30 More Days of Noir: The Killer Is Loose (dir by Budd Boetticher)

Posted on November 4, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Film noir comes to the suburbs!

The Killer is Loose opens with the robbery of a savings and loan. At first, it seems like meek bank teller Leon Poole (Wendell Corey) behaved heroically and kept the robbery from being far worse than it could have been. How meek is Leon Poole? He’s so meek that his nickname has always been Foggy. People have always made fun of him because of his glasses and his bad eyesight. Everyone assumes that Poole is just one of those quiet people who is destined to spend his entire life in obscurity.

However, the police soon discover that Leon Poole is not the hero that everyone thinks that he is. Instead, he was involved in the robbery! When Detective Sam Wagner (Joseph Cotten) leads a group of cops over to Poole’s house to arrest the bank teller, Poole’s wife is accidentally shot and killed. At the subsequent trial, Poole swears that he’ll get vengeance. And then he’s promptly sent off to prison.

Jump forward three years. Leon Poole is still in prison. He’s still deceptively meek. He still wears glasses. Everyone still assumes that he’s harmless. Of course, that’s what Poole wants them to believe. He’s still obsessed with getting his vengeance. Meanwhile, Detective Wagner and his wife, Lila (Rhonda Fleming), are living in the suburbs and have a somewhat strained marriage. Lila wants Wagner to find a less dangerous and less stressful job. Wagner wants to keep busting crooks.

When Poole see a chance to escape from prison, he does so. That’s not really a shock because even the quietest of people are probably going to take advantage of the chance to escape from prison. What is a shock is that Poole ruthlessly murders a guard while making his escape. He then kills a truck driver and steal the vehicle. He then tracks down his old army sergeant and guns him down while the man’s wife watches. Always watch out for the quiet ones, as they say.

Now, Poole has just one more target. He wants to finish his revenge by killing Lila Wagner.

The Killer is Loose is a tough and, considering the time that it was made, brutal film noir. (Seriously, the scene where Poole kills his former sergeant really took me by surprise.) While both Rhonda Fleming and Joseph Cotten give good performances in their roles, it’s Wendell Corey who really steals the film. Corey plays Poole not as an outright villain but instead as a man who has been driven mad by years and years of taunts. After spend his entire life being told that he was a loser, Poole finally decided to do something for himself and, as a result, his wife ended up getting killed by the police. Now that Poole’s managed to escape from prison, he’s willing to do anything just as long as he can get his final revenge. Corey plays Poole with a smoldering resentment and the performance feels very real. (If the film were made today, it’s easy to imagine that Poole would be an anonymous twitter troll, going through life with a smile on his face while unleashing his anger online.) It brings a very real spark and feeling of danger to a film that would otherwise just be a standard crime film.

The Killer Is Loose also makes good use of its suburban setting, suggesting that both Fleming and Cotten have allowed themselves to get complacent with their life away from the obvious dangers of the big city. You can buy a new house, the film seems to be saying, but you can’t escape the past.

30 More Days of Noir #3: Guns, Girls, and Gangsters (dir by Edward L. Cahn)

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Guns, Girls, and Gangsters! The title of this 1958 film pretty much sums it all up.

Now, technically, I guess you could debate whether or not the criminals in this film really qualify as gangsters. When I hear the term “gangster,” I tend to think of the big Mafia chieftains, like Al Capone and the Kennedys. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen The Godfather too many times but I always associate gangsters with wealth, big mansions, elaborate weddings, and aging crooners who need someone to chop off a horse’s head in order to get a role in From Here To Eternity. However, the gangsters in this film are all basically small-time criminals. One of them does own a nightclub but it’s not a very impressive nightclub. If anything, they’re wannabe gangsters. However, Guns, Girls, and Wannabes just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Chuck Wheeler (Gerald Mohr) has a plan. He wants to rob an armored car. It’s a Vegas armored car, so of course it’s going to be full of money and since Michael Corleone killed Moe Greene three years before, there shouldn’t be too many repercussions from hijacking it. (Sorry, I’m still thinking about The Godfather.) To enlist the aid of a nightclub owner, he enlists the aid of a singer named Vi (Mamie Van Doren). Vi just happens to be the wife of Chuck’s former prison cellmate, Mike (Lee Van Cleef). Vi has been demanding a divorce for a while but Mike won’t grant it because he’s insanely jealous. He probably wouldn’t be happy to find out that Chuck and Vi are now a couple but, fortunately, he’s locked up.

