Ed Gorman's Blog, page 58

Seven Things to Know About Walter Matthau

Seven Things to Know About Walter Matthau Thanks to Classic Film and TV Cafe The Classic Film and TV Cafe is a place for fans to mingle and share their love of great films and television series, ranging from the silent film era to the early 1980s. If you're a fan of classic Hollywood, world cinema, or TV shows like The Fugitive and The Avengers, then come on into the cafe and have fun!


Carol Grace and Walter Matthau.1. Walter Matthau met his second wife, Carol Grace, when they both appeared in the 1955-56 Broadway hit Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? She was previously married--twice--to playwright and author William Saroyan (The Human Comedy). In her 1992 memoir, Among The Porcupines, she wrote: "I married Saroyan the second time because I couldn't believe how terrible it was the first time. I married Walter because I love to sleep with him."
2. In 1961, Matthau played an investigator for the Florida Sheriff's Bureau in the half-hour syndicated TV series Tallahassee 7000. It was produced by Herbert B. Leonard, who co-created Route 66 with Stirling Silliphant. Like Route 66, Tallahassee 7000 was shot on location. Matthau later claimed that he starred in the show only to pay off gambling debts.

Matthau as Oscar in the film version.3. Walter Matthau made his Broadway debut in 1948, playing a servant in Anne of the Thousand Days. He was nominated for a Tony as Featured Actor in a Play for Once More With Feeling (1959) and then won that same award for A Shot in the Dark (1962). However, his career as a leading man took off after his Tony win for Male Comedy Performance in The Odd Couple in 1965. Matthau played slob Oscar to Art Carney's neat freak Felix. Years later, Matthau told Time Magazine: "Every actor looks all his life for a part that will combine his talents with his personality. The Odd Couple was mine. That was the plutonium I needed. It all started happening after that."
4. Walter Matthau directed himself and his wife, Carol, in 1959's Gangster Story. He played a criminal on the run who inadvertently infringes on mob territory (the plot bears a slight resemblance to one his best 1970s films, Charley Varrick). Matthau never directed again, although his son Charlie became a director. Charlie directed his father and Jack Lemmon in The Grass Harp.

5. Matthau and Lemmon appeared in ten movies together, starting with Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie (1966), which earned Matthau a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. He was nominated twice as Best Actor, for The Sunshine Boys (1975) and Kotch (1971). The latter film was directed by Jack Lemmon.
6. Lemmon and Matthau became great friends. Matthau told People Magazine in 1998: "The main thing I like about Jack is that he bathes every day, so I don't have to worry about being assaulted odoriferously."

7. He and Barbra Streisand clashed famously on the set of 1969's Hello, Dolly! I'll skip Walter's best-known insult about his co-star (just Google the film's title, Matthau, and butterfly) and close with this quip: "I would like to work with Barbra again on something more suitable to her talents--like Macbeth."

Books: Mr. Bad Taste and Trouble Himself: Robert Mitchum

Books: Mr. Bad Taste and Trouble Himself: Robert Mitchum by Robert Ward
For the entire piece go to http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...


