the loneliest city, Los Angeles. Gosling’s driver character is vulnerable, yet brutal dreaming of a life of love while coming to terms with his true nature.

It is in this respect, I think a good pairing movie with Drive would be Michael Mann’s Thief, another synth propelled story of one man who wants a normal life, but is reminded that there is no normal for drivers or thieves.

Drive is available to purchase on Amazon Prime for just $5.99.

DAY 23

Road Trip Noir #3

They Live By Night is a 1948 American film noir directed by Nicholas Ray. The screenplay was written by Ray and Charles Schnee, and it was adapted from the 1937 novel Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson.

The film follows the doomed romance between two criminals who are part of a bank robbing crew. When things go wrong, the two lovers ditch the crew and go on the lam.

CAST

Keechie - Cathy O’Donnell

Bowie - Farley Granger

Chicamaw - Howard Da Silva

T-Dub - Jay C. Flippen

Hawkins - Ian Wolfe

Mattie - Helen Craig

This story is set sometime during the Great Depression.

Arthur “Bowie” Bowen, a 23 year old serving a prison sentence for a murder he committed when he was 16, escapes from prison with two older bank robbers; Chicamaw “One Eye” Mobely and T-Dub. They all take shelter in a gas station owned and operated by Chicamaw’s brother, and niece Catherine “Keechie” Mobely.

T-Dub’s brother Robert is also in prison, and concocts a plan to knock over several banks in order to raise funds for a lawyer to prove Robert’s wrongful conviction.

The robbery goes smoothly, but then Bowie crashes their car, and Chicamaw kills a cop who arrived at the scene. Chicamaw runs off, leaving an injured Bowie in the care of Keechie and T-Dub. Keechie and Bowie are both young and shy, so naturally they start falling for each other.

Meanwhile the press reports on the robbery, but mistakenly pin Bowie as the leader of the gang, and a manhunt ensues.

Bowie and Keechie go on the lam, find a justice of the peace named Hawkins, get married, and Hawkins sells them a convertible, and they drive off. All the while, the cops are hot on their tale.

I love this movie so much. It’s maybe the most romantic movie I’ll cover all NoirVember. The two leads, Cathy O’Donnell and Farley Granger are so sweet, charming, and likeable. Every gesture exchanged between the two of them, be it a gaze, a touch or a phrase is among the most precious of all cinema. You can’t watch this movie and not fall in love with Keechie and Bowie, hoping they make it through this mess. They Live By Night is the softer side of Bonnie and Clyde.

Even their wedding vows are sweet; “To love, honor, cherish and spoil.”

One doesn’t normally think of noir as “sweet” considering they’re mostly so bleak, but this film defies convention in many ways. This was Nicholas Ray’s feature film directing debut, and wanted to experiment with things like helicopter shots and shooting on location.

When a Nicholas Ray film is about innocence, the main characters are innocence personified. The only things they know must be the harsh realities of the world, so they can discover tenderness.

I read the Edward Anderson novel Thieves Like Us last November and really enjoyed it. It’s a quick read, and it’s almost exactly the same as the movie. It’s very cinematic.

Grab your sweethearts, folks! This is one to watch with that special someone, and yes it’s even a Christmas movie.

They Live By Night is available to watch on HBO MAX.

DAY 22

Road Trip Noir #2

Blue Ruin is a 2013 American revenge thriller film written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier.

It tells the story of an unhoused man who goes on a revenge mission after the man who killed his parents is released from prison.

CAST

Dwight Evans - Macon Blair

Ben Gaffney - Devin Ratray

William Cleland - David W. Thompson

Kris Cleland - Eve Plumb

Dwight Evans is a vagrant living on the beach in Delaware. His only shelter is the Blue Pontiac Bonneville, where he sleeps. He survives by scavenging for food and money, occasionally breaking into people’s homes to clean himself off in a bath. He is not a violent man.

One day, a local police officer that knows Dwight’s story informs him that Wade Cleland, Jr., the man who shot and killed his parents twenty years earlier is being released from prison. Dwight takes the money he’s been saving for who knows how long to buy gas and drives his car to his hometown in Virginia.

When he gets to Virginia, he steals a gun from a parked truck, but upon further inspection the gun has a trigger lock, which he doesn’t know how to open so he throws it away.

Dwight parks outside the prison where Wade has been serving his jail time and watch as the Cleland family collect Wade and drive off. Dwight follows them to the family bar where they celebrate Wade’s release. Dwight sneaks into the bar, and steals a knife from the kitchen. He follows Wade in to the bathroom and stabs him, but they struggle and fight until Wade finally bleeds out and dies.