Except, of course, Mike escapes from prison around the same time that Chuck and the gang manage to hijack that armored car. As you can guess, this leads to mayhem and havoc. That’s where the guns of the title come into play….

Guns, Girls, and Gangsters is an entertaining little B-noir. It’s only 70 minutes long so the film doesn’t waste any time getting to the action. (There’s also a narrator who serves to fill in any plot holes and to keep the audience entertained with his rather self-important delivery.) Gerald Mohr is a bit on the dull side as Chuck but you better believe that Lee Van Cleef is 100% menacing and oddly charismatic as the as the always angry Mike. Van Cleef brings a charge of very real danger to the film. (Perhaps he’s the gangster that the title was referring to, though I would still think of him as being more of an outlaw than a gangster.) And, of course, you’ve got Mamie Van Doren, playing yet another tough dame in dangerous circumstances. Van Doren gets to perform two musical numbers in Guns, Girls, and Gangsters and they both have a low-rent Vegas charm to them. Watching this film, it occurred to me that Van Doren may not have been a great actress but she had the perfect attitude for films like this. She played characters who did what they had to to do survive and who made no apologies for it and it’s impossible not to be on her side when she’s having to deal with creeps like Chuck or sociopaths like Mike.

Guns, Girls, and Gangsters is an entertaining B-noir. There’s enough tough talk, cynical scheming, and deadly double crosses to keep noir fans happy.

Porky’s (1981, directed by Bob Clark)

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Porky’s.

On the one hand, it’s a crude, juvenile, and raunchy sex comedy where a bunch of teenagers in 1960s Florida think that it’s a hoot and not at all problematic to spy on the girls shower and to hire a black man to scare all of their (white) friends.

On the other hand, it’s a heartfelt plea for tolerance where Tim (Cyril O’Reilly) finally stands up to his abusive father (Wayne Maunder) and makes friends with Brian Schwartz (Scott Colomby), who is apparently the only Jewish person living in Angel Beach, Florida.

What’s strange about Porky’s is that everyone knows it for being the template for almost every bad high school film that followed, with tons of nudity, jokes about sex, and characters with names like Pee Wee, Miss Honeywell, Cherry Forever, and Porky. But, when you sit down and watch the movie, you discover that, for all the raunchiness, it actually devotes even more time to Brian Schwartz dealing with the local bigots than it does to any of the things that it’s known for. Everyone remembers the shower scene but it’s obvious the film’s heart is with Brian and his attempts to make the world a better place. Porky’s is a sex comedy with a conscience.

Porky’s is an episodic film about a group of teenage boys trying to get laid and also trying to get revenge on the owner of the local brothel. There’s a lot of characters but I’d dare anyone to tell me the difference between Billy, Tommy, and Mickey. I went through the entire movie thinking that Billy was Mickey until I turned on the subtitles and discovered who was who. Porky’s has a reputation for being a terrible movie but it’s actually a pretty accurate depiction of the way that most men like to imagine how their high school years went. It captures the atmosphere of good-spirited teenage hijinks if not the reality.

One of the interesting things about Porky’s is that Bob Clark went from directing this to directing A Christmas Story. The innocence of A Christmas Story might seem like it has nothing in common with raunchiness of Porky’s but, actually, they’re both nostalgic films that are set in an idealized past. (If you still think A Christmas Story has nothing in common with Porky’s, just remember that Ralphie didn’t actually say “fudge.”) Of course, A Christmas Story struggled at the box office and only became a hit when it was released on video while Porky’s is still the most successful Canadian film to ever be released in the U.S. Sex sells. As cool as it was to see Brian Schwartz stand up for himself, I doubt the people who made Porky’s a monster hit were buying their tickets because they had heard the film struck a blow against anti-Semitism. They were going because they knew there was a shower scene.

