Guest Review Double Feature: 99 River Street in The Naked City

By Philip Schweier  John Payne is in for the fight of his life in 99 River Street (1953) when he plays Ernie Driscoll, a former boxer turned cabbie. It seems the boxing commission barred him from fighting due to an eye injury, and now, four years later, he’s driving a cab in New York City. He’s got dreams of owning…

Guest Review Double Feature: The Dirty Dozen (1967)/The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission (1985)

By Philip Schweier  The Dirty Dozen (1967) is a manly type of film, chockfull of military bravado and guns and explosions and all the things that make action movies worthwhile. But as a war film, it is, as one commenter on the DVD explained, of the latter breed of WW II films. That is to say, that movies…

Guest Review: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

By Philip Schweier  I’ll admit to the fact that in my younger days I was what they call a “trekkie.” I read all the books and watched the TV show over and over. So I was thrilled at the age of 14 when the cast of the television show reunited for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). Recently, with a…

Guest Review: Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)

By Philip Schweier  Once again, co-stars and director are reunited in Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), as Otto Preminger directs his leading actors from Laura (1944), Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in a script from newsie turned playwright turned screen scribe Ben Hecht.  Dana plays Det. Mark Dixon, a tough cop who has no compulsion against beating the occasional suspect in an…

Guest Review: Evil Under the Sun (1982)

By Philip Schweier  I’ve always been a mystery fan, ever since I watched Scooby-Doo in its original run. But many mysteries rely on some sort of gimmick, denying the audience (movie or book) the opportunity to solve the crime along with the detective. Perhaps the solution lies in a photograph the audience never gets to see. Or maybe there’s…

Guest Review: The Woman in the Window (1944)

By Philip Schweier Some months back, I offered for your consideration a review of Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945), unaware that it had an unofficial prequel in the form of Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944). The two films are less cousins and more like identical twins, in that the three major roles…

Guest Review: The Racket (1951)

By Philip Schweier The Racket (1951) also features Robert Ryan, but this time he’s on the other side of the law, starring as Nick Scanlon, public enemy #1 in an unnamed city where Robert Mitchum, as honest police captain Tom McQuigg, holds the line between decent folk and the forces of evil. The film opens as…

Guest Review: On Dangerous Ground (1952)

By Philip Schweier On Dangerous Ground (1952) is a rare case in which I can’t wait for a movie to end. It is part of a film noir collection I received for Christmas, but it represents the low end of the five films in the collection, in my opinion. Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is a reasonably…

Guest Review: The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

By Philip Schweier The Asphalt Jungle (1950) is the simple story of a crime, but because criminals are by nature untrustworthy, the crime begins to unravel virtually from the get-go. But this is also the story of motivation. Not greed, mind you, but what drives people to do certain things. According to Doc Erwin Riedenschneider, the…

Guest Review: Lady in the Lake (1947)

By Philip Schweier Lady in the Lake (1947) is based on the Raymond Chandler story of the same name, which features his private eye, Philip Marlowe. Marlowe is one of those characters which has been featured in many movie adaptations but never played by the same actor twice, Robert Mitchum being the exception. As much as I…