“He drank too much and smoked too much. He granted too many interviews full of cynical observations about himself and his business. He made too many bad movies and hardly any of the kind that stir critics to rapture or that, taken together, look like a life achievement worthy of official reward.God, some of us are going to miss Robert Mitchum!”—Richard SchickelAnd he’s still missed, 17 years after his death. No, you sure don’t see movie stars like Robert Mitchumanymore. But we can still appreciate the real thing. In 1983, Robert Ward hung out with the star of Out of the Past , The Night of the Hunter, Cape Fear, and The Friends of Eddie Coyle , and wrote the following profile, “Mr. Bad Taste and Trouble Himself: Robert Mitchum.” It originally appeared in the March 3, 1983 issue of Rolling Stone and is collected in Ward’s terrific anthology, Renegades . It appears here with the author’s permission. —Alex BelthA big, crazy, sexy sixty-five-year-old little boy who can’t get used to the idea that he’s supposed to act like, like Ward Cleaver, you dig? Robert Mitchum is walking down this Kafkaesque hallway, holding his arms straight out in front of him, crossed, as though they’ve been manacled by the CBS production assistant who trucks along in front of him. Mitchum staggers a bit. All he drinks nowadays is tequila—and milk, though not together—and he had his first shot at one thirty in the afternoon, and now it’s ten thirty at night and he’s been through five interviews and a fifth of Cuervo Gold Especial and is fast moving into that strange land between dreams and wakefulness.[image error]Things are mightily askew but still manageable until someone notices the glass partitions and the little wooden desks, which look like interrogation booths, and yells, “Bob, look, we’re in Czechoslovakia and they’re going to bring out the fucking guards!”This registers slowly behind Mitchum’s lizard-lidded eyes, and smiling his curling serpent’s smile, he thrusts his hands forward as though they are cuffed and booms in this deep, hilarious voice: “My name is Robert Mitchum. My serial number is 2357982. My rank is private. I have nothing whatsoever to tell you….”Down these endless narrow hallways and out of these little rooms come women of all ages—twenty-three, forty-five, sixty-seven—each of them saying, “Hey, that’s… that’s Robert Mitchum,” and each of them getting this look on her face. The same look. Lust! And helplessness. And yet, completely maternal. And sweet, like, “I’ve got to help that big, crazy, sexy, funky little boy who is sixty-five years old and has never gotten used to the idea that he has to act like a Ward Cleaver brand of grown-up.”Mitchum had drawn a similar response from a group of young businessmen as we’d left the Waldorf Hotel earlier. “There’s Mitchum,” one of them said. “He’s all fucked up again.” And the rest of them laughed and nodded. Thank God somebody is still wild.
“Where the hell is the goddamned makeup girl? I want to kiss her, okay?” he says now, as he runs through the halls. Yes, right here at CBS, is Mr. Bad Taste and Trouble himself. Yeah, he’s got himself a pinstripe suit and dark Italian sunglasses like all the rest of those movie stars, but one look will convince you that here is a man acting like a civilized being. In a 1964 Esquire profile, the usually savage Helen Lawrenson said his personality had paralyzed her into wordlessness. D. H. Lawrence described it as the Life Force. But six-foot-one-inch, barrel-chested, ham-fisted, sleepy-eyed, speech-slurred Robert Mitchum gives off something that can’t really be put into words at all….Meanwhile, the makeup woman, a sixty-five-year-old gal herself, is literally buckling at the knees and wiping her brow and saying, “My, oh my, oh my…Robert Mitchum.” The whole place cracks up, and Mitchum sweetly kisses her on the forehead.