Porky’s deserves its reputation for being a not-so great movie but I would be lying if I said that I didn’t laugh more than once while watching it. (Of course, I still didn’t laugh as much as the characters in the films laughed. I’ve never seen a cast that was as apparently amused with themselves as the cast of Porky’s.) There’s a lot of bad moments but it’s hard not to crack a smile when Miss Honeywell demonstrates why she’s known as Lassie or when one of the coaches suggests that wanted posters can be hung around the school to help catch the shower voyeur. Plus, everyone learns an important lesson about tolerance and how to destroy a brothel. As bad as it is, it’s hard to really dislike Porky’s.

Ralph Gibson: Photographer/Book Artist (2002, dir. by Paula Herdia)

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Dazzling Erin

Photographer Ralph Gibson is one of the most important photographers of the last century and, in this documentary, he discusses both his life and his work. An independent iconoclast, Gibson went from serving in the Navy to working as an assistant to Dorothea Lange to eventually publishing his own very influential books of photographs. Gibson’s work is fascinating, sensuous, and frequently surreal and helped to change the public perception about whether or not photography can also be art.

Here’s just a few examples of Gibson’s work:

In the documentary Ralph Gibson: Photographer/Book Artist, Gibson tells his own story of how he became both a photographer and a publisher. It’s interesting to listen to him as he explains how he first came to realize that how a picture is placed on a page (especially when compared to the placement of the picture on the facing page) can make as much of an artistic statement as the pictures themselves. The documentary also features interviews with several of Gibson’s contemporaries and also with critics who attempt to analyze what makes Gibson’s work so effective.

The only problem with this documentary is that it’s too short. It’s only 30 minutes long so sometimes, like when Gibson is talking about his childhood and his time in the Navy, it feels rushed. The best thing about the documentary though is that it features many of Gibson’s photographs and also Gibson himself. Listening to Gibson talk will make you want to pick up a real camera and start capturing the world around you.

This documentary is on Prime and if you’re an artist looking for inspiration, I recommend it.

The Battered Bastards of Baseball (2014, dir. by Chapman Way and Maclain Way)

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Dazzling Erin

If you’re like me and you’re already missing baseball, I recommend watching a documentary called The Battered Bastards of Baseball.

In 1972, Portland, Oregon lost their minor league baseball team when the Portland Beavers abandoned the city in order to become the Spokane Indians. At the same time, actor Bing Russell, a former minor leaguer and the father of Kurt Russell, had grown tired of Hollywood and was looking to get back into baseball. Relocating to Portland, Russell announced that he was going to start his own independent minor league team, the Portland Mavericks.

At first, no one took the Mavericks seriously. Because they weren’t affiliated with a major league team, the Mavericks roster was largely made up of misfits and rulebreakers, many of whom had been released from other organizations and who had been blacklisted from the major leagues. On average, most of the Mavericks players were older than the average major leaguer. Many of them were players who were looking for one last shot at glory and Bing refused to cut any of them because he felt that that they deserved that chance. When the skeptical media asked Bing what the Mavericks were going to offer that other baseball teams couldn’t, he replied, “Fun.”

And he delivered. From 1973 to 1977, the Mavericks played exciting baseball, won divisional and league titles, and, most importantly, they put on a good show. Playing mostly for the love of the game (because Russell never had much money to spend on salaries), the Mavericks reminded people of what baseball was all about. They pulled off amazing plays on the field while their off-field antics were legendary. The Mavericks played baseball the way that people wanted to see baseball played, with one manager living every fan’s dream by punching an umpire.

