Ed Gorman's Blog, page 184

David Thomson on The Third Man-an ironic take on bad guys

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Ed here: The Third Man was on TCM this morning so of course I watched it. I wouldn't change a single frame. As much as I admire Graham Greene's other screenplays, this is the masterpiece. And Carol Reed, the director and Greene's close collaborator, was every bit as good as Greene.

Here's Thomson's ironic take on the career of Harry Lime. As I watched this I saw Lime as all the Wall Streeters who destroyed a good part of the world. And also on bad guys in general.

The Third Man
Production year: 1949

Directors: Carol Reed
Cast: Alida Valli, Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard

How bad is bad? Good enough to make a sequel. In Vienna, just after the war, there was a shortage of penicillin that led to a racket. In The Third Man, this fellow, Harry Lime, cornered the market in penicillin. He was selling it for 70 quid a tube. Then logic occurred to him: he could dilute the stuff but put the price up. It was a kind of murder. "Men with gangrened legs, women in childbirth. And there were children, too. They used some of this diluted penicillin against meningitis. The lucky children died, the unlucky ones went off their heads."

They could be your children. Calloway, the policeman, shows the results to Holly Martins to break that fool's friendship with Lime. In 1949, such scenes were too grim to put in the film itself. But no one stinted on the charm of Lime. He's talked about for three-quarters of the picture, and there he is, like a little boy in a grown-up's coat, hiding in a doorway, with a cat on his polished shoes, and giving that sweet, seductive Orson Welles smile into the camera. Would he smile to see the children in the hospital, or just pop another indigestion tablet to kill the acid? Those kids, he tells Holly, they're like dots on the ground. He offers Holly £20,000, "free of income tax, old man", for every dot that stops moving. It is a Satanic proposition, and The Third Man is a film where Satan has most of the best lines - like the one about Italy under the Borgias and good old Switzerland with centuries of brotherly love and only the cuckoo clock as its prize.

Everyone loved Harry Lime in 1949, even if he had to die, so it was hardly a surprise that after the movie, Lime was back, on radio first - as a hero, a kind of modern-day Robin Hood, a bit of a rogue but a fellow who righted wrongs, someone the poor benighted mugs of the world could rely on.

for the rest go here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/m...

A remarkable movie about men who are terrified of women.

David Thomson on Films: 'Sweet Smell of Success'
A remarkable movie about men who are terrified of women.
David ThomsonApril 1, 2011 | 7:24 pm 2 comments

Ed here: Yes I watched The Sweet Smell of Success again (I'm addicted to it) and so here's the David Thomson piece on it.

FROM THE NEW REPUBLIC

Nobody had seen or heard anything like the first half of Sweet Smell of Success in 1957. It wasn't just the way the picture went out onto the streets and into the bars of Manhattan, letting cameraman James Wong Howe get his best stuff at dawn and twilight. Film noir had made hay with darkness for ten years, but still, you didn't get a lot of real night in American pictures. Here it was, and here were the nocturnal creatures who thrived on it: Sidney and J.J., a new kind of double act in an age famous for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

The picture was a disaster when it opened: It did no business; it got no nominations—not even for Howe, let alone Tony Curtis or Burt Lancaster, or the gang of writers who found a way for them to talk. The production had been painful. Director Alexander Mackendrick (born in Boston but raised in Glasgow and the British film business) was a stylist and a perfectionist, brave enough to challenge Lancaster (whose company, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, was making the picture). Ernest Lehman had supplied the basic material and some script, but the very famous or nearly washed up Clifford Odets had been kept in a trailer on the streets at night, typing out dialogue for the guys to use as poison darts.

It's a celebrated picture now, so I hardly have to tell you the set-up: J.J. Hunsecker is a powerful New York gossip columnist. The legend says he's based on Walter Winchell, but I think he comes largely out of the writing, Burt's urge to intimidate everyone, and the strange chemistry he got going with Tony. Curtis is the freelance press agent, Sidney Falco. Today, we see handsome snakes in the grass in every media garden (indeed, they are the grass), but truly, this smiling wickedness was quite novel in 1957, and it showed Curtis's reckless ambition that he wanted the part. Their scenes together changed film. It wasn't just the wise-cracking chat, "the cookie dipped in arsenic" stuff. It was their intimacy in evil and the power game they played. It was the sado-masochistic trip they were on and the subtle ways in which loathing and contempt veiled need.

http://www.tnr.com/article/film/86133...

