Edward Reed
A-List Customer
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- 494
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- Aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress
LOL! I guess we can list that as another uncredited appearance!Does Colonna know Hope swiped his moustache?
LOL! I guess we can list that as another uncredited appearance!Does Colonna know Hope swiped his moustache?
(Spoiler alert) After a full acquittal for both of them, Simmons confesses her guilt to her attorney (wonderfully played by Leon Ames): she did it all in a mad attempt to kill her stepmother and keep Mitchum for herself (her father was collateral damage).
Ames explains that double jeopardy - you can't be tried for the same crime twice - makes her confession moot (challenge, since her confession would be new evidence, but it's a movie, so you just go with it and I'm not a lawyer anyway).
Really? My friends (the ones who like the movie, that is) and I laugh right through most of it, mostly because Ben (Dustin Hoffman) seems to be so clueless about the world he lives in. "Different strokes for different folks", I guess.I (re)watched the "Graduate" last night on TCM... interesting that they ( those at TCM) called the movie a comedy? while certainly quirky.. there aren't really many laugh out loud moments.
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Heat Lightning from 1934 with Aline MacMahon, Preston Foster, Ann Dvorak and Lyle Talbot
This gem of a pre-code B Movie should be better known, but perhaps has been eclipsed by its subsequently famous cognate, The Petrified Forest. All of the latter's themes are here in Heat Lightning and explored in rawer form with a feminist angle as was often the wont of the pre-code era.
Two sisters, a still-young, but world-weary older one, Aline MacMahon, and the younger one, Ann Dvorak, run an isolated motor court (gas station, diner and spartan lodge) in the Mojave desert.
MacMahon was a party girl in a big city who was played hard and tossed aside by a former boyfriend, so she's retreated into her role as an asexual auto mechanic/motor-court owner in greasy overalls. MacMahon tries to prevent her cute sister, Dvorak, from repeating her mistakes with men.
The younger sister is a good kid, but like any late teen, she wants to go out and have fun, in this case, with a local bad boy, which has Dvorak seeing a dangerous echo of her own failed youthful romance.
Into this family drama, coincidentally, drives MacMahon's old boyfriend, Preston Foster, and his buddy, Lyle Talbot. We quickly learn they are on the lam from a jewelry-store holdup and murder, the latter, which only Foster committed.
You can feel the physical heat between MacMahon and her old boyfriend as it's clear that sexual passion was a big part of their former relationship. Foster's sudden appearance shatters MacMahon's desert armor of sexual abstinence, which has her now scrambling to rebalance herself.
Driving right into the middle of this passion storm are two bejewelled Reno divorcees who, like the ex-boyfriend and his buddy, are stuck spending the night. Upping the drama, Foster, now that he's seen the women's jewelry, plots to steal it.
What follows is a defining evening as young-sister Dvorak sneaks out to be with her bad-boy date. Meanwhile, Foster flirts MacMahon into bed, but as she learns later, only to distract her so he and his partner can steal the jewels the divorcees have stored in the diner's safe.
We're now fifty minutes into this sixty-minute movie and everyone's world has been rocked as the young daughter (we think) slept with the bad boy who is now cold to her when he drops her back at the diner (cow, milk, free - lesson learned). Hurt and tearful, she walks in to see Foster leaving her big sister's bed - yup.
But there's more (spoiler alerts from here on out), MacMahon, still freshly glowing, dreamily walks into the diner only to learn she's been played by Foster again as he's forcing his partner to break into the diner's safe. In a girl-power moment, 1934 style, MacMahon gets a gun and shoots Foster dead in cold blood. That's one way to handle it.
She then lets the partner get away because he wasn't trying to break into her safe. She now, also, shows empathy to her younger sister as she gets that you can't just lock your passions and urges away and call it a life.
Marvel at the pre code. In an hour, we watched a world-weary woman get sexually played by the same man who played her in the past, so she shoots him dead. At the same time, her late-teen sister appears to have slept with a guy for the first time who proceeds to all but ignores her as he dumps her back at the diner and drives off.
The cold-blooded shooting will be dismissed legally since the dead man was stealing from MacMahon's safe at the time, but the message is clear: he was shot for manipulating this woman emotionally and sexually one too many times. Pre-code justice was also okay with letting the partner escape as he had only held up a jewelry store, but didn't kill the guard or emotionally abuse a woman.
None of this would be allowed a year later when the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced and a year after that when Heat Lightning's same themes were explored in a similar construct in 1936's The Petrified Forest.
In that code-handcuffed, but still outstanding effort, the sex has been reduced to kisses and the criminals are all either killed or arrested. It's a powerful movie for other reasons, but it lacks the raw carnal passion and realpolitik justice of Heat Lightning.
N.B. Amidst all the other things going on, it's still worth noting the "girl power" meme in Heat Lightning of two women running a successful motor court with one of them doubling as the gas station's mechanic. History is rarely as black and white as it's often portrayed.
Nothing as period as this for me, alas. Last night I watched Zombieland: Double Tap which has finally arrived on Netflix UK. A rare sequel to a surprise cult hit that really hits the mark. Stick around for a surprise appearance during and after the end credits. Woody Harrelson is especially on form, and does a very credible Elvis impression, it turns out. Even if he doesn't fit Elvis' actual shoes.
Minor correction required--Jim Jarmusch had nothing to do with Sling Blade; it was written and directed by Billy Bob Thornton....Speaking of zombie films, last night's Friday Night Flick was The Dead Don't Die, 2019...Made by the dude who did Sling Blade...
Minor correction required--Jim Jarmusch had nothing to do with Sling Blade; it was written and directed by Billy Bob Thornton.
Misinformation on the Internet??? Say it ain't so!My wife told me that, she read it off the internet! Apparently, not everything you read there is true!
Our family love both films.
Speaking of zombie films, last night's Friday Night Flick was The Dead Don't Die, 2019, starring Adam Driver and, ahem, Bill Murray, as two small town cops dealing with the effects of the earth's core not spinning, or something (the McGuffin).
Zombies arise (including one played by Iggy Pop), mayhem arises.
This is a love it or hate film. Three of us loved it, daughter 1 found it "strange". 5.5 on Imdb.
It has a deadpan approach and humour, perhaps why some do not "get it".
9.5 at the Cairo house. Made by the dude who did Coffee and Cigarettes.
Tom Waits plays a hermit. Carol Kane has a one word role. Nuff said..
Finally saw that one over the Summer - it seemed to take forever to come to streaming, and I missed it in the cinema. Very much enjoyed it. The only mis-step, imo, was the breach of the fourth wall and the references to "the script" - I felt that fell rather flat. Otherwise, excellent cast. Iggy was hilarious (sort of a pity he didn't get a line or two, though). There's no-one quite like Bill Murray; truly an irreplaceable player in anything he's been in.