Summer Vacation and Our Recent Best

Enjoy our best features as we enjoy our vacation.

Vacation time again.

It’s July. The sun is shining and the weather’s nice. Screaming Blue Reviews is suspending publication this week to get out and enjoy some time off but also to get caught up on our movie watching. We’ve got a full DVR and several new indies to check out, so our work is cut out already.

While we’re having fun, we suggest you check out some of these other reviews and features we’ve published over the last few months. We hope you like them. Join us when we return Monday, July 20 with our review of this summer’s brainy science fiction spectacle Moon. 

1. We love gangster movies for a lot of reasons, not least of which is their amazing resonance with the times surrounding them. Our Road To Gangsterland feature looks back at eight decades of gangster films, including video clips from some of the best of each era. And for what it’s worth, each film discussed is better than Public Enemies, this summer’s 800lb monster of disappointment.

2. Film Noir is both the gangster movie’s successor and perennial accomplice. Summer, with its steamy heat and oppressive atmospheres, is the perfect climate to take a walk down the genre’s long and seductive side streets. Last summer we talked about five movies to make a good film noir festival, films that merit a place in any film collector’s library but provide an excellent treat for fans of the genre’s bleak worldview and sumptuous textures. There’s a video clip of the notorious scene from Kiss of Death, too, which must be viewed to be believed.

3. If crime and criminals aren’t your thing, consider the careers of seven leading men and seven leading women we think are due for major comebacks. They’re talented performers who’ve made some pretty amazing films, and to a person their presences are missed. Happy to say, but at least two of the actors – a man and a woman – mentioned on the lists have independent films circulating this summer. We hope that’s the start of a trend.

4. With so many comic book movies in the pipeline right now and so much casting news and rumors making Internet headlines, check out this list of seven lesser known comics-to-film adaptations. Some had potential, some never had a chance, some were just… weird. Marvel Comics’ stalwart Captain America has had so many big- and small-screen misfires that he rated a film retrospective all his own.

5. Reading books makes us feel smart, but we’d rather be watching movies – it takes less time and there’s usually some kind of candy. Still, we recently made a list of five books with the potential to become great movies, including ideal casts and directors to do the novels profiled justice. There’s been a surprising amount of feedback on this piece – a surprisingly low amount. Does no one else armchair produce their favorite books into blockbuster films?

6. We also enjoy crap, with our without ironic detachment. Last Thanksgiving we ran a fun piece – we can’t quite call it an expose – on all the cheap knockoffs of American film franchises to come from the nation of Turkey. Some of the video clips will very probably blow y0ur mind. Also, we grew up in the 1990s (the golden age of ironic detachment), and our piece about eight of the worst films from the decade’s first half brought back a lot of memories we were content to leave dormant. We’re also embarrassed by how many we actually saw in the theatre. Be advised each of the cinematic train wrecks profiled comes accompanied with a video clip as proof of its dubious quality.

7. Finally, every now and then we talk about a film we want to encourage people to see, either because it’s under-appreciated or has gotten somewhat obscured by the passage of time. A few are box office turkeys we think got a bad deal from their marketing or public reception. These films include the 1973 realist drama Save The Tiger with Jack Lemmon, 2006′s David Fincher-directed Zodiac, and several more we present together . We’ve also got a list of films that deserve a DVD release but haven’t gotten one yet. Life is too short to watch bad movies, and we sometimes suspect that good movies are made every day. The hard part is finding them to watch.

See you next week.

- Michael Kabel

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Put The Summer Heat On Ice With Classic Film Noir

Five films to cool off the steamy mid-summer nights in the naked city.

These films are our "big combo."

Despite its shadowy milieu, film noir is the cinema of heat: the heat between a man and a woman, the friction between men on collision courses, the burning need for vengeance or justice or just getting a little distance from your circumstances. It’s the perfect kind of film to relax with during the summer, when nerves and patience already run short – preferably with a whirring ceiling fan overhead and a tall glass of something chilled.

We’ve grown accustomed to Warner Brothers releasing their Film Noir Classic Collection box sets each July, but it looks as if they’re not doing that again this year. So we’ve put together our own five-pack of classic and semi-classic films to get you through the night.

1. Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) This ain’t the storybook you had as a kid. When a hard-boiled detective with one too many brutality complaints accidentally kills a murder witness, he must frame an innocent man for the crime – even as he falls in love with the man’s daughter.

One of several noirs and neo-noirs by writer-director Otto Preminger and starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney (the others include the classic Laura), the film is noir at its most primal. Yet the story remains nuanced and memorable long after viewing, thanks to compelling performances from every cast member. Though Mitchum and Bogart are most commonly considered noir’s reigning heavyweights, Andrews’ incredible reserve and depth help make him the thinking man’s noir anti-hero. DVD: Part of Fox’s “Fox Film Noir” library.

2. Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) Though many count 1955′s Atomic Age-themed Kiss Me Deadly as the last great noir of the classic period, Odds Against Tomorrow better deserves that title, looking ahead as it does to the Civil Rights Movement while still retaining noir’s classic themes and motifs. Harry Belafonte, Ed Begley Sr. and noir titan Robert Ryan conspire to rob a small town bank. But Ryan’s ex-con is a hardbitten racist, and the tension between him and Belafonte’s gambling addict simmers into a twist ending that M. Night Shyamalan only wishes he could concoct. Noir siren Gloria Grahame and Shelley Winters glimmer and tempt as women drawn into Ryan’s self-destructive orbit. DVD: Available from MGM.

3. Black Angel (1946) When a gadabout is falsely convicted for the murder of a blackmailing nightclub singer, his loyal wife (June Vincent) teams with the singer’s alcoholic ex-husband (the underrated Dan Duryea) to prove his innocence. Together they infiltrate a nightclub run by a powerful gangster (Peter Lorre), even as the ex-husband’s alcohol-racked memory begins to reveal the killer’s true identity. Haunting and memorable without lapsing into sentimentality or melodrama, the film remains undercelebrated but a must-see nonetheless, especially for the lush cinematography and the fine performance by the all-but-forgotten Vincent. DVD: from Universal.

4. The Blue Dahlia (1946) Not to be confused with Brian De Palma’s 2006 flop The Black Dahlia, this sharp edged, brittle bit of noir reunites frequent co-stars Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake in Raymond Chandler’s original screenplay about a returning World War II fighter pilot investigating the murder of his dissipated wife. Chandler’s script is reflective of his Philip Marlowe novels’ serpentine plots and crisp dialogue, while Ladd and Lake’s chemistry lights up the screen as it did in This Gun For Hire and The Glass Key.

In real life, a bartender gave Hollywood starlet Elizabeth Short the nickname “The Black Dahlia” because the movie was playing at a theatre down the street. Short liked the name, keeping it until her gruesome murder the following year. DVD: Somehow, The Blue Dahlia is yet to come to DVD. Just the same, it’s still widely available on VHS.

5. Kiss of Death (1947) An imprisoned jewel thief (Victor Mature) testifies against his cohorts to get early release after his wife’s suicide leaves their children indigent. Once on the outside, he works undercover to help the District Attorney (Brian Donlevy) bring down psychotic killer Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark).

The film belongs to Widmark, who plays the well-named Udo with such wide-eyed glee that Mature’s straight-jawed line delivery is almost completely overshadowed. You probably won’t ever forget the scene where Udo giddily throws a wheelchair-bound old woman down a flight of stairs. DVD: Also part of Fox’s “Fox Film Noir” library.

- Michael Kabel

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