I dunno...Robert Downey, Jr. to play Perry Mason

Ed here: It's my age I'm sure. But I think Perry Mason I think Raymond Burr. This might work if Downey, a very good actor, plays him hard-boiled as Mason was in the early books. Maybe.

Warner Bros., Downey team for 'Perry Mason'
Duo to relaunch franchise as a feature film
By JEFF SNEIDER

'Perry Mason'

Previous "Perry Mason" adaptations include the long-running TV series, B movies and telepics.

Warner Bros. and Team Downey are pairing to adapt the Perry Mason property as a feature film, with Robert Downey Jr. eyeing the project as a potential starring vehicle.
Like the original series of books by Erle Stanley Gardner about the irrepressible defense attorney, "Perry Mason" will be set in the rough-and-tumble world of early 1930s L.A. and feature Mason's secretary, Della Street, private investigator Paul Drake and Mason's longtime courtroom nemesis, Hamilton Burger.

Team Downey principals Robert Downey Jr. and Susan Downey will produce with Robert Cort, while David Gambino, Eric Hetzel and Joe Horacek will exec produce with Susan Feiles and Chris Darling. The producers are looking for a writer; script will be based on an original story by Downey Jr. and Gambino.Warner Bros. exec Jon Berg will oversee the project for the studio.

Cort and his Robert Cort Prods. exec Hetzel teamed with Darling and Feiles of Action Entertainment to bring the idea for the feature relaunch of "Perry Mason" to Team Downey. Estate attorney Horacek negotiated the rights deal on behalf of Paisano Prods.

Gardner's 82 "Perry Mason" novels and dozens of short stories have been published in 37 languages, with book sales exceeding 425 million. Gardner mentored both Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett but surpassed them both in sales -- combined. At the height of his popularity, Gardner sold an average of 26,000 "Perry Mason" books per day.

A "Perry Mason" radio series began in 1937, running 3,257 episodes, and there were six feature films beginning in the 1930s from Warners. But the character is perhaps best known as the protag of the popular TV show starring Raymond Burr, which ran on CBS from 1957-66 and featured memorable theme music composed by Fred Steiner. The series still plays in 87 languages around the world, and Burr also starred in a series of "Perry Mason" telepics in the 1980s and '90s.

Robert Downey Jr., who next stars in "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows," is currently reprising his role as Iron Man in Marvel's "The Avengers." He is repped by CAA.

Amazon's latest big announcement

Amazon Launches SF/Fantasy Imprint: 47North

— posted Tuesday 11 October 2011 @ 10:05 am PDT
Amazon.com's publishing division has announced a new SF/fantasy/horror imprint, 47North.

The imprint has announced their first 15 titles, to be released in late 2011 and early 2012. Upcoming books include Against the Light by Dave Duncan (January 2012); The Mongoliad: Book One by Neal Stephenson & Greg Bear (April 2012); and Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson (May 2012).

Titles will be available in Kindle, print, and audio formats at Amazon.com, "as well as at national and independent booksellers." They plan to publish original work, reprints, and out-of-print titles.

47North is the seventh imprint from Amazon Publishing, and joins other genre lines including Montlake Romance and mystery/thriller imprint Thomas & Mercer. For more details, see www.amazon.com/47North.

Category: Publishing.

Please don't bring "Arrested Development" back

Ed here: I reluctantly agree with this piece. Man, I loved this show. Bought all the DVDs and watched them over and over. But the odds against producing new ones that would do justice to the originals...Plus I agree that in the last season and a half some of the story arcs were pretty lame. Even some of the performance felt tired.

Please don't bring "Arrested Development" back FROM SALON
Once again, rumors of a movie are swirling. Can't we leave a great show alone?