The Film Noir of Robert Wise by the great Jake Hinkson

The Film Noir of Robert Wise by Jake Hinkson
FROM THE CRIMINAL ELEMENT







By most measurements, Robert Wise didn’t just succeed as a director—Robert Wise crushed it. He made West Side Story, which, if you adjust for inflation, made about half a billion dollars at the American box office. Then he made The Sound of Music. 2015 will mark the 50 year anniversary of that movie and many articles will doubtless come out to remind us just how gigantic that film was. Adjusted for inflation, it is still the third biggest movie of all time, behind only Gone With The Wind and Star Wars. Like those two films, it wasn’t just a blockbuster, it was a phenomenon. (Read Mark Harris’s wonderful book Pictures At The Revolution, which details how Hollywood basically bankrupted itself trying to duplicate the otherworldly success of The Sound of Music.) Wise walked away from 1965 with armloads of money and awards.Afterwards, however, he floundered. He followed his monster success with movies that often felt bloated, self-important, and empty. Today, he’s more of a footnote than a legend. His stylistic impact on generations of subsequent filmmakers has been negligible, and there are few academic studies of his work. The Sound of Music has become a beloved classic sure, but it’s not remembered as Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music. It’s remembered as Rogers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music.What all of this obscures, however, is that Robert Wise was a great director.Not good. Not workmanlike. Not professional.Great. Born To Kill I’m genuinely amazed that Born to Kill was made in 1947. When it was released, it was derided for being amoral, debased, and disgusting. What’s upsetting about the film—and what would certainly disqualify it from being made by a major studio today—isn’t its sexual innuendo or bursts of violence. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been surpassed a hundredfold by network television. No, what’s still taboo about this film is the way it focuses on the machinations of a truly gruesome set of characters, headed up by a romantic duo straight out of hell.Helen Brent (Claire Trevor) discovers that her friend Laurie has been murdered. Instead of calling the cops, Helen flees the scene and catches the first train back home to San Francisco. On the train, she meets a handsome man named Sam Wilde. She’s seen Sam before. He is Laurie’s murderer. Here again, though, the movie surprises us. This isn’t a story about an innocent woman who meets a psycho. It’s about soul mates without souls. Love at first sight, you might say, if either of them could feel love.Wise is a tough director to pin down. He was an expert craftsman, but he didn’t have a consistent style in the way that someone like Robert Siodmakdid. There’s no such thing as a distinctly Wisean shot. Still, the success ofBorn to Kill owes a lot to Wise’s sense of pace and drama (the first ten minutes of the film are thrilling in their economy and intelligence). It also owes a huge debt to the performances Wise gets from his actors. Lawrence Tierney was the meanest son of a bitch in noir; menace seemed to glint off him like light off a pair of brass knuckles. And holding the whole thing together is the remarkable turn by Claire Trevor. One of the great women of noir, here Trevor issues her definitive take on the femme fatale.
The Set-Up If you were going to introduce a friend to film noir, a good place to start would be Wise’s 72 minute masterpiece The Set-Up. There aren’t many perfect movies in the noir canon—hell, there aren’t many perfect movies, period—but this is one of them.It stars Robert Ryan as Stoker Thompson, a past-his-prime boxer battling a younger fighter named Tiger Nelson (Hal Baylor). What Thompson doesn’t know is that his manager and his trainer (George Tobias and Percy Helton) have cut a deal with a local gangster for Thompson to throw the fight. They don’t let Thompson in on the arrangement —why split the fifty bucks?—because they figure he’s so over the hill, he’ll lose anyway. But then Thompson begins to rally against the younger fighter, unknowingly digging himself into a deep hole with the gangster and his thugs.Wise, always a good director of action, here outdoes himself. In fact, working with Robert Ryan and Hal Baylor (both of whom were real boxers: Ryan held a college championship, and Baylor held the California Heavyweight Championship), Wise creates probably the best extended fight sequence in classic film. The fight occupies the center of the film both chronologically and thematically. Stoker Thompson is struggling to beat the younger fighter, but he is also struggling to overcome his own depleted sense of self-esteem. Since we know things Thompson doesn’t know, the fight takes on added layers of suspense. As Thompson begins to turn the tide of the fight, his manager and trainer begin to sweat, and so do we.The Set-Up is based on a narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March. As scripted by Art Cohn, the entire film is an exquisitely constructed metaphor. Dramatically, it is freshly layered with almost every new scene.No one wants Thompson to win the fight. His wife begs him to quit. The gangster seethes. Even the guys who are literally in his corner want him to lose. He is alone in the ring, in a fight that matters to no one. It is a brilliant masterstroke to make us root for Thompson on one level and then on another level to make us hope, for his own good, that he’ll lose. Even we—the audience—aren’t completely in his corner. How existential is that?Wise was a perfect director for this material. Many of his shots are long, floating compositions, nailing down the details of plot and character development while taking in multiple threads of the milieu surrounding them. You’ll remember The Set-Up as lean and mean, but notice how many little stories Wise manages to work in. His boxing spectators aren’t just a faceless, jeering mob. To take just one wonderful small story: there’s a nameless woman who accompanies her husband and friends to the fight under protest. She hates the fights, she says. We find out why as we gradually see her thaw out during the fight. By the end, she’s a bloodthirsty screamer, and we realize the reason she hates the fights is because some deep, ugly part of her craves the violence.Everyone is excellent here, but the movie belongs to Robert Ryan. In the scenes with his wife (noir goddess Audrey Totter) he’s fragile and almost boyish in his simplicity. In the fight, he’s always believable. And when the fight is finished, and his body is battered, and he must somehow summon one last bit of strength to survive the gangster’s wrath, Ryan achieves something rare for the genre’s antiheroes: a tragic nobility.
Odds Against Tomorrow Odds Against Tomorrow stars Harry Belafonte as Johnny Ingram, a nightclub singer with a gambling problem. To pay off his debts, Ingram agrees to rob a bank with an old ex-cop named Dave Burke (Ed Begley). Dave also enlists a third man for the job, a racist hood by the name of Earle Slater (Robert Ryan). Earle doesn’t like Johnny because he’s black; Johnny doesn’t like Earle because he’s a bigot. It’s pretty much all Dave can do to keep these two from killing each other before they knock over the bank.Most American films about race from the fifties and sixties are pretty bad. They have a certain stiffness, a do-gooder liberal atmosphere which is mostly geared toward glorifying the enlightenment of white characters. Perhaps these films served a purpose in their time, but they make for bad entertainment and worse art. (One could say the same thing, one suspects, about recent Hollywood movies about race…)Odds Against Tomorrow is an extremely rare exception to this case. The movie was produced by Belafonte through his production company, but he demands none of the “noble black hero” treatment that marred much of Sidney Poitier’s work from the same era. Instead, Johnny Ingram is a perfect film noir protagonist. He’s likable and relatable, but he’s deeply flawed. His flaws will be his undoing. Belafonte’s charismatic in the role, giving Johnny a quick, shallow charm that meshes nicely with Robert Ryan’s fiery, bigoted Earle. Ryan was a natural choice for this role, of course, given both his real world interest in the civil rights movement and his established screen persona as film noir’s King of the Nutjobs. He makes Earle a tower of seething resentment and rage.The film was written by the blacklisted Abraham Polonsky, and it bears all of his usual intelligence and subtly. What is unique about Odds Against Tomorrow as a “race drama” is that the characters are allowed to have individual psychoses which have nothing to do with race. Johnny is a womanizing gambler who still loves his ex-wife but resents her for disapproving of his lifestyle. Earle is emotionally knotted up. He’s a married man who has a brief affair with his next door neighbor (Gloria Grahame in an exceptional, touching performance) almost out of sheer ennui. The conflict between the two men is an outgrowth of both their characters, not a plot point.All of this is handled with Wise’s usual skill and efficiency. He never beats a point too hard, never goes for a preachy moment. He keeps things moving at a quick pace, but lets characters unfold naturally at the same time. For example, Ryan’s seduction of Graham has the pressure of a suspense scene, while the bank robbery is tense because of the evolving relationship of the characters.Wise made other interesting noirs, but Born To Kill, The Set-Up, and Odds Against Tomorrow are an excellent place to begin reassessing his work.

