D.O.A.

"I'd like to report a murder."

"Who was murdered?"

"I was."

With that Edmond O'Brien (star of Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker and The Bigamist) opens Rudolph Mate's 1949 noir masterpiece told in flashback that follows O'Brien's Frank Bigelow--an accountant, notary, and bachelor whose drink is spiked with "luminous poisoning" while on a vacation from his otherwise forgettable secretary and love interest Pamela Britton--from Banning to San Francisco to Los Angeles. The shadowy nighttime location shooting and interior cinematography was handled by Robert Aldrich-regular Ernest Laszlo in collaboration with the Krakow-born Mate, whose own career as a cinematographer spanned famously from Vampyr (1932) to Gilda (1946). Like Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang, Mate was among the many artists and filmmakers who exiled their lives to Hollywood during Hitler's rise in Europe during the late-1930s. The original film was firmly set in postwar America (unlike the 1988 remake starring Dennis Quaid and Charlotte Rampling) by both hinting at some unspoken pseudo-atomic destruction centering around a mysterious man named Majak and a stolen shipment of iridium, a dense metal that has been used for military projects (though not on atomic or nuclear weaponry) and containing a brilliant scene at a beatnik-era jazz and jive club called The Fisherman. Listed with the National Film Registry, D.O.A. contains period footage of the Bradbury Building on Broadway in Downtown L.A., and was guaranteed "scientifically accurate" by a medical advisor in the closing credits.

Astro Zombies

Ted V. Mikels' Astro Zombies (1969) deserves a wider audience than simply Misfits fans seeking out Danzig's inspiration for sending his Astro zombies to rape the land and exterminate the whole fucking human race. B-movie legend John Carradine and Chinese Communist spy Tura Satana (Faster Pussycat Kill, Kill) star alongside switchblade-wielding Mexicans, square CIA agents, body-painted strippers, and an ubiquitous trail of young, bloody corpses. Look for LBJ--and with him the war in Vietnam--in the background (literally) of this space age thriller.

Top 20 Westerns

Top 20 (29) Westerns in chronological order, 1940-1980

1. 1940 Santa Fe Trail d. Michael Curtiz. Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan, Olivia de Havilland
2. 1941 They Died With Their Boots On d. Raoul Walsh. Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland
3. 1943 The Outlaw d. Howard Hughes. Jane Russell
4. 1943 The Ox-Bow Incident d. William Wellman. Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn
5. 1946 My Darling Clementine d. John Ford. Henry Fonda, Victor Mature
6. 1948 Ft. Apache d. John Ford. Henry Fonda, John Wayne
7. 1948 Red River d. Howard Hawks. John Wayne, Montgomery Clift
8. 1948 Treasure of the Sierra Madre d. John Huston. Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston
9. 1948 Duel in the Sun d. King Vidor. Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotton, Jennifer Jones,
10. 1949 I Shot Jesse James d. Sam Fuller. John Ireland
11. 1952 Viva Zapata d. Elia Kazan. Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn
12. 1952 Rancho Notorious d. Fritz Lang. Marlene Dietrich
13. 1952 High Noon d. Fred Zinneman. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Katy Jurado
14. 1955 Vera Cruz d. Robert Aldrich. Burt Lancaster, Gary Cooper
15. 1956 The Searchers d. John Ford. John Wayne, Natalie Wood
16. 1957 Forty Guns d. Sam Fuller. Barbara Stanwyck
17. 1957 3:10 to Yuma d. Delmer Daves. Glenn Ford, Van Heflin
18. 1960 The Magnificent Seven d. John Sturges. Yul Brenner, James Coburn, Steve McQueen
19. 1961 One-Eyed Jacks d. Marlon Brando (fired Stanley Kubrick). Marlon Brando, Karl Malden
20. 1962 Ride the High Country d. Sam Peckinpah. Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Warren Oates
21. 1962 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance d. John Ford. Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Lee Marvin
22. 1964 A Fistful of Dollars d. Sergio Leone. Clint Eastwood
23. 1966 The Appaloosa d. Sidney Furie. Marlon Brando
24. 1966 The Professionals d. Richard Brooks. Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance, Claudia Cardinale
    
25. 1969 The Wild Bunch d. Sam Peckinpah. William Holden, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates
26. 1970 The Ballad of Cable Hogue d. Sam Peckinpah. Jason Robards
27. 1973 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid d. Sam Peckinpah. James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan
28. 1974 Don't Touch the White Woman d. Marco Ferreri. Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Catherine Deneuve
29. 1976 Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or, Sitting Bull's History Lesson d. Robert Altman. Paul Newman, Frank Kaquitts, Will Sampson, Burt Lancaster, Shelley Duvall, Harvey Keitel, Geraldine Chaplin,
    

Jamaica Inn

Alfred Hitchcock’s last U.K. film before coming to Hollywood, Jamaica Inn (1939) was based on the Daphne du Maurier novel published three years earlier. The film stars Maureen O’Hara as the Irish orphan Mary and an over-the-top Charles Laughton as Sir Humphrey Pengallon, the corrupt country squire of the Cornish coast. Set during the 1820s, the film takes place in the isolated “Jamaica Inn,” a hideout for smugglers and pirates run by Mary’s aunt and uncle. O’Hara (Rio Grande, Our Man in Havana) and Laughton (Mutiny on the Bounty, Witness for the Prosecution) are fantastic, and the film provides an early look at the English actor Robert Newton, who played the unforgettable, visionary, and drunken artist in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947). Featuring a hero dressed as a villain and a villain dressed as a hero, the film involves shipwrecks, double-crosses, hangings, sailor tattoos, eavesdropping, and meddling women, and also offers an implicit critique of the “public spectacle” of modern death on the eve of WWII, in which his native England will almost fall. The film involves many recognizable Hitchcock touches, from the lady with the goose to the gagged and bound heroine at the films denouement to lines like: “Take off your clothes off or I’ll do it for you!” O’Hara and Laughton later starred during the war in the French Resistance film This Land is Mine, directed by Jean Renoir in 1943.

