Here’s the latest trailer for A Monster Calls, which is based on a book that I absolutely adore and which everyone needs to read! The trailer looks pretty good and if anyone was born to voice a tree monster, it’s Liam Neeson!
A Monster Calls is coming out this fall, presumably just in time for Oscar season.
Here’s the trailer for the upcoming thriller, Our Kind of Traitor! I have to admit that, having watched the trailer, I have mixed feelings. I love Ewan McGregor but I am so sick of movies featuring Russian mobsters.
My love for Ewan will be put to the test on July 1st!
What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!
If you were up at 12 midnight last night (and really, who wasn’t?), you could have turned over to Showtime and watched a new documentary called Spring Broke.
I have to admit that the main reason I watched Spring Broke was because I assumed that it would be a light-hearted and mostly empty-headed celebration of spring break decadence. I always loved spring break and really, the worst part of graduating from college was that I lost that one week out of the year when you could basically do absolutely anything without having to worry about any negative consequences.
But it turns out I was wrong. Spring Broke does feature a few scenes of sandy decadence but, for the most part, it focuses more on the business aspect of spring break than on the fun. It starts with footage of clean-cut, square-jawed college students partying in Florida in the late 50s and the early 60s and then follows as spring break gets progressively wilder and, in some ways, far more dangerous. As one observer points out, when you have 20 drunk college students jumping off a balcony and into the pool below, only 19 are going to make it into the water. One out of the 20 is always going to end on the pavement “splattered like a watermelon.” Spring Broke is one of those documentaries that claims to show how a good thing eventually fell apart. What does Spring Broke blame for the corruption of spring break?
Capitalism, of course. But that’s not surprising. It’s very rare that you see a documentary that doesn’t blame everything on capitalism.
Spring Broke is basically a collection of talking head interviews, mixed in with footage of past spring breaks. As is typical for many documentaries, the various interviewees can split into three separate and distinct groups:
First off, there’s the faded celebrities. These are people who used to be famous but who you probably really haven’t thought about recently. It’s rare that the celebrities ever have anything interesting to say but, for marketing purposes, they have to be present in the film. The main Spring Broke celebrity is Pauly Shore.
Secondly, there’s the people who were actually involved with the documentary’s subject matter but who worked behind-the-scenes. They give the inside details of what was really going on. These people usually aren’t as smooth in their delivery as the faded celebrity but, because they were actually there, they are still often interesting to listen to. In Spring Broke, this group of people is made up of a collection of businessmen, nightclub managers, resort owners, local politicians, and MTV executives. The businessmen and the politicians had the most interesting stories to tell (and I especially enjoyed the interview with the cantankerous old man who took it upon himself to try to save Florida from insane spring breakers, largely because he reminded me of twitter mainstay Leo Mcallister) but I have to admit that I always find it interesting when MTV executives show up in documentaries. That’s because the MTV executives (as opposed to the on-air talent) almost always turn out to be the blandest and most boring people interviewed and that pattern continues with Spring Broke. (One exec even uses the term “synergy” without a hint of irony.)
And then finally, every documentary has to interview an expert. The expert is someone who has nothing to do with the subject of the documentary but who has still written a book about it. You can always tell who the expert is supposed to be because they’re usually the least attractive person in the film. Spring Broke‘s expert had bad teeth and hipster glasses.
Spring Broke was a fairly interesting documentary. Clocking in at a fast-paced 78 minutes, Spring Broke didn’t always go into as much depth as I wanted it to. For instance, I would have preferred to have heard more about the conflict between the spring break-loving businessmen and the spring break-hating townspeople. But as an anthropological history and a look at how economics shape culture, it’s an interesting look at the surface that hints at a bigger story underneath.
Previous Insomnia Files:
The 12th film contained in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set is the classic film noir D.O.A. Before I get into reviewing this film, there’s an oddity that I feel the need to point out. According to the back of the Fabulous Forties box, D.O.A. was released in 1949. However, according to Wikipedia, imdb, and almost every other source out there, D.O.A. was released in 1950. In short, it’s debatable whether or not D.O.A. actually belongs in the Fabulous Forties box set but it really doesn’t matter. D.O.A. is a classic and, along with Night of the Living Dead, it is undoubtedly one of the best B-movies to ever slip into the public domain.
D.O.A. opens with a lengthy tracking shot, following a man named Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) as he walks through the hallways of a San Francisco police station. Frank walks with a slow, halting movement and it’s obvious that he is not a healthy man. When he finally steps into a detective’s office, Frank announces that he’s come to the station to report a murder — his own.