The Battered Bastards of Baseball tells the story of the Mavericks and Bing Russell. It features archival footage of the Mavericks at play, along with interviews with people like Kurt Russell, who briefly played for the Mavericks and then served as one of their vice presidents. The documentary pays tribute to the players who never gave up, the fans who eventually welcomed them to a new town, and most of all to the vision and determination of Bing Russell. Even while Bing was bringing the fun back to baseball, he was also breaking down other barriers by hiring professional baseball’s first female general manager, as well as the first Asian American general manager.

Most importantly, though, The Battered Bastards of Baseball reminds us of why people love baseball in the first place. It celebrates the game, the players, and most of all the fans. It’s a documentary that will just leave you in a good mood. That’s something we all could use!

Kurt Russell as a Maverick

Charlie’s Angels (2019, dir. by Elizabeth Banks)

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Dazzling Erin

In the latest version of Charlie’s Angels, the Angels have become an elite force of international super spies and there are now hundreds of Angels instead of just three. There’s also more than one Bosley as this movie establishes that Bosley is actually a codename that’s given to Charlie’s lieutenants. Djimon Hounsou is a Bosley and Patrick Stewart is a Bosely and Elizabeth Banks is a Bosley.

Two Angels, Sabina (Kristen Stewart) and Jane (Ella Balinska), are assigned to protect a corporate whistleblower named Elena (Naomi Scott) because Elena has discovered that Callisto, a renewable energy device, can also be used to trigger fatal seizures in selected targets. When an assassin attempts to take out Elena, he kills one of the Bosleys and Elena becomes an Angel. What I don’t get is why the assassin would try to shoot Elena in public when he could have just used the Callisto device to give her a seizure.

I wanted to like Charlie’s Angels because “Girl power!” but I got bored pretty quickly. All of the action scenes were done better in the last Mission Impossible and most of the jokes fell flat. Too much of the humor was built around someone saying something awkward and then everyone else standing around with a confused look on their face. For a movie that’s supposedly about celebrating girl power, I noticed that the Angels made a lot of stupid mistakes. It also bothered me that we were expected to laugh when an innocent security guard was killed by the Callisto but it was supposed to be a big emotional moment when one of the Bosleys died. It’s also supposed to be a big emotional moment when Jane thanks Sabina for teaching her that it’s okay to work with other people but since Jane never seemed like she had a problem working with other people, I wasn’t sure what she was talking about or why I should care.

Elena learns how to stick up for herself, Jane learns how to trust other people, and Sabina doesn’t learn anything but at least Kristen Stewart finally gets to smile. None of them can hold a candle to Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu in the first Charlie’s Angels movie, which was both fun and empowering. This new version just can’t compete.

30 More Days of Noir #2: Blonde Ice (dir by Jack Bernhard)

Posted on November 2, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1948’s Blonde Ice tells the story of Claire Cummings (Leslie Brooks), the society columnist for a San Francisco newspaper. Almost every man that Claire meets falls in love with her.

Les Burns (Robert Paige), the paper’s cynical sports reporter? Les is so in love with Claire that he keeps getting involved with her despite the fact that she cheats on him with almost every man that she meets.

Al Herrick (James Griffith)? Yep, he’s still in love with her too.

Carl Hanneman (John Holland), one of the wealthiest men in San Francisco? Carl is so in love with Claire that he’s willing to marry her even after he catches her kissing Les on the day of the wedding!

Congressional candidate Stanley Mason (Michael Whalen)? He’s so in love with Claire that he’s willing to sacrifice his political career just to be with her.

How about Blackie Talon (Russ Vincent), the pilot who witnesses Claire doing some things that she probably wouldn’t want the world to know about? Well, Blackie never gets around to declaring his love for Claire but his obsession with blackmailing her is probably just his way of dealing with the massive crush that he has on her.

The only person who doesn’t appear to be in love with Claire is Dr. Kippinger (David Leonard), a psychiatrist who immediately picks up on the fact that Claire is cold and manipulative. There’s a reason why Les refers to her as being …. can you guess? …. “Blonde Ice!”

