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Diagnosis: Moxie – Joan Blondell in NIGHT NURSE (1931)
During her first full year in Hollywood, Joan Blondell made 15 films! The former Miss Dallas and WAMPAS Baby Star had just come off of the Warner Brothers-Vitaphone production THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931),...
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Blondie
Take a look at this poster and tell me what you think this movie is about: Sex, right? Sorry, I know this is a family forum, but we’re talking about Joan Blondell, so the bar has to be set differently....
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Two Peas in a Pod – Blondell and Cagney in BLONDE CRAZY
Could there have been a more ideally matched couple from the Warner Bros. stock company than this pair of New York natives with their streetsmart ways and attitudes to match? It seems strange that...
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Success Never Spoiled Joan Blondell
In 1939, Joan Blondell left Warner Bros. for Columbia after her husband at the time, Dick Powell, decided that neither of them was getting their due from Jack Warner. Blondell worked regularly on the...
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Blonde Ambition: Joan Blondell in The Crowd Roars (1932)
Joan Blondell made herself at home in the cinema. Regardless of the plot or set decoration, Blondell would adjust her sheer stockings and plop into a seat as if she was at a cuckolded boyfriend’s pad....
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The Love Song of Judex (Summer’s End Edition)
My children returned to school this week. Which to my mind spells the end of summer. Who cares what the calendar says, summer = not-in-school, end of discussion. And the end of summer, also, means the...
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FARMAGEDDON
“This film has cross-over appeal that connects with progressive hippies and Tea Party members alike. It’s about government raids on local and organic farmers.” I’d had a long working relationship with...
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“Lesbians, Martial Arts, High Heels and Science”: More Marketing Madness from...
As a former editor, I am annoyed that the items listed in the tagline above are not parallel: After all, it should be “Lesbians, Martial Arts, High Heels and Sciences.” But, then again, that is the...
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The Proliferating Fictions of Raúl Ruiz
“In true travel, what matters are the magical accidents, the discoveries, the inexplicable wonders and the wasted time.” -Raúl Ruiz, paraphrasing Serge Daney in Poetics of Cinema No director wasted...
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Playing the Zone: Inside Moves
First things first: My dad excelled at basketball. He played in high school and briefly in city college (he had to leave after one year to go to work after his father died) and, eventually, it kept...
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Celebrity Vinyl: Classic Actors Sing
During a weekend trip to my local bookshop I spotted a small coffee table book called Celebrity Vinyl written by Tom Hamling. The book is a showcase for the author’s novelty record collection featuring...
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“A fancy name for multiple murder!”
In honor of James Coburn’s birthday yesterday, and my own birthday tomorrow, I’m going to talk a bit about one of his more obscure projects – the Allied Artists thriller THE INTERNECINE PROJECT. I...
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Origin Story (or, Confessions of a Movie Geek)
Last week in my griping about superhero origin stories, I promised to offer up my own origin story, the explanation of how I came to be the way I am today. Every story has a beginning. Mine,...
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Constantine, Silva and Klugman in HAIL, MAFIA
“Why can’t they use top class killers? Guys who know their business. When one of the big boys gets caught, it’s the real panic and then they really get scared.” - Rudy (Eddie Constantine) in HAIL,...
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Barbara and Wanda
Each month, my film-discussion group meets for a lively brunch to discuss a topic agreed on in the previous meeting. At the end of September, we will meet to talk about the films and careers of...
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Action Items: Direct-to-Video, Into My Heart
Under the cover of disrespectability, direct-to-video (DTV) action movies are quietly throttling their theatrical brethren. Despite having budgets one-tenth of studio spectacles, these DTV scrappers...
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Aw, Shut Up and Quit Your Whining
In 1978, Animal House hit the screens and the terms “toga!” and “food fight!” entered the common parlance. I saw it, and loved it, time and time again. By 1983, five years into its release, I’d...
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Reinventing Lolita in MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD (1973)
One of the most iconic images to emerge from the cinema in the 1960s is the figure of a young Sue Lyon, peering over her sunglasses at a leering James Mason in Stanley Kubrick’s LOLITA (1961). And I’m...
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“Remember Buck Rogers?”
The nifty indie outfit Synapse Films has released the grindhouse classic THE EXTERMINATOR (1980) in an extended (gorier) director’s cut as a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack. Though the care and professionalism...
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I don’t have a clever title for this one, it’s about King Kong
The late 1970s was a period in film comparable to the present day: Hollywood developed a fixation on geek culture, turning out comic book movies and remakes of older sci-fi productions, while Lucas and...
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