I got a hunch he brung something in.
Jack Palance makes a big impression in his film debut about a New Orleans street thug exposed to a deadly strain of plague in Elia Kazan’s lean, gritty story of an obsessively determined health official (Richard Widmark) who only has two days to head off an epidemic.
In my case, self-absorption is completely justified.
As a teenager in the 1940s, my mother was a self-professed movie buff, spending a lot of her free time with her friends at the matinees and double features in Schenectady, New York, where she grew up. She probably lost count of the number of movies that she see saw back in the day, but one she remembered forty and fifty years later was Laura. When Fox finally came to their senses and released it on VHS some time ago, I was finally able to appreciate why.
Did it ever occur to you that we might be sellin’ this dead cop short? Maybe he had a mother that scrubbed floors, too.
This fact-based account of a crusading journalist trying to exonerate a man falsely imprisoned for murder has been released under Fox’s “Film Noir” line of DVDs, even though it might not belong under that umbrella. Superficially, I guess you could say that bears some resemblance to the noir classics, namely its time period and the plot centering on urban violence and corruption, but it lacks some key elements of the genre. Its hero, city reporter P.J. McNeal (Jimmy Stewart) and the subject of his quest, Frank Wiecek (Richard Conte) are a little too pure and noble to fit under the strict definition of noir, but as a film genre, noir has proven to be most flexible. It matters little, since regardless of its classification, Call Northside 777 is a taut and involving movie.
I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.
Plato believed that everything in the world has an “ideal universal form” that represents the perfect example of the imperfect things in the real world. For many, The Maltese Falcon is the Platonic ideal of the hard-boiled detective story. True, it’s not the earliest example of the genre, the original novel already having been adapted twice for the screen in the previous decade, but it still contains classic examples of what we consider the basic elements of that genre of film. Most of would now be tired clichés of detective films were either established or popularized by this classic version of Dashiell Hammet’s novel.
Original Theatrical Cut:
’92 “Director’s” Cut:
Final Cut:
Replicants are like any other machine – they’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit, it’s not my problem.
Blade Runner is the exception that proves the rule that filmmakers should not be allowed to revisit their earlier work, like George Lucas did with Star Wars. Unlike Lucas’s popcorn trilogy, Ridley Scott‘s visionary adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electic Sheep has always seemed like it really was only partially finished.
One night driving a Mercedes, and you’re already an asshole.
Modern film noir isn’t the easiest style to successfully bring off, at least not without appearing overly cute or self-conscious about it. This blood-soaked mix of dark humor and double cross manages to navigate that minefield without making the audience look at their watches until the end credits roll.
The last film to so adroitly combine noir elements, ironic humor and a byzantine plot was Wild Things and The Ice Harvest is good deal less trashy and more sophisticated than that potboiler.
I admire you as a policeman, particularly your adherence to violence as a necessary adjunct to the job.
It’s probably appropriate that the film adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel L.A. Confidential contains a fictional TV series that’s an obvious riff on Dragnet. This film seems like it wants to expose every dirty secret about the LAPD that Jack Webb ever whitewashed.
Of course I’m respectable. I’m old. Politicians, public buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.
Take a screenwriting class, any screenwriting class, and I almost guarantee you that, before the first session is over, your teacher will mention Robert Towne‘s script for Chinatown in a tone that grown men usually reserve for talking about their first crush. The screenplay for this film has been held up as an example of near perfection of the screenwriting craft and, if I were more cynical, I might look hard for a reason to find fault with that opinion. I probably wouldn’t find it, though.