Of course, even with all of these men falling in love with her, no one loves Claire as much as Claire loves herself. Claire is a narcissist and a sociopath and she has no problem killing one lover and framing another for the crime. In fact, it’s something that she attempts to do several times over the course of Blonde Ice. Claire, it has to be said, is pretty clever about it too. Her natural ability to manipulate, combined with her total lack of empathy for anyone but herself, makes Claire a dangerous character.

Blonde Ice is somewhat obscure as noirs go. It was clearly a poverty row production, with only a 74-minute running time and a cast largely made up of obscure contract players. And yet, Blonde Ice is a personal favorite of mine, largely because of the ferocious performance of Leslie Brooks. Brooks rips into the role of the femme fatale, delivering her cynical lines with aplomb and murdering anyone who gets in her way. Considering that this film was made in 1948, I was actually a bit shocked at just how high the body count climbed in just an hour and a few minutes. Claire is basically willing to kill anyone and the film often seems to take a perverse delight in showing how easily she can convince others of her innocence. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the film is that Claire attempt to frame the same man for not one but two murders and, even after all that, he still doesn’t seem to be emotionally capable of telling her to get out of his life. In a world of weak men, Claire comes in, takes control, and offers up no apologies.

Obscure though the film may be, Blonde Ice is an enjoyable noir and can be found on YouTube.

Five Days One Summer (1982, directed by Fred Zinnemann)

Posted on November 2, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

In 1932, Dr. Douglas Meredith (Sean Connery) is living in Switzerland with a much younger woman named Kate (Betsy Brantley), whom Meredith introduces as being his wife. When Meredith and Kate go on a climbing holiday in the Alps, they hire a young guide named Johann (Lambert Wilson). As they climb the mountains they not only discover a dead body but Meredith becomes suspicious that Kate might be falling for their guide. Meanwhile, Johann discovers that truth between Meredith and Kate’s forbidden relationship. Two men may go up the mountain but, in the end, only one man comes down.

Director Fred Zinnemann had a long career behind the camera, starting as an apprentice in Germany before coming to Hollywood in 1929. (He was one of the many German and Austrian directors to immigrate as things grew steadily worse in post-war Germany. He would soon be joined by Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, and many others.) Zinnemann was a master craftsman who made several good film without ever really developing a trademark style. Among his best-known (and Oscar-nominated) movies are High Noon, From Here To Eternity, The Nun’s Story, A Man For All Seasons, and Julia. Unlike a lot of his contemporaries, Zinnemann never resorted to changing his filmmaking habits in an effort to keep up with the new wave of the 60s and the 70s. As a result, he never humiliated himself the way that some of the other Golden Age directors did during the final years of their careers. Instead, he continued to put together well-constructed but old-fashioned and occasionally stodgy movies. Five Days One Summer was his final film. It was one that he had been trying to make for close to 40 years and the combination of the critical drubbing that greeted the film and its failure at the box office inspired Zinnemann to retire from filmmaking.

The love story at the center of Five Days One Summer is a bland one and Brantley doesn’t have much in the way of chemistry with either Connery or Wilson. But the love story is just a distraction from the true star of the movie, the mountain. Some of the mountain climbing segments are amazing to watch and knowing that the three stars were actually putting their lives at risk to get some of the shots makes it all the more impressive. At its worse, the film is a visually impressive but old-fashioned travelogue. At its best, it puts you right on the mountain. The film is far from perfect and it’s certainly not one of Zinnemann’s best but, at the same time, it is hardly the disaster that it’s often described as having been. I think some critics are so wedded to the narrative of the once-great director making a film that proves how out of touch he is with contemporary audiences (think of the final films of Otto Preminger, Richard Brooks, Elia Kazan, and George Stevens) that they overlooked that Zinnemann’s final film is a respectable, middle-of-the-road feature.

Ignore the film’s wan story and instead just concentrate on the amazing scenery and you’ll see that Five Days One Summer was not a terrible film for an old craftsman like Fred Zinnemann to go out on.