Chess Fever

Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Chess Fever (1925) is a comedic classic of Soviet cinema that builds on early Russian silent cinema, not just upon the revolutionary impulses of October 1917. The film presents a domestic picture of wintry Moscow in the grip of “chess fever,” and includes both actual footage of an international chess tournament in Moscow that year as well as cameo appearances by famed chess stars of the day, such as the Cuban Jose Raul Capablanca (world champion 1921-1927). Chess Fever stars Anna Zemtsova (later billed as Anna Pudovkin) and Vladimir Fogel as they prepare, in much different fashion, for their wedding day. When Fogel’s obsession with chess—shared by the entire male population of the city, including the chemist who unwittingly mistakes lipstick and poison—tears apart their engagement, Fogel and Zemstiva must each evaluate what is truly important. Will a chance encounter with chess champion Capablanca (who prefers beautiful women to chess) save the day? The 27-minute Soviet silent features chess-loving kittens, checkered socks, and an attempted suicide.

After Hours

Martin Scorsese’s dark, postmodern comedy After Hours (1985) stars Griffin Dunne as computer programmer Paul Hackett, whose casual and nervous encounter with Rosanna Arquette leads him on a nightmare voyage through Soho’s dark and rainy streets. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, Hackett’s only thoughts are of finding an illusive and elusive way home “home”-- which in his case is back at work in his corporate office. On his journey through New York’s underground, where he encounters (but does not participate in) the libidinous world of drugs and sex, he will be tempted and tormented by an increasingly strange collection of women, from the trauma-inflicted Arquette to a sexually threatening sculptor played by Linda Fiorentino, from the obsessive, beehived, and potentially-castrating Teri Garr (who has access to a Xerox machine) to Catherine O’Hara (and her Mister Softee truck), and finally to the mysterious and maternal Verna Bloom, who lives in the basement of the Oz-like Club Berlin. Also features fantastic location shooting, mis-communication, repetition, an angry mob, and a cameo by Cheech and Chong. As a fantastic portrait of downtown in the early 1980s, After Hours is best viewed in conjunction with Downtown 81 or Permanent Vacation.

Ramona (1928)

Edwin Carewe’s Ramona, which cast Dolores Del Rio as the half-Scottish, half-Indian title character of this latest adaption of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel, was produced by Inspiration Pictures and distributed by United Artists in 1928. Carewe had directed Del Rio three times before, including her first two films Joanna (1925) and High Steppers (1926), and Resurrection (1927). The film was described by Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times as an “extraordinarily beautiful production, intelligently directed and, with the exception of a few instances, splendidly acted. The scenic effects are charming and there is for the most part an admirable restraint throughout this drama of Southern California." Hall, who does not offer a direct comparison of her performance with that of Pickford’s, wrote that “Miss Del Rio’s interpretation of Ramona is an achievement. Not once does she overact, and yet she is perceived weeping and almost hysterical. She is most careful in all the moods of the character. Her beauty is another point in her favor.” In an earlier article about the film, the Times misidentified the national and ethnic heritages of both the character of Ramona, and of Del Rio herself. Writing that this is the “first time in her brief but rapid film career that Miss Del Rio has portrayed a character at least partly parallel to her own nationality,” the Times describes the character as “half Indian—half Spanish” and Del Rio as “a Mexican with Spanish blood in her ancestry.” In the story, however, Ramona is pointedly not half-Indian, half-Spanish (which would have made her ethnically “Mexican”) but is rather orphaned by her Scottish father. She is merely raised as a step-daughter by a “noble” Sevillian family living in California. As Victoria Sturtevant has shown, Del Rio’s performance in early films like The Loves of Carmen and Ramona gave her a more polished, elite, and Spanish image than Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire. Her performance not only helped sustain the Ramona story’s enduring popularity, but was also a direct engagement with the growing Mexican American commercial market as a means to circumvent any forms of Mexican protest and boycott. More than simply cultivating a Mexican star, as we saw with The gaucho, the 1928 Ramona was produced during a period of the novel’s “discovery” by the Spanish-speaking Mexican American population of Los Angeles. Not only had the (still-ongoing) outdoor festival known as the Ramona Pageant premiered in Hemet, California in 1923, but an elaborate ten-part Ramona play ran at the Mexican American Teatro Hidalgo on N. Main Street in downtown Los Angeles during the twenties. This play's success was in turn trumped by Mexican novelist and playwright Adalberto Elias Gonzalez's Spanish-language play entitled Los Amores de Ramona, which opened in 1927 and seated nearly two thousand people per night in its initial run. Unlike previous strategies in getting around the Mexican protest without substantively altering their largely derogatory portrayals of Mexican characters, the 1928 version of Ramona could be marketed towards a built-in Mexican American audience. The Del Rio version, additionally, continued the long legacy of marketing that has surrounded the Ramona story as well. The silent film was “really the progenitor of the modern theme song,” and prior to the film’s completion “an astute sales manager named Emil Jensen summoned to his office at 729 Seventh Avenue in New York representatives of a music publishing house. He told them he was anxious to exploit a new Del Rio film in two ways: a Ramona rose, an artificial flower, would be manufactured and sold to film fans; and he wished a song composed, entitled ‘Ramona,’ and dedicated to the star.” The sheet music for the “Waltz song with ukulele and banjo uke” was written by Mable Lane and L. Wolfe Gilbert and featured a large picture of Del Rio on the cover, though the song was not included in the film.