BY MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS

TOPICS:ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
Anyone who's ever watched a zombie movie — or either of the "Sex and the City" features — knows that bringing something once-beloved back from the dead rarely works out well. Why then, nearly six years after it left the air, do wekeep getting our hopes up about bringing back "Arrested Development"?

The justly beloved Fox sitcom recalibrated America's "cult classic" meter virtually from the moment it debuted in 2003. Though it was never a ratings success, the farcical tribulations of the once-wealthy Bluth family scooped up Emmys and Golden Globes, launched Will Arnett and Michael Cera, made Jason Bateman a bona fide leading man, and gave that kid from "Happy Days" a nice narrating gig for a while there. Its cancellation in 2006 was both inevitable and a total heartbreaker. And when it happened, viewers, perhaps spoiled by "Buffy" — a show so violently adored that it survived its final two seasons on a different network – hoped for a similar fate. Surely some other savvy network would pick up one of the slyest, most original television series ever aired? Showtime? HBO? Anybody? How about a movie, then?

(more)

But not enough. Some things only come along once in a while for a reason. "Arrested Development" existed in a particular moment in pop culture, and the exploits of its family remain comfortably frozen in a time when Bush was president and Michael Cera was a gawky teen. And let's just say it, fellow diehards, that last season, with the whole Charlize Theron stuff and the confusion over adoptions and long-lost family members, was pretty scattershot. It's not that Hurwitz and company couldn't still spin gold from their characters. But after an absence of what would be at least seven years, would audiences really want to know what Buster and Tobias were up to?


for the rest go here: http://entertainment.salon.com/2011/1...

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub.More Mary Elizabeth Williams

On sale today BAD MOON RISING

Ed here: Amazon is selling the hardcover for ten dollars off the published price and the Kindle version goes on sale tomorrow.

Formats
Amazon Price New from
Kindle Edition $9.99
Hardcover $15.99

Some of the reviews:

"The real crime, as Sam eventually realizes, is how one generation exploits the next—while the younger generation devours itself. In turn mellow and melancholy, this book grapples with problems that are too complex for any detective to untangle".
Starred Review Publisher's Weekly

"The hippies, the animosity between Vietnam hawks and doves, the drugs, and the music all provide rich background for a cleverly plotted, fast-paced mystery. Those who lived through the sixties will field a rush of memories; younger generations will find the novel a telling guidebook to the era."
Booklist

"Another knockout mystery from Gorman, with the right balance of suspense, characterization, and humor....The McCain books are some of the best-written portrayals of the complexities of small-town America, like Winesburg, Ohio with a noir twist. This isn't a nostalgic view of the good old days. Gorman's 1950s and 1960s are as politically diverse and socially complex as today. Even though it is a small town, the crimes are anything but quaint. Gorman reveals the dark undercurrents, seething anger, and boiled-up oppression of mid-century Middle America. There might not be any fedoras or rain-slicked dark alleys, but Gorman's world is 100% noir. His work embodies the compromised decisions characters have to make in order to survive in a compromised world."
Pulp Serenade"

"Plots, characters, setting, and attitude. This series has it all,,,There's a hippie commune just outside Black River Falls, and when the daughter of one of the town's prominent citizens is murdered there, McCain is drawn into the case. Everyone except McCain seems to believe it's an open-and-shut case, especially Cliffie, the town's police chief, who doesn't figure as much in this story as in previous books. McCain begins his own investigation, and things prove to be a lot more complicated than anyone thought. Ugly secrets are uncovered, but Gorman, as usual, is wonderfully even-handed at presenting the human beings involved. Nobody's painted in one color here. Even the worst have redeeming qualities, no matter how small. And even the best have their flaws."
--Bill Crider

"Gorman manages to collapse every chaotic problem that America faced in 1968 into one tight, small-town story. While unwinding a complex mystery, Sam McCain blends pathos and humor with his edgy social commentary and makes us all take a long look at ourselves back when."
Criminal Element