REMEMBERING JOHN FLYNNHappy Holidays Everybody!Peter Drag...

REMEMBERING JOHN FLYNN

Happy Holidays Everybody!

Peter Dragovich writes an interesting article about the late director John Flynn in the new Crimespot. He cites The Outfit and Rolling Thunder as Flynn's best pictures (there's a third with Steven Segal).
I believe that Don Westlake said that The Outfit's characterization of Parker (here called Macklin) is the closest to the novel Parker. Robert Duvall is excellent. You buy him as a tough amoral guy because he doesn't play him as a tough amoral guy. He's just going about his business. I dubbed this off on tape years ago and I still watch it two or three times a year. Karen Black is sexy and sad; Robert Ryan lends his usual melancholy to the action film; Joe Don Baker is in his prime here and particularly strong--and as if he he wants to salute the crime film in general Flynn uses many familiar actors for some of the smaller roles, among them Jane Greer, Richard Jaeckel, Sheree North, Marie Windsor and even Elisha Cook, Jr. Duvall's intelligence and mystery carries the film. Flynn' direction is absolutely on the money. This should have been on tape and/or DVD years ago.
The second picture is Rolling Thunder which I've always considered one of Paul Schrader's finest scripts. This is one of those films you don't watch--you inhabit it, sometimes against your will. The star is William Devane . He plays a returning Viet Nam vet with only one thing on his mind, revenge. This and most of Karl Reisiz's Who'll Stop The Rain are the two best films I've ever seen about the era of Viet Nam played out on the American streets. The rage, the dislocation, the sucker's game fate of so many of the characters, Schrader and Flynn really give us the bleeding wound of that time. An amazing, disturbing movie.
My choice for Flynn's third best would be Best Seller, a starring vehicle for both James Woods and Brian Dennehy. Woods plays a hit man who wants to get back at an old enemy. To do it he needs the help of widower Dennehy who wrote a bestselling book about a murder investigation he was involved in as a detective. Unfortunately he's stalled on a second book and running out of the funds he needs to support his teenaged daughter and himself. Dennehy loathes Wood and doesn't trust him when he says that he knows who killed Dennehy's old police partner. He also claims that this will give Dennehy the biggest best seller he can imagine--killer and scandal are one and the same. There is a particularly moving and very strange scene where Woods takes Dennehy back go the small town where he grew up. Larry Cohen's script is excellent and Flynn's direction is flawless.
Rolling Thunder and Best Seller are easy and inexpensive to come by. Just light a lot of votive candles and pray that someday somebody will put The Outfit on DVD,
Here's an excellent overview of Flynn's career:http://www.moviefanfare.com/john-flyn...
POSTED BY ED GORMAN AT 12:44 PM 4 COMMENTS: LINKS TO THIS POST 

