The Pigeon That Took Rome (1962)

Director: Melville Shavelson
Writer: Melville Shavelson, based on the novel The Easter Dinner by Donald Downes
Stars: Charlton Heston, Elsa Martinelli, Harry Guardino, Baccaloni, Gabriella Pallotta, Marietto and Brian Donlevy

Index: 2025 Centennials.

In 4:3 aspect ratio, Paramount News tells us that Italy has been freed from the bondage of the Nazis and that a U.S. General has honoured the Carrier Pigeon Hero of Liberation. No, says the recognisable voice of Charlton Heston. The pigeon is an impostor! And so we rewind back and shift into anamorphic widescreen, though we remain in black and white.

If that didn’t suggest a comedy, the opening scenes underline it. The Italians throw bombs from bicycles, so the Nazis ban bicycles, so the Italians switch to tricycles. So it goes.

Where it will all end up is never in doubt, in part because we know that the Nazis lost the Second World War but also because everybody in Italy knows that the American Fifth Army is on its way. What nobody knows is when they’ll get there and until they do it’s about survival. Somewhere in between lies our story.

Always a Bride (1953)

Director: Ralph Smart
Writers: Ralph Smart and Peter Jones
Stars: Peggy Cummins, Terence Morgan and Ronald Squire

Index: 2025 Centennials.

While this is a sedate British comedy about gentlemanly crooks plying their trade on the French Riviera, it unfolds against a historical backdrop that sent me down a rabbit hole and I wish the filmmakers had explored it deeper.

As we begin, our focus is on Terence Winch, who’s trying to change his hotel room without luck. We soon learn that the hotel is trying to subtly pressure him into to leaving because he intimidates their guests. It’s because his job is literally to stop them spending money.

And, because that seems to make absolutely no sense at all, I need to explain. He’s an agent of the British Treasury enforcing UK exchange controls that were designed during World War II to avoid a run on the pound and to ensure a steady flow of foreign imports. Sounds crucial, doesn’t it? Well, it probably was in 1939 during wartime but the law lingered on for decades.

Fitzwilly (1967)

Director: Delbert Mann
Writer: Isobel Lennart, based on the novel A Garden of Cucumbers by Poyntz Tyler
Stars: Dick Van Dyke, Barbara Feldon, John McGiver, Harry Townes, John Fiedler, Norman Fell and Edith Evans

Index: 2025 Centennials.

While I review a lot of movies on hundredth birthdays, it’s rare that I get to do it while the centenarian is alive and celebrating, but today actually is Dick Van Dyke’s centenary and he’s still going strong. Why not tackle a film that I haven’t seen before that he made when he was forty-two, the ultimate answer?

I enjoyed this immensely but I left it with a string of questions, starting with, “Why wasn’t this British and black and white?” It feels like a classic Ealing comedy remade in Hollywood, keeping Dame Edith Evans because who could replace her, but recasting most other roles.

She’s Miss Victoria Woodworth, delightfully haughty as an old and rich force of nature who requires a vast staff to run her huge New York mansion and signs endless cheques to endless charities. The only catch is that she hasn’t any money and hasn’t had since her father left her a measly hundred and eighty bucks.

A Man Called Adam (1966)

Director: Leo Penn
Writers: Les Pine and Tina Rome
Stars: Sammy Davis Jr., Louis Armstrong, Ossie Davis, Cicely Tyson, Frank Sinatra Jr., Mel Tormé and Peter Lawford

Index: 2025 Centennials.

The poster appropriately points out that “in Adam’s world... the music never stops!” That’s pretty true because music is everywhere here. Even when Adam Johnson isn’t performing on stage, there’s music in the background: on the radio, on the jukebox, even on his reel-to-reel tape deck. Manny, his powerful agent, points out his problem: “Take that horn away, buddy, and what have you got? Nothing.”

It’s also our problem, because, while Sammy Davis Jr. is blisteringly good as Adam, he’s the sort of disaster of a human being that we can’t find much sympathy for, even if he truly went off the rails a decade ago in the aftermath of a tragic accident that took his wife and baby.

Instead, we’re asked to sympathise with the people who are closest to him. Nelson, his best friend from childhood, played by Ossie Davis, cites “that excitement, that quality of personal danger” as why Adam’s a genius and also why he can’t stop being there for him, regardless of what he’s done in the past.

The Plastic Age (1925)

Director: Wesley Ruggles
Writers: Eve Unsell and Frederica Sagor, based on the novel by Percy Marks
Stars: Donald Keith and Clara Bow

Index: That's a Wrap!

As I write, Paramount are involved in a new merger, trying to buy Warner Brothers against opposition from Netflix. This film was made by Preferred Pictures, who had been founded by a former Paramount publicist in 1918, who then merged his company with Paramount because they wanted its leading lady, Clara Bow.

