From the DVR: The Underworld Story (1950)

This past Saturday evening (January 25) saw the premiere of Try and Get Me! (1950; a.k.a. The Sound of Fury) on The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ as an offering on their Noir Alley showcase, hosted by the Czar of Noir himself, Eddie Mueller.  TCM ran Get Me at midnight as part of a…

Squeezing one in before the Old Year ends

The Thrilling Days of Yesteryear faithful are certainly entitled to an explanation as to why it’s been so quiet around these parts since mid-August...and I’m not making much progress beyond going out for a pack of cigarettes and losing track of the time.  (I’ve heard this a time or two in movies and TV.)  The…

Adventures in Blu-Ray: Noir Archive Volume 2: 1954-1956

It seems like it was just last April—come to think of it...it was last April—when I borrowed some bandwidth on the blog to talk about a collaborative Blu-ray effort between Mill Creek Entertainment and Kit Parker Films/The Sprocket Vault featuring nine movies previously released to MOD DVD as part of Sony’s Choice Collection.  That compendium…

Adventures in Blu-ray: Noir Archive Volume 1: 1944-1954

In Jacobellis vs. Ohio (1964), a U.S. Supreme Court case addressing the First Amendment (an Ohio movie theatre banned the 1958 Louis Malle film Les Amants because they believed it to be “obscene”), Justice Potter Stewart made a famous observation about obscenity that has become a colloquial expression today.  “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I…

Adventures in Blu-ray: Stand-In (1937)

The agenda at a board meeting of prominent New York bank Pettypacker & Sons centers around the sale of Colossal Pictures—a Hollywood independent studio that financier Ivor Nassau (C. Henry Gordon) seeks to acquire for far below its $10,000,000 price tag.  Nassau has made president Fowler Pettypacker (Tully Marshall) an offer of five million, and the senior Pettypacker is seriously considering…

Adventures in Blu-ray: Along Came Jones (1945)

The town of Paynesville isn’t a particularly welcoming one to cowpokes Melody Jones (Gary Cooper) and George Fury (William Demarest) as they ride in one day...but there’s an explanation for this.  Native Paynesvillian (definitely not a favorite son) Monte Jarrad (Dan Duryea) has a $1,000 price on his head after a stage robbery nets him…

It’s not E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed…but beggars can’t be choosers

Many apologies, cartooners, for allowing the blog to go dark for the past few weeks; there has been much outside activity here at Rancho Yesteryear—notably some extracurricular projects plus preparations for an event that looks like it’s shaping up to become what I have decided to label The Great DVD Purge of 2019.  This one won’t…

Where’s That Been? – Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941)

Once again, I apologize (with hat in hand) to the Thrilling Days of Yesteryear faithful for the fallow blog of late; a lot of my copious free time has been sacrificed to Radio Spirits assignments and their blog (not that I’m complaining, mind you—there's money in that gig) and the remainder seems to be taken…

Overlooked Films on Tuesday: I Met My Love Again (1938)

A wise man once observed: “Youth is wasted on the wrong people.”  (Come to think of it, I believe it was the cranky old fart [Dick Elliott] on the front porch in It’s a Wonderful Life [1946].)  But that’s not the film I want to discuss today—and what's more, that adage certainly doesn’t apply to I…

Adventures in Blu-ray: Merrily We Live (1938)

In cinematic screwball comedies of the 1930s/1940s, wealthy people were always given a hefty transfusion of eccentricity in order to make them more accessible to non-wealthy folks.  (Rich people!  They’re just like us!)  That is most definitely the case with the Kilbourne family, a clan whose matriarch Emily (Billie Burke) has an interesting hobby:  hiring…