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Table of Contents: "Introduction" by Jon L. Breen "The Interrogator" by David Morrell "The List" by Loren D. Estleman "The Scent of Lilacs" by Doug Allyn "Section 7 (A) Operational" by Lee Child "The Lamb Was Sure to Go" by Gar Anthony Haywood "Luck" by T. Jefferson Parker "The Story of the Stabbing" by Joyce Carol Oates "Trade Secret" by Bill Pronzini "The Plot" by Jeffery Deaver "The Vengeance of Kali" by David Dean "Sometimes You Can't Retire" by Marcia Muller "Clutter" by Martin Edwards "Grave Matter" by Max Allan Collins & Mickey Spillane "Escape from Wolfkill" by Clark Howard "The Performer" by Gary Phillips "Loon Life" by Brendan Du Bois "Winning Ticket" by Christine Matthews "The Movie Game" by Dick Lochte "Sleep, Creep, Leap" by Patricia Abbot "The Girl in the Golden Gown" by Robert S. Levinson "What People Leave Behind" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch "The Return of Inspiration" by Tom Piccirilli "Archie's Been Framed" by Dave Zeltserman "The Perfect Triangle" by Michael Connelly "Old Men and Old Boards" by Don Winslow "Plainview" by David Hoing

The first Dev Conrad novel SLEEPING DOGS from Mysterious Press e books

Sleeping Dogs by Ed GormanIn: Espionage & ThrillerSleeping Dogs by Ed Gorman




Click the image above to zoom in

A Chicago politico fights to protect his candidate from a murder investigation

On the outside, Senator Warren Nichols’s reelection campaign appears to be proceeding smoothly. But behind closed doors, chaos reigns. The senator’s rabble-rousing opponent is gaining in the polls, and rumors of Nichols’s womanizing threaten to end his political career forever. When his chief of staff quits and then commits suicide, turmoil threatens the Nichols camp. Only Dev Conrad can haul the senator back from the brink.

A battle-hardened political consultant with a military background, Conrad finds the Nichols campaign in even worse shape than he imagined. A sleazy political operative has gotten his hands on a compromising tape of the senator, and he wants $1 million to keep it under wraps. When the blackmailer turns up murdered, Conrad must find the tape to keep his senator out of jail.“Rewardingly dry-eyed political savvy without the bloat of most novelists who patrol this turf. The prose is pared so close to the bone that it makes Elmore Leonard look positively garrulous.” —Kirkus Reviews“Engaging . . . Highly interesting . . . Dev’s strong showing in this sophomore campaign should guarantee that he’ll run again.” —Publishers Weekly“[Dev Conrad] evokes some of Ross Thomas’ savvy political fixers. . . . Gorman is an experienced and accomplished storyteller, and genre fans will not want to miss his latest.” —Booklist

ED here: Sleeping Dogs is of course the title of Dick Lochte's brilliant novel. Chemo-brain or old age or both made me forget
that. I apologize, Dick.Buy this book from one of the following online retailers: Click here to find more books and exclusive content