Frank is a small-town accountant who came to San Francisco for a vacation. After a long night of drinking, Frank woke up feeling ill. When he went to a doctor, he was informed of two things. Number one, he was in overall good health. Number two, he only had a few days to live. Sometime during the previous night, Frank was poisoned with a “luminous toxin.” There was no antidote.
The rest of the film follows Frank as he attempts to figure out who poisoned him and why. It’s an intriguing mystery and I’m not going to ruin it by going into too many details. Over the course of his investigation, the increasingly desperate Frank comes across a gangster named Majak (Luther Adler). This leads to a lengthy scene in which Majak’s psychotic henchman, Chester (Neville Brand), repeatedly punches Frank in the stomach. It’s a scene that, even in our far more desensitized times, made me cringe. I can only imagine how audiences in 1950 reacted.
(There’s also a shoot-out at a drug store that can stand alongside almost any modern-day action sequence. Regardless of whether the film was made in 1949 or 1950, it still feels like a movie that could have just as easily been made in 2016.)
But really, the mystery is secondary. Instead, D.O.A. is truly about Frank and how he deals with the knowledge that he is going to die. Before being poisoned, Frank is the epitome of complacent, middle-class suburbia. He’s engaged to Paula (Pamela Britton) but he’s in no hurry to marry her. He’s got all the time in the world. When Frank goes to San Francisco, he epitomizes the bourgeoisie on vacation. He goes to the 1940s equivalent of a hipster nightclub, not because he’s actually interested in what the scene is all about but because he’s a tourist looking for a story to tell the folks back home. When he checks into his hotel, he leers at every passing woman with a casual sexism that would not be out-of-place on an old episode of Mad Men. Frank is floating through life, confident in his own complacency.
It’s only after he’s poisoned that Frank actually starts to live. He goes from being passive to being aggressive. Knowing that he’s going to die, he no longer has anything to lose. Only with death approaching does Frank actually start to live. Frank’s realization that he waited to long to live makes his final line all the more poignant.
D.O.A. is a classic! Watch it below, you won’t be sorry!
The eleventh film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set was 1946’s The Strange Woman. The Strange Woman is one of those film noir/small town melodrama hybrids that seem to have been something of a cinematic mainstay in the mid to late 40s.
The Strange Woman of the title is Jenny Hager (Hedy Lamarr) and she’s not just strange because she’s got an Eastern European accent despite having grown up in Bangor, Maine. The film opens in 1824 and we watch as tween Jenny pushes one her classmates into a river, despite the fact that he can’t swim. At first, she seems content to let him drown. However, once she realizes that an adult is watching, Jenny jumps into the river and saves his life.
Ten years later, Jenny has grown up to be the most beautiful woman in Maine. However, her father is abusive and regularly whips her as punishment for being too flirtatious. Jenny has plans, though. She wants to marry the richest man in town, a store owner and civic leader named Isaiah Poster (Gene Lockahrt). Isaiah also happens to be the father of Ephraim (Louis Hayward), the young man who Jenny tried to drown at the beginning of the film.
And eventually, Jenny’s dream does come true. She marries Isaiah, even though she doesn’t love him. She just wants his money and is frustrated when the sickly Isaiah keeps recovering from his frequent illnesses. She starts to flirt with the weak-willed Ephraim, trying to manipulate him into killing his father.
Of course, even as she’s manipulating Ephraim, she’s also flirting with John Everd (George Sanders), despite the fact that John is already engaged to the daughter of the local judge. Though Everd is a good and decent guy, he still finds himself tempted by Jenny.
What makes all of this interesting is that Jenny isn’t just a heartless femme fatale. Throughout the film, there are several instances when she wants to do good but can’t overcome her essentially heartless nature. She gives money to charity and, whenever she listens to one of the local fire-and-brimstone preachers, she finds herself tempted to give up her manipulative ways.
The Strange Woman was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, who is probably best known for directing the ultimate indie film noir, Detour. He was a childhood friend of Hedy Lamarr’s and she specifically asked that he direct her in The Strange Woman. As a result, this film represents one of the few times that Ulmer was given a budget that was equal to his talents. What makes The Strange Woman stand out from other 40s melodramas — like Guest In The House, for example — is that, even with the larger budget, Ulmer’s direction retains the same deep cynicism and dream-like intensity that distinguished his work in Detour. The film remains sympathetic to Jenny, even as she often suffers the punishments that were demanded by the production code.
In the role of Jenny , Hedy Lamarr is a force of a nature. She is so intense and determined that watching her as Jenny is a bit like seeing what Gone With The Wind would have been like if Scarlet O’Hara had been a total sociopath. Even the fact that Lamarr’s accent is definitely not a Maine accent seems appropriate. It sets Jenny apart from the boring people around her.
