Cold storage

Oh...hello!  I didn’t see you come in… Well, what can I say—I have been Señor Slug when it comes to the blog of late...though I haven’t been completely spending my copious free time counting sands in the hourglass since these are the days of our lives.  I lucked out with three, count ‘em, three Radio…

Buried Treasures: The Sleeping City (1950)

Before the plot of The Sleeping City (1950) gets underway, actor Richard Conte delivers a prologue by introducing himself to the motion picture audience and stating that though City was filmed on location using the facilities of NYC’s famous Bellevue Hospital…the story is fictional—it didn’t take place at Bellevue or any other city’s hospital, for that matter.  (I half-expected…

Grey Market Cinema: Night World (1932)

The best way to describe the pre-Code motion picture Night World (1932) is that it’s “Grand Hotel in a speakeasy.”  That speakeasy is owned and operated by ‘Happy’ MacDonald (Boris Karloff), a charmingly sinister host with clear ties to unsavory underworld elements.  His wife Jill (Dorothy Revier) is having a little clandestine what-have-you with Klauss (Russell Hopton), the man choreographing the…

Happy birthday, Edmond O’Brien: An Act of Murder (1948)

The photo above is a still from a 1947 noir entitled The Web, a great little suspenser starring Edmond O’Brien—who celebrates a birthday today, and you can read about it at Radio Spirits—as an attorney hired by criminal no-good Vincent Price to be his bodyguard…but ends up in much more trouble than he bargained.  (Thrilling Days of Yesteryear fave…

Where’s That Been? – It’s in the Bag! (1945)

The following review is one of several that I composed for the ClassicFlix site under the column title “Where’s That Been?”  Most of those columns made the transition to CF’s new site but some of them stayed behind for reason or another...and since my writer’s ego is just big enough to where I don’t like having what…

Grey Market Cinema: Crazy House (1943)

In 1941, Universal Pictures hired vaudeville comedians Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson to bring their mega-successful stage revue Hellzapoppin’ to the silver screen.  Hellzapoppin’, for those not familiar with the production, was a wacky “anything goes” hodgepodge featuring comedy props, wacky sight gags, one-liners (often on the ribald side) and audience participation—much of it improvised nightly by the…

Buried Treasures: Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)

At the Academy Awards ceremony on March 10, 1938, director Leo McCarey graciously accepted the Best Director Oscar for his classic screwball comedy The Awful Truth (1937), thanking the Academy and his peers for bestowing upon him such an honor.  He also added: “But you gave it to me for the wrong picture.”  The film to which…

Grey Market Cinema: Thanks a Million (1935)

A troupe of ragtag performers are traveling on a bus during a torrential downpour as our film opens; the aggregation is headed for a fictional state and its capital, “New City”…where as movie coincidences would have it, is the birthplace of one of its members, crooner Eric Land (Dick Powell).  The driver lets the motley…

“It’s a good story today…tomorrow they’ll wrap a fish in it…”

Spectacle and sensationalism as presented by the media—be it print, broadcast or online—is certainly nothing new throughout recorded history but to make a motion picture that portrayed the fourth estate is a less than flattering light got director Billy Wilder in trouble sixty years ago on this date in theaters.  Wilder followed up his corrosive…

“I can handle big news and little news…and if there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog…”

This essay was originally published at Edward Copeland's Tangents. Cinephiles and classic movie fans alike marked off July 17, 2007 as the date when one of their Holy Grails was finally released to DVD: Ace in the Hole (1951), director Billy Wilder’s pungent portrayal of both the fourth estate and the public’s insatiable appetite for the sensationalism they…