The Proper Christmas Spirit by Len Levinson

The Proper Christmas Spirit by Len Levinson
My mother died on Christmas Eve 1939 when I was four years old.  Then I went into foster care for four years, after which dear old Dad took me to live with him.  Then, every Christmas Eve, dear old Dad sat at the kitchen table, drank straight whisky out of a regular glass, and got smashed.  "Your poor Mummy," he wailed again and again.  "If she still was alive today, thing'd be different, let me tell you."  His pattern was to drink himself into a stupor, lay his face on the table, and pass out. 
I barely remembered my mother, and although only a child, I didn’t consider my father’s boozing to be proper Christmas behavior.  So every Christmas Eve I put on my coat and went out wandering through the streets.  We lived in a working class neighborhood of old wooden tenements near the polluted Acushnet River in New Bedford, Massachusetts.  This might sound like a depressing story, but I felt very happy as I walked the streets alone, gazing at colorfully-lit Christmas trees in windows, occasionally hearing Christmas carols, and absorbing the joy of Christmas.  I didn't feel alone or bereft in the least because I too was participating in Christmas in my own way, and actually felt sanctified, as if God was with me, irrational though that might sound.  I loved Christmas, always looked forward to it, and still do.  
Recently I was in a store.  After completing my transaction, I said to the young lady behind the counter:  "Merry Christmas".
She gazed at me disapprovingly for several seconds, then replied with an edge in her voice, "Happy Holidays”.
I realized that I had been seriously politically-incorrect.  All I could do was smile and walk away.  Evidently there will always be people who don't have the proper Christmas spirit, just like dear old Dad.  My only choice is to accept reality as I did as a child, and continue to celebrate Christmas in my own way.

You CAN go home again

You CAN go home again

I have several Stephen King books on my keeper shelf. For sheer storytelling power he's extraordinary in every way that matters.

I still read just about every book he publishes and enjoy most of them. In the last three months or so I reread Salem's Lot, Misery, The Mist and From a Buick 8. And last night, for no particuar reason, I picked up his first collection Night Shift.

Yes, he got better as a writer, much better in fact. But I tell you this book has a mesmeric hold on me. I don't exaggerate when I say that I've read some of these stories twenty times. They're almost like saying the rosary for me.

Graveyard Shift still creeps me out; I Am The Doorway is an acid nightmare; Sometimes They Come Back is an Evan Connell-like portrait of personal and professional failure tucked inside a stunning horror tale; Strawberry Spring and I Know What You Need presage the later, more sophisticated work; The Ledge and Children of The Corn demonstrate his mastery of pulp tropes; and The Woman in the Room is the sad, gripping masterpiece of the collection.

This is one of those books to keep permanently on the nightstand. Whatever kind of fiction you like, you'll find an example of it in Night Shift. It's a special treat for writers. Nobody in popular fiction has ever equaled King's rolling thunder approach to the job of telling a story. He's like a prize fighter who can hit you three times before you get your guard up. These stories have the effect of blunt force trauma on me. I think they'll have the same effect on you.

