Dont Look Back (1967)

Director: D. A. Pennebaker
Writer: D. A. Pennebaker
Stars: Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Alan Price

Index: 2025 Centennials.

“Don’t criticise what you can’t understand,” Bob Dylan sang in The Times They are a-Changin’ in this film, which every critic should keep in mind as they review it. After all, it’s not your typical documentary and wasn’t in 1967.

Ostensibly, filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker was chronicling Dylan’s tour of the UK in 1965, but, quite frankly, this does a terrible job of that. I left knowing little more about that tour than I did going in, which wasn’t a heck of a lot.

I had to research online to find that it ran for eight nights in seven cities over ten days, that he only performed solo and acoustic and each gig was performed in two halves without support, prompting me to wonder why Joan Baez and Alan Price were there for much of it.

Locke & Key (2011)

Director: Mark Romanek
Writer: Josh Friedman, based on the graphic novels by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez
Stars: Miranda Otto, Mark Pellegrino, Sarah Bolger, Nick Stahl, Ksenia Solo, Skylar Gaertner and Jesse McCartney

Index: Unsold Pilots

There are probably a lot of ways to start an Unsold Pilots project but Locke & Key seems like the perfect one because there’s a long history that highlights how complicated the process is to bring a well known and successful property to television. It doesn’t hurt that my better half is a huge fan.

Locke & Key started out as a comic book, one with a huge name as writer, Joe Hill, who’s one of Stephen King’s sons, each of whom found a success of their own. It ran for six stories over six years, from 2008 to 2013, to great acclaim. It was inevitable that it would be adapted into something by someone at some point.

That turned out to be a TV show developed for Fox for their 2010-11 season. The pilot was made but not aired, though it was screened at San Diego Comic-Con. However, Fox passed on it, so no show was made.

Side Street (1949)

Director: Anthony Mann
Writer: Sydney Boehm
Stars: Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, James Craig, Paul Kelly, Jean Hagen, Paul Harvey, Edmon Ryan and Charles McGraw

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Farley Granger was tempted into all sorts of trouble as the forties became the fifties. Alfred Hitchcock made him a murderer in Rope, then Nicholas Ray put him on the run for murder in They Live by Night and Hitch put him right back in the murder game in Strangers on a Train.

He’s a thief here—“no hero, no criminal, just human like all of us, weak like some of us but foolish like most of us”, as the Chief of Police tells us at the end. He sees an opportunity and he takes it, but then he feels guilty about it so does all he can to fix what he did. His problem is that he does all the wrong things, even if he does them for the right reasons.

Side Street has all sorts of flaws, but it works for me on two fronts. For one, it’s a beautifully shot exploration of New York, the city being a deeper and more substantial character than a bunch of the supposed leads. And for two, it’s a great unwitting descent, where we watch Joe Norson jump into a hole, then continue to try to dig his way out of it until he almost makes it to Australia. If you’re one of those moviegoers who likes shouting at characters on screens to not do the stupid thing they’re about to do, I’d highly recommend this one to you.