It reminds us that, even if she is “strange,” there is no one else like Jenny Hager.
The 10th film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set was 1947’s Dick Tracy’s Dilemma. According to Wikipedia, this was the third Dick Tracy film to be produced by RKO Pictures. In case you couldn’t guess from the title, Dick Tracy has a dilemma in this film. I assume that, in the first two films, he had a problem and a quandary.
Clocking in at just an hour, Dick Tracy’s Dilemma takes place over the course of one long and very dark night. Three men rob the Flawless Furs Warehouse and kill the night watchman. The leader of the gang (played by Jack Lambert) is known as the Claw because, instead of a right hand, he has a prosthetic hook, which he can use to either beat or claw people to death. (It all depends on his mood.) The Claw also loves cats so he can’t be all bad.
Investigating the murder is Detective Dick Tracy (Ralph Byrd). This was the first Dick Tracy film that I’ve ever actually watched so I can’t claim to be an expert on the character. But judging from this film, Dick Tracy’s dilemma is that everyone around him is either extremely stupid or extremely evil. For example, Dick’s partner, Patton (Lyle Latell), is useless. When Dick’s number one informant, a fake blind beggar named Sightless (Jimmy Conlin), attempts to get some important information to Dick, he has the misfortune of running into Dick’s idiot friend, a Shakespearean actor named Vitamin (Ian Keith). Vitamin mishears the information and he delivers his lines with so much over-the-top flourish that, by the time he tells Dick that Sightless wants to speak to him, the poor beggar has already been murdered by The Claw.
Seriously, people have been talking about how dark Batman v. Superman is but just check out Dick Tracy’s Dilemma. The Claw is a sadistic killing machine and, in the end, it seems like it’s more dumb luck than good police work that leads to Dick Tracy tracking him down. The film ends with smiles all around, despite the fact that it’s only been a few hours since poor Sightless was clawed to death. If Vitamin wasn’t a drunk old actor, Sightless wouldn’t be dead. For that matter, Dick Tracy is the one who pressured Sightless to act as an informant in the first place.
Seen today, Dick Tracy’s Dilemma seems more like an episode of an old cop show than an actual movie. It’s easy to be dismissive of it but I don’t know. If I had been alive in 1947 and saw this movie when it was originally released, I probably would have enjoyed it. Ralph Byrd makes a convincing hero and there is a sense of genuine menace to Jack Lambert’s performance as The Claw. That said, don’t even get me started on Vitamin.
What type of name is Vitamin anyway?
You can watch Dick Tracy’s Dilemma below!
The 9th film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties DVD box set was 1942’s Jungle Book. Based on the novel by Rudyard Kipling (which was later made into an animated Disney film and of which a remake is scheduled to be released next week), Jungle Book was directed by Zoltan Korda and produced by Zoltan’s brother, Alexander. Today, the Hungarian-born Korda Brothers are best remembered as being pioneers of the British film industry. However, during World War II, they relocated their film making to the United States. Jungle Book was one of the most critically and commercially successful of their American films.
Jungle Book opens in colonial India. An elderly Indian storyteller is visited by a British woman (Faith Brook) who wants to hear a story from his youth. The rest of the film plays out in flashback, a structure that allows Jungle Book to walk a thin line between reality and fantasy. Is the storyteller telling the exact truth or is he exaggerating his tale? That’s left up to the viewer to decide. Personally, I chose to believe that he’s telling the exact truth. It’s more magical that way.
The storyteller starts by telling the woman about the Indian jungle and the animals that live within it. Some of the animals are kind and some of them are cruel but they all serve a purpose. The most feared of the animals is a tiger named Shere Kahn. When a baby disappears from a nearby village, the villagers assume that he, like his father, was killed by Shere Kahn. What they do not know is that the baby actually wandered into the jungle and was raised by wolves.
The baby grows up to be Mowgli (Sabu), a feral young man who can talk to the animals. When Mowgli is captured by the villagers, he is unknowing adopted by his real mother, Mesusa (Rosemary DeCamp). At first, the wild Mowgli struggles to adapt to human ways and one of the villagers, Buldeo (Joseph Calleia), insists that Mowgli has “the evil eye.”