Dwight runs out of the bar, and and realizing he dropped his car keys in the bathroom, steals the Cleland’s white limousine they were driving and floors it, unaware that Wade’s 16 year old brother William is still in the car.

I saw this movie for the first time earlier this year and loved it. When the credits started rolling, the ending really sat with me. It’s a very bare bones revenge story, in the style of movies from the 70’s like Death Wish or Rolling Thunder. Dwight isn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s a regular guy, who’s suffered a lot of trauma.

The actions Dwight takes are the result of his trauma bubbling inside him for twenty years, finally spilling out.

Blue Ruin premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17th, 2013, as a part of the Directors Fortnight section. It was a nominee for the John Cassavetes Award at the 2015 Independent Spirit Awards.

Director Jeremy Saulnier funded this movie through a very successful kickstarter campaign.

Saulnier and his star Macon Blair grew up making movies together when they were kids. They considered this film their last shot at chasing their dreams before they had to put them aside and get real jobs.

Also… Eve Plumb (aka Jan Brady) is in this movie and she’s a baddie. It’s honestly a pleasant surprise to see her and that she’s still acting.

Blue Ruin is available to watch on Amazon Prime or Starz.

DAY 21

Road Trip Noir #1

Hey, stranger! Need a lift? I was just driving down the highway all by my lonesome, and saw you by the side of the road. You look like you’ve seen some things. Hop in my car and I’ll take you wherever you need to go! I’ve seen a few things myself.

Detour is a 1945 independent film noir directed by Edgar G. Ulmer.

The script was written by Martin Goldsmith, who adapted his own 1939 novel of the same name.

It’s the story of a down-on-his-luck piano player who hitchhikes across country to see his sweetheart in Los Angeles, and runs into trouble along the way.

CAST

Al Roberts - Tom Neal

Vera - Ann Savage

We start off with Al Roberts in a diner, when a familiar tune plays on the jukebox that bums him out. The rest of the film is told in a flashback.

Al Roberts is an struggling piano player, who’s honestly just ok. He and his girlfriend Sue have an act at a New York nightclub where she sings, and she is noticeably more talented than Al. Sue decides to move to LA to seek fame and fortune.

Al mopes around and doesn’t go with her, but then regrets it, and calls her saying “baby, I’m coming to Hollywood to be with you.” With no money and no car, Al decides to hitchhike across country.

Al sticks his thumb out and makes it all the way to Arizona, where he’s picked up by a bookie named Haskell, who’s driving a convertible. Haskell boasts about how he’s in the chips and on his way to LA to bet on a horse. Al takes the wheel when Haskell says “mind if I take a nap for bit?”

Al is forced to stop because of bad weather, and tries to wake up Haskell, but Haskell is unresponsive. Al opens the door, and Haskell falls out, hitting his head on a rock, killing him. Al is screwed and he knows it.

Convinced the cops won’t believe his story, he takes Haskell’s body, leaves it by the side of the road, takes Haskell’s coat, which has all his money and identification, and drives his car into California.

Al picks up woman named Vera, who’s hitchhiking along the side of the road. Vera is immediately suspicious, and says “hey I recognize this car, and it’s not yours” and reveals she met Haskell in Louisiana. He got fresh with her, and she ran out of the car. Vera suspects Al killed Haskell, and blackmails him.

These two lost souls continue to drive on the most paranoid road trip this side of the Mississippi.

I saw this film for the first time last year and I loved it. One of my top 10 noir movies of all time. It’s got great snappy noir dialogue, like the one above and some real doozies like “What happened? Did you kiss him with a wrench?” or “From now on, you and me are like siamese twins, get me?” All three lines uttered by Vera.

Tom Neal is pretty good, but the real star is Ann Savage, who is unfortunately probably most known for this movie. She’s so compelling and nasty from the moment she pops on screen.

The character of Vera really embodies the essence of everything that is thought of as film noir. The pessimism, the bleak worldview, Vera is a classic femme fatale. She shows up in Al’s life, and like a whirlwind turns everything upside down. Filmmaker Wim Wenders called Ann Savage’s performance “30 years ahead of its time.”

Director Edgar G. Ulmer was an Austrian filmmaker who got his start in Germany as an art director/set designer for Fritz Lang, on movies like Metropolis and M. He mostly directed ultra low budget movies for minior studios, which was called “Poverty Row” back then.

In 1992, Detour was selected for The National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Filmmaker Errol Morris has named Detour as his favorite film of all time. Morris said of the film; “It has an unparalleled quality of despair, totally unrelieved by hope.”

Detour is widely available to watch on account of it being in the public domain. You can watch it on youtube, or you can watch a 4K restoration on the Criterion Channel.