The Goon Squad by Jake Hinkson The Criminal Element

William Talman by Jake  HInkson
Courtesy of The Criminal Element



We've recently featured a post on the noir career of Raymond Burr. Although he’s best remembered today as the stalwart defense attorney Perry Mason, Burr spent much of the 40s and 50s playing demented psychos and cold-eyed masterminds in film noir. It’s interesting to note, then, that William Talman—who played Perry Mason’s loyal opposition, district attorney Hamilton Burger—was himself one of noir’s premier goons. Not just that, Talman specialized in playing full-tilt nutjobs.He was born in Detroit in 1915, the eldest son of a successful industrial electronics executive, and as a young man he thrived in sports—especially boxing. He went to college at Dartmouth but left after one year when he was involved in a joyride that ended in the death of a friend. He tried his hand at acting, but then the war stopped everything. Talman was drafted into the Army and served in the US Signal Corps, eventually rising to the rank of Major.After the war, he began working in movies and from the start he was typecast as thugs with a demented streak. Talman had a strange face with weathered features (even as a young man), a severe mouth and off center eyes. His gravelly voice added to a demeanor that made him perfect for characters with bad intentions.1. The Woman On Pier 13 (AKA I Married a Communist) (1949) — This is redbaiter propaganda at it’s best, with evil Commie agents out to destroy America just for the sheer fun of it. Talman has a small role as a twitchy thug who takes guys out to the pier…and the guys don’t come back. A ridiculous movie, yes, but fun.2. Armored Car Robbery (1950) — Only one year into the business and Talman was already playing a mastermind. In this film, he’s the brains behind—what else?—an armored car robbery. He pairs off against cop Charles McGraw and the results (orchestrated by the great noir director Richard Fleischer) are riveting. Talman proves that he can play smart as well as mean.3. The Racket (1951) — One of noir’s most famous disasters. The film is a would-be crime epic starring three of the genre’s greatest actors—Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, and Lizabeth Scott—but it was destroyed by RKO studio chief Howard Hughes (already losing his hold on reality) who ordered it rewritten/reshot/reedited so many times it seems to have been created inside a hurricane. It’s notable, though, because Talman gets to play a good guy for a change—an honest cop helping to bring down a crime lord. 4. The Hitch-Hiker (1953) — Talman’s biggest and best role came as the title character in this Ida Lupino classic. Two fishing buddies played by Frank Lovejoy and Edmond O’Brien stop to pick up you-know-who and everything just goes to hell. This is one of the harshest noirs made during the classic period—it’s stripped down, desperate, and raw. The word existential gets thrown around a lot in discussions of  film noir, but this film is truly a hardcore existential crime drama. In an excellent cast, Talman steals the show as the psychopathic Emmett Myers, a raging nihilist brutalized by life. “My folks were tough,” he says at one point. “When I was born, they took one look at this puss of mine and told me to get lost.”5. City That Never Sleeps (1953) Talman was bumped back down to supporting psycho for this Chicago crime flick, but he’s as good as ever in a superior production that’s notable for the gorgeous location cinematography of John Russell.6. Crashout (1955) — Lewis R. Foster’s underrated prison break drama is as hard-edged as this stuff gets. Talman has one of his best roles asa knife-throwing Jesus freak named Luther Remsen AKA “Reverend Remington” who is in jail for the “celebrated soul-saving murder” of a church organist. In one of the strangest scenes in film noir, Talman baptizes a wounded man in a muddy drainage pool, trying to drown the guy in the process.
Jake Hinkson, The Night Editor, is the author of  The Posthumous Man and Saint Homicide.

ED MCBAIN by Dana King

Thursday, December 18, 2014Among those I enjoyed most was Ed McBain’s. He’s been dead almost ten years, so I’m not sure why I checked. Maybe to see what a more or less bare bones site looked like, if anything was there at all. Turned out he did (does?) have a site, though it has not been updated since 2010, when he was made an honorary citizen of Ruvo, Italy.
The site consists of what you might expect from the web presence of an author with his background. The navigation bar links to pages titled Home, Newsdesk, Booked, Bios, etc., Forum, Links, and Contacts. It’s the “Newsdesk” page that caught my eye. In it is a page called Articles by the Author. These are essays—blog posts, essentially—written by McBain between May 23, 2002, and March 18, 2004. (He died July 6, 2005.)
The posts are priceless. (For those of you who are unaware, “Ed McBain” is a pen name of Evan Hunter, who was born Salvatore Lombino.) Evan Hunter a Ed McBain. He writes of growing up in “the big, bad city” in such a way even a country boy such as myself gets it. Why an author should never fake it. His contract with the reader. Books he abandoned, and why. Altogether there are nine. I read them all, and can’t pick a favorite.
What I like best is how they work so well as vehicles for McBain to speak candidly and directly to the reader. The wit found in his books is present, as are the little bits of whimsy. Phrasings just different enough to let you know this came out exactly how he wanted it, if not quite how you expected. In “Trials and Errors,” he writes of four novels he began as Evan Hunter, never to finish any of them; one only got three paragraphs written. This essay concludes with, “I've never started an 87th Precinct novel I didn't finish,” which, to me, spoke volumes about how he felt about his seminal, and most successful, series.
In “About That Novel,” Evan Hunter explains how he writes a novel, in the guise of explaining to you how to write one. All writers should read this, regardless of your level of experience. That’s not to say you should then follow his advice to the letter, but everyone who has made the effort will appreciate what he’s talking about.
for the rest go here:http://danaking.blogspot.com/