As Mowgli becomes a little more civilized (though he’s never exactly tamed), he starts to fall in love with a Mahala (Patricia O’Rourke). Unfortunately, Mahala is the daughter of Buldeo and Buldeo is none to happy when Mowgli and Mahala start to spend all of their time exploring the jungle together. However, that’s before Mowgli and Mahala come across a lost palace that is full of treasure. When the greedy Buldeo finds out about the treasure, he demands that Mowgli tell him where the palace is. Driven mad by Mowgli’s refusal to tell him, Buldeo goes to more and more extreme measures to find the treasure…
Jungle Book is a big epic film, one that proudly announces that it was shot in Technicolor. The sets are big, the live animal footage (as opposed to the stock footage usually used in films like this) is impressive, and it’s just a fun movie to watch. (Even though I was watching a typically cheap Mill Creek transfer, I was still impressed with the films visuals.) Indian actor Sabu makes for a charismatic Sabu but the film’s best performance comes from Joseph Calleia, who brings unexpected depth to his villainous character.
(Movie lovers, like you and me, probably best know Joseph Calleia as Orson Welles’s tragic partner in Touch of Evil.)
You can watch the original Jungle Book below!
(Jungle Book is in the public domain so, if the video above gets taken down — as often seems to happen with embedded YouTube videos — I would suggest just going to YouTube and doing a search for Jungle Book 1942. You’ll find hundreds of other uploads. I picked the one above because it did not appear to have any commercials.)
After I watched The Red House, I watched the 8th film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set, a 1945 film noir called The Lady Confesses.
Mary Beth Hughes plays Vicki McGuire, who is engaged to marry Larry Craig (Hugh Beaumont). When we first meet Larry, he seems like a fairly normal guy. He drinks too much but then again, this film was made in 1945 and it’s totally possible that Larry had yet to see The Lost Weekend. Before getting engaged to Vicki, he was married to Norma Craig (Barbara Slater). Norma disappeared seven years ago and has since been declared legally dead. So, imagine everyone’s surprise when Norma suddenly turns up alive and knocking on Vicki’s front door! Norma announces that there’s no way that she’s going to give up Larry.
Larry reacts to all this by going out and getting drunk. He spends a while literally passed out at the bar and then, once he’s sobered up, he and Vicki go to visit Norma and try to talk some sense into her. However, upon arriving at her apartment, they discover that Norma has been strangled!
The police automatically suspect Larry of being the murderer but he has an alibi. He was drunk. He was passed out at the bar. And the only time he wasn’t at the bar, he was sleeping on a couch in the dressing room of singer Lucille Compton (Claudia Drake)…
Wait! Larry was sleeping on another woman’s couch? Well, Vicki isn’t necessarily happy to hear that but she still believes that her fiancée is innocent and she’s willing to do whatever it takes to clear his name, even if it means going undercover and working at a nightclub. Vicki and Larry suspect that nightclub owner Lucky Brandon (Edmund MacDonald) is the murderer. Can they prove it or, waiting around the next shadowy corner, is there another twist to the plot?
It’s not a spoiler to tell you that there’s another twist. In fact, for a film that only runs for 64 minutes, there’s a lot of twists in The Lady Confesses. The Lady Confesses is an entertaining film noir, one that gives B-movie mainstay Mary Beth Hughes a rare lead role. As well, if you’ve ever seen an old episode of Leave It To Beaver, it’s quite interesting to see Hugh Beaumont playing a somewhat less than wholesome character. Director Sam Newfield, who directed over 254 films during the course of his prolific career, keeps the action moving and provides a lot of menacing and shadowy images.
Though it may not be perfect (for one thing, we never learn why Norma disappeared in the first place), The Lady Confesses is a watchable and atmospheric film noir. And you watch it below!
Last week, I started on my latest project — watching all 50 of the movies included in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set! I started things off with Port of New York and then I was lucky enough to discover two excellent low-budget gems: The Black Book and Trapped.
And now, we come the 7th film in the Fabulous Forties box set: 1947’s The Red House.
The Red House takes place is one of those small and seemingly idyllic country towns that always seem to harbor so many dark secrets and past crimes. Everyone in town is friendly, cheerful, and quick to greet the world with a smile.
Well, almost everyone.
Pete Morgan (Edward G. Robinson) is the exception to the rule. A farmer who moves with a pronounced limp, Pete lives on an isolated farm and refuses to have much to do with any of the other townspeople. He lives with his wife, Ellen (Judith Anderson), and his niece, 17 year-old Meg (Allene Roberts). Pete and Ellen are extremely overprotective of Meg. Pete, especially, is always quick to tell her not to associate with any of boys in the town and not to enter the dark woods that sit next to the farm. He tells her that there’s a red house hidden away in the woods and the house is haunted. Going into the red house can only lead to death.