Cinema Retro #21 Available Now

Ed here: I'm not exaggerating. This is the single best issue of Cinema Retro I've ever read. This is only to say that every piece in the issue appealed to my own tastes. But honestly it is packed with so many goodies it's impossible to exaggerate.t
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Cinema Retro issue #21 is now shipping in worldwide. All subscribers should have the issue in their hands any day. It's our most provocative issue ever, covering some of the most ground-breaking, censor-shattering films in history. Among the highlights:

Raymond Benson examines the legacy of A Clockwork Orange and interviews Malcolm McDowell and Jan Harlan, Stanley Kubrick's assistant and future producer of his films.
John Exshaw looks into the making of Ken Russell's controversial The Devils and explores how the film has been cut and censored around the world since its initial release- and why it may never be released in America or the UK on DVD.
Stephanie Callas celebrates Bertolucci's X-rated classic Last Tango in Paris
Ian Brown looks into Don Siegel's kinky remake of The Killers- the final film of Ronald Reagan.
Mark Cerulli gives us the inside story on the making of John Carpenter's horror classic Halloween
Adrian Smith interviews "The British Marilyn Monroe", Vera Day and attends the reunion of The Avengers cast and crew.
Matthew Field gets personal with directors Michael Winner, Mike Hodges and Ken Russell
Mark Mawston attends the St. Trinian's reunion
Tom Lisanti covers the bizarre story behind the two competing 1965 big screen biopics of Jean Harlow
Dave Worrall takes a sentimental journey and attends the family memorial service for producer Elliott Kastner
Raymond Benson's 10 best films of 1980
Plus the story behind Cinema Sex Sirens, Cinema Retro publishers Dave Worrall and Lee Pfeiffer's new book that pays tribute to the screen goddesses of the 60s and 70s.
Plus the latest DVD, soundtrack and film book reviews
If you are a subscriber, this is your last issue of the season. Please renew your subscriptions ASAP to make sure you don't miss a single issue of the new season, which begins in December. Cinema Retro back issues are fast becoming expensive collector's items- so don't miss any of the excitement. If you haven't subscribed, do so today and get all three issues of Season & (#'s 19, 20 and 21).

We appreciate the support of all of our subscribers, but to ensure that we keep Cinema Retro "pure" and largely devoid of advertisements, please renew your subscription for season 8 (issues #22, 23 and 24) right away! This will ensure that you will not miss an issue. As you may know, out of print copies of back issues are selling for up to $150 each on the collector's circuit. Your prompt support and renewal is much appreciated- and will help us keep the price stable. (We have not raised our cover price in eight years, despite soaring production and postage costs.)

We will still be filling subscriptions for season 7 until issue #22 comes out in December. If you are renewing, just specify your payment is for season 8.

David Thomson on Films: The Lonely Legacy of Nicholas Ray

David Thomson on Films: The Lonely Legacy of Nicholas Ray
David ThomsonAugust 4, 2011 | 12:00 am THE NEW REPUBLIC

He died well short of his own centenary, and some who knew film director Nicholas Ray (and who tried to save him from his richly endowed self-destructiveness) were amazed he got as far as 67. But, this August 7, he would have been 100. And now, for a moment, the world seems ready to take notice and offer the chronic vagrant a home. Not that "home" has much reliability in his case. What made Nick Ray valuable and important was his living forever by night, on dangerous ground, in a lonely place. I'm playing with the titles of some of his films, to which I should add his last, unfinished problematic film—an untidy picture about picture-making on its own existential borders—We Can't Go Home Again.

This was a project that grew out of a college teaching job in upstate New York in the early '70s, a psychodrama in which Ray and his own students played themselves, working in every film or video format they could find. When Ray died in 1979, he was
struggling to complete it, though it was apparent that death was the most likely closure. Now, decades later, Ray's fourth wife, Susan, after valiant efforts to find funding, to keep the faith, and discover a form for the film, has produced a version that may be definitive. To mark Ray's centenary, it will play at the Venice Film Festival. Will it seem like a masterpiece, or a footnote to a history so few people know now? I can't say, but I would guess that the film raised from the dead must renew the potent but frightening legend of Nicholas Ray. There's no doubt that Ray embodied the idea that, in the mid and late
twentieth century, the place to look for America's tragic heroes was among its film-makers.