A Flash Of Light: The Photographs of E.J. Kelty (2005, dir. by Will Kelty)

Posted on November 2, 2020 by Dazzling Erin

Who was Edward J. Kelty?

That’s the question that’s explored in the documentary, A Flash of Light. A hard-drinking Manhattan-based photographer, Kelty would spend his summers following the circus as it traveled across the country. Along the way. Kelty would take picture of the performers. Some of them were candid shots while some of them were posed but they all captured the humanity of a group of people who were usually not treated with much respect by the rest of society. From the 1920s through the 40s, Kelty captured indelible images of circus life but then, suddenly, he apparently abandoned both photography and the circus and he moved to Chicago. It was only after his death that collectors started to realize just how special Kelty’s photographs were. In the documentary, one collectors says that he hung one of Kelty’s pictures between pictures taken by Diane Arbus and Irving Penn and that Kelty’s picture was the one that visitors always commented upon!

by E.J. Kelty

Featuring hundreds of Kelty’s photographs, along with interviews with collectors and his surviving family members, this documentary gives Kelty his due. While Kelty’s personal life may remain mysterious, his art can speak for itself and A Flash of Light shows not only why Kelty’s photographs are so popular among collectors but also why they are such important documents of their time and place.

I recommend A Flash of Light to anyone who is interested in either the circus or photography.

by E.J. Kelty

For Love of the Game (1999, dir. by Sam Raimi)

Posted on November 2, 2020 by Dazzling Erin

Last week, the Dodgers won the World Series and brought the 2020 MLB season to a close. For me, it was a disappointing season because the Rangers ended up with the worst record in the American League and came nowhere close to the playoffs. I should be used to that by now but it still hurts every season.

If only we could have had a pitcher like Billy Chapel, who Kevin Costner plays in For Love of the Game. Billy Chapel is a forty year-old veteran who has been playing baseball his entire life and who has spent his entire major league career as a member of the Tigers. Before the start of the team’s final game against the Yankees (the Yankees have already clinched the playoff berth while the Tigers are at the bottom of their division, kind of like my Rangers), Billy is told that the Tigers have been sold and that Billy is going to be traded to the Giants. Will Billy go to San Francisco or will he retire and go to London with the woman he loves, Jane Aubrey (Kelly Preston)?

That’s the decision that Billy is going to have to make. But first, Billy’s going to throw a perfect game against the New York Yankees.

While Billy is pitching the game, he’s also thinking about Jane and having flashbacks to how they first met and fell for each other. Billy loves Jane but he also loves playing baseball and it keeps the two of them apart. Jane doesn’t want to be a baseball groupie and she needs a man who she knows is going to be there for her and her daughter, instead of spending most of the year traveling around the country. Billy, meanwhile, doesn’t want to give up the game that’s defined his life. As Billy throws his perfect game, he has to decide whether or not to keep playing until he can no longer get the ball across the plate or whether to start a new chapter with Jane. Meanwhile, Jane is stuck in an airport, watching Billy play the game of his life.

For Love Of The Game is a good love story but it’s a great baseball movie. I loved the scenes of Billy standing out on the mound, carefully evaluating each batter while blocking out all of the noise around him. (The only villains in this movie are the New Yorkers who won’t stop yelling at Billy during the game.) I enjoyed the interplay between Billy and the catcher (John C. Reilly) and I especially appreciated the way that the movie showed that it takes more than a good pitcher to have a perfect game. It takes teamwork and focus. It’s not just Billy’s perfect game. It’s the entire team’s perfect game.

For Love of the Game may be a romantic drama but it’s also a celebration of everything that makes baseball great. It’s America’s pastime and this movie shows why. Watching Billy Chapel get his perfect game made me look forward to seeing what will happen next year. Who knows? Maybe the Rangers will even shock everyone and make the postseason. If Billy Chapel can throw a perfect game while playing the Yankees in New York City, then anything can happen!