Blog
These stories have been around a long time. Some of them I have updated. Many of them I haven’t. This started out when blogs were like, new!
A Curse Can Befall A Nurse: The Movie, “Night Nurse”
In William Wellman's Night Nurse (1931), the world of nursing can be an alarming and even dangerous one because of human nature. Barbara Stanwyck stars as Lora Hart, a nurse hired to care for an alcoholic's two ostensibly sick children. In truth, a lawless brute...
“The Confessions of X”—Ex-Concubine (A Book Review)
What is The Confessions of X (2016), a novel by Suzanne M. Wolfe, about? Its narrative is about the concubine, unnamed, of St. Augustine before he became a Christian. Thematically it is about the unbreakable tie between former lovers who have lived without any other...
Sexy With Spies: “The Silencers”
I liked the acting of Stella Stevens in the 1968 film, How to Save a Marriage (And Ruin Your Life), but not in the highly commercial 1966 spy adventure, The Silencers. (Dean Martin' s acting doesn't pass muster either.) But she is there, and there is actually much...
A Very Old Film Version Of “Tarzan of the Apes”
Over a hundred years old now, the silent Tarzan of the Apes (1918) is entrancing. It opens as it should: with frightening shots of such African creatures as lions, snakes and crocodiles. Tarzan is not intimidated, which is good. Enemies keep popping up, and this...
“Stand-In” Still Amuses
Stand-In (1937) is one of the funnier comic flicks of the Thirties. How many of its one-liners were invented by Clarence Budington Kelland, who wrote the novel, and how many came from the movie's two screenwriter-adapters I don't know. What I do know is how smart and...
Pepe’s At The Casbah: “Algiers”
The 1938 Algiers contains themes---the criminal as captive (without being in prison), the destruction of human ties, ultimate loss. But it doesn't have originality, for the film is an American remake of the French Pepe le Moko, which I've never seen. Pepe is a jewel...
I Don’t Like The Movie, “Her”
On Spike Jonze's Her (2013): Wherein Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a computerized operating system with a female voice. . . The near-future technology in this seriocomic film can be fascinating, the best thing about it, but what is not fascinating at all is the...
Up And Away: “Ceiling Zero”
I saw the Howard Hawks film, Ceiling Zero (1936)---or let me say I saw a particular print of it---on YouTube. It was the best I could do since the pic was never released on DVD. Director Hawks did even better with airline workers in Zero than he did, years later,...
The Stories Of A Roman Catholic Writer: On “Death in Naples” and “The Deacon”
Mary Gordon is a notable American author, and a Catholic. From The Stories of Mary Gordon (2013), there is "Death in Naples," a 19-page piece wherein an elderly widow, Lorna, visits Italy with her son and daughter-in-law. The daughter-in-law is a difficult complainer...