At the same time, July saw the publication of Patrick McGilligan's Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director. This is the first attempt at a Ray biography written in English (and researched by someone raised in Ray's Midwest). The earliest work on Ray came from France and England, and a lot of it was written in the vibrant but not always helpful vein of Jean-Luc Godard's comment, "Nicholas Ray is the cinema." McGilligan is more down-to-earth and much more interested in research. So he is more valuable on the failure and the mess in this handsome but very insecure figure. He admits the bisexuality that some hero-worshippers preferred to overlook. He keeps a steady eye on the sheer chaos of the life: Nick Ray found his son Tony in bed with his third wife, actress Gloria Grahame, when the son was just thirteen!

http://www.tnr.com/article/film/93139...

Drugs, Sex, Girls: Being Directed by Peckinpah on the His 'Killer Elite'

From The Wrap

Drugs, Sex, Girls: Being Directed by Peckinpah on the His 'Killer Elite'
Published: October 07, 2011 @ 10:35 am

By Carole Mallory

With both "Straw Dogs" and "Killer Elite" playing in theaters, I feel it's the moment to tell what it felt like to be directed by Sam Peckinpah. The new "Killer Elite" is not the same script as Peckinpah's, but it is the same title.

In 1975 he cast me in the original. For the audition I was told to look sexy. I wore a blue suede dress from St. Tropez that had a Tarzan's Jane look to it. It was cut low. It had a Native American feel, and I thought Sam -- who claimed to be part Native American -- would "cotton" to it.

When I walked into his office, he was seated and wearing a blue and white paisley bandana covering his forehead. He had a deep tan, wrinkled skin and sparkling mischievous eyes. "Walk around for me?" he said, sternly. Like a good obedient actress on an audition, I did as I was told. Minutes later I was told I could leave.

Leaving, I passed my competition a stunning Veronica Hamel, who had starred in "Hill Street Blues." She was wearing a suit. Why, I wondered!

Later that day, my agent called to say I had been cast, Sam had liked the dress I had worn on the audition so much that he asked me to wear it for the filming. Great, I thought!

for the rest go here:
http://www.thewrap.com/movies/blog-po...

New Books:The Consummata by Max Allan Collins

"FRIEND, YOU'RE TALKING TO A GUY
WITH A PRICE ON HIS HEAD AND
THE POLICE AT HIS BACK..."

Compared to the $40 million the cops think he stole, seventy-five thousand dollars may not sound like much. But it's all the money in the world to the struggling Cuban exiles of Miami who rescued Morgan the Raider. So when it's snatched by a man the Cubans trusted, Morgan sets out to get it back. A simple favor—but as the bodies pile up...dead men and beautiful women...the Raider wonders what kind of Latin hell he's gotten himself into, and just who or what is the mysterious Consummata?

Begun by mystery master MICKEY SPILLANE in the late 1960s and completed four decades later by his buddy MAX ALLAN COLLINS (Road to Perdition), The Consummata is the long-awaited follow-up to Spillane's bestseller The Delta Factor—a breathtaking tale of treachery, sensuality, and violence, showcasing two giants of crime fiction at their pulse-pounding, two-fisted best.

Resources

Reviews:

Publishers Weekly: "There are ample servings of the sex and violence Spillane fans have come to expect, and it's impossible to tell where Spillane's work stops and Collins's begins."

The Library Journal: "The men are tough, the women are sexy, and the pages turn faster than the bodies pile up—what else could you ask for in a hard-boiled thriller?"

Pulp Fiction Reviews: "zips along at a fast, gut tightening pace filled with lots of sexy and dangerous women and a true exotic mix of colorful supporting characters from both sides of the law." "[THE CONSUMMATA] is a seamless adventure that moves smoothly from chapter to chapter with one clear and exciting voice, echoing the bullet-blasting tales of a true Mystery Grandmaster."