Despite Pete’s eccentricities, Meg is finally able to convince him to hire one of her classmates to help do chores around the farm. Nath (Lon McAllister) is a good and hard worker and soon, even Pete starts to like him. Meg, meanwhile, is falling in love with Nath. However, Nath already has a girlfriend, the manipulative Tibby (Julie London), who cannot wait until they graduate high school so that she and Nath can leave town together. When Nath starts to also develop feelings for Meg, Tibby responds by flirting with the local criminal, Teller (Rory Calhoun).
Though things seem to be getting better on the Morgan Farm, Nath eventually makes the mistake of admitting that, when he goes home, he takes a short cut through the old woods. Pete angrily forbids Nath from entering the woods. Of course, this has the opposite effect. Soon, Nath and Meg are spending all day sneaking away into the woods so that they can look for the red house.
Once Pete learns of what they’re doing, he decides to hire Teller to keep them from even finding and entering the red house. Needless to say, love, melodrama, murder, and tragedy all follow…
Despite the fact that the DVD suffered from a typically murky Mill Creek transfer, I enjoyed The Red House. It’s one of those films that is just so over the top with all of the small town melodrama that you can’t help but enjoy it. (If M. Night Shyamalan had been a 1940s filmmaker, he probably would have ended up directing The Red House.) Nath and Meg were kind of boring but Julie London was a lot of fun as Tibby. If I had ever starred in production of The Red House, I would want to play Tibby.
Plus, the film’s got Edward G. Robinson doing what he does best! Robinson was an interesting actor, in that he could be both totally menacing and totally sympathetic at the same time. He has some scary scenes as Pete but they’re also poignant because Robinson suggests that Pete hates his behavior just as much as Ellen and Meg. Robimson was a powerhouse actor, the type who could elevate almost any film.
And that’s certainly what he does in The Red House!
After being disappointed with Guest In The House, I decided to go ahead and watch the sixth film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set and I’m glad that I did. 1949’s Trapped turned out to be an entertaining little discovery.
Much like Port of New York, Trapped opens with documentary footage of the government at work and an official sounding narrator explaining to us that we are about to see a film about the hardworking agents of the Treasury Department. In fact, the narrator goes on for so long about the Treasury Department that he starts to sound downright worshipful. There’s nothing that the Treasury Department cannot do! Who protects the President? The Treasury Department! Who tracks down counterfeiters? The Treasury Department! Who protects the coast? The Coast Guard but guess what? The Coast Guard is actually a part of The Treasury Department! The tone of the narration is so worshipful that it could almost pass for a Scientology recruiting film. Just as only the Sea Org can protect us from Evil Lord Xenu, only the Treasury Department can stop phony money pushers!
Eventually, the narration ends and the actual movie begins. Fortunately, the rest of Trapped more than makes up for that awkward introduction. The film opens with a bunch of Treasury agents looking over a phony twenty-dollar bill. The bill is almost perfect and the agents believe that it was printed using plates designed by one of the world’s greatest counterfeiters, Tris Stewart (Lloyd Bridges). The only problem is that Stewart is in prison. Obviously, someone else has gotten their hands on Stewart’s plates.
Stewart is upset that someone is getting rich off of his work. So, he strikes a deal with the Treasury Department. In return for being released, he will help them track down his plates. The Treasury Department agrees and arranges for Stewart to “escape” during a phony prison break.
However, Stewart has plans of his own. As soon as he’s out of jail, he knocks out his handler and escapes for real. Tris is not only planning on tracking down his plates but he’s also going to go back into business printing and passing phony money. He also reunites with his girlfriend, nightclub hostess Meg Dixon (Barbara Payton).
When he meets Meg, he discovers that she has a new admirer. Johnny Hackett (John Hoyt) likes to hang out whenever Meg’s working. Even though Johnny appears to have a thing for Meg, he and Tris still become friends. Tris is even willing to bring Johnny in on the operation but, what Tris doesn’t realize, is that Johnny Hackett is actually Treasury agent John Downey (John Hoyt)…
Needless to say, violence, betrayal, and death follows.
Shot on location in some of the seediest parts of 1940s Los Angeles, Trapped is a fast-paced and exciting film noir. (This is one of those films, like The Black Book, where shadows are literally everywhere.) Lloyd Bridges (who, as a young man, could have passed for Kirk Douglas’s brother) gives a great performance as the charming but ultimately cold-hearted Tris Stewart while John Hoyt does a fairly good job as the conflicted Downey. Barbara Payton, one of the more tragic figures from Hollywood’s Golden Age, does such a good job as Meg that it’s even more tragic to consider that, just a few years after making Trapped, her career would be destroyed by alcoholism and personal scandal and she would eventually end up as a homeless prostitute on Sunset Boulevard.
Trapped was a good discovery and you can watch it below!