I’m watching with her in mind, even though the film is far more about the character played by Donald Keith. There are reasons why Clara Bow’s name is still remembered while Keith’s is not and they’re obvious after she’s been on screen for about ten seconds.

I did have other names in mind too, because I know that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard are both in here somewhere, as they would be again later in the month in Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, but I couldn’t find either of them. It was early for both of them, as neither made a major name for themselves until the thirties. They were both huge stars when Donald Keith was retiring, in 1936, though not yet married to each other. That happened in 1939.

In 1925, twenty-two year old Keith is the all-American boy ready to go to Prescott College, with the fastest 440 yard dash ever made by a prep student. We’re also told that the thrill of going to college is the thrill for the plastic age of youth, which is the only mention of the title anywhere in the film.

Deathmaster (1972)

Director: Ray Danton
Writer: R. L. Grove
Stars: Robert Quarry, John Fiedler, Bob Pickett, William Jordan, Betty Anne Rees, Bill Ewing and Brenda Dickson

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Roger Ebert gave this movie just one of four stars but clearly had a lot of fun talking about how bad it was and all that seems fair. It’s not simply a bad movie, though it is that. It’s a bad movie that surprises us, that confuses us, that we find we really have to ask questions about. Even now, I’m struggling to answer the pivotal one that lords over all the others: “Why?”

What makes sense is that it’s a vampire flick starring Robert Quarry. He’d had a big hit two years earlier with Count Yorga, Vampire, and he followed that up with a 1971 sequel, inevitably The Return of Count Yorga, then began 1972 with the wonderful Dr. Phibes sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again. He was suddenly a horror name and so why not make him Khorda, another vampire?

What doesn’t make sense is everything else. Yes, I realise that sounds like hyperbole but let me explain, because I’m at a loss to grasp any other decision made by the filmmakers. Maybe you’ll be able to figure it out. I hope so.

Lights of Old Broadway (1925)

Director: Monta Bell
Writer: Carey Wilson, from the play Merry Wives of Gotham by Laurence Eyre, with titles by Joseph W. Farnham
Stars: Marion Davies and Conrad Nagel

Index: That's a Wrap!

“Some of us are born to be lucky...”, says the opening intertitle, “and others are lucky to be born.” That’s Joseph Farnham earning his pay for titles already. Marion Davies plays both, as a pair of sisters orphaned on board a ship on its way to New York and fostered by different parents at opposite ends of the social scale.

We quickly leap past childhood so Anne De Rhonde can be “petite and perfectly bred” at a choice address in Washington Square but Fely O’Tandy, the sister she doesn’t know she has, only “rough, roguish and Irish” down in the ethnic slums.

There’s more opportunity for Davies in Fely so naturally we concentrate on her, beginning with her climbing to the top of a ridiculously large stack of tables in the street, then tipping them over, miraculously sustaining only a few bruises in the process.

Go West (1925)

Director: Buster Keaton
Writers: Buster Keaton and Lex Neal, from a scenario by Raymond Cannon
Star: Buster Keaton

Index: That's a Wrap!

The second of Buster Keaton’s two features for 1925, Go West is a far more subtle film than Seven Chances, or indeed any of his earlier full length films. I’m used to suggesting words like “frantic”, “acrobatic” and “impressive”. None of those spring to mind here. I’d offer “slow”, “calm” and “gentle”, at least until the finalé.

That finalé involves Buster dressed in red as a devil to lead a herd of cows through the city of Los Angeles to the stockyards. It reminds a great deal of the finalé to Seven Chances, where his pursuers were would-be brides—a different meat market, I guess—but it’s initially slower, gaining pace only when he finds the costume.

Until then, it’s gentle comedy performed at a gentle pace, the best scene the first one, still in the east. Buster plays Friendless, the credits tell us, and it’s a fair name. The shopkeeper he meets as we start certainly isn’t his friend and neither is anyone else at any point in the film. Well, except Brown Eyes, who plays herself.

The Mafu Cage (1978)

Director: Karen Arthur
Writer: Don Chastain, based on the play Toi et Tes nuages by Éric Wesphal, translated into English by Richard Cottrell
Stars: Lee Grant and Carol Kane

Index: 2025 Centennials.

The Mafu Cage is an American film that was widely seen in Europe but little seen at home. I can see why, because it’s a very European film, indeed one based on a French play. I can also see why Jerry Gross, a distributor who kept on trying the U.S. market under an array of titles, went bankrupt. I’m European. I adored it.

I’m watching a version called Deviation that includes a brief voiceover at the beginning, as my copy of The Mafu Cage is an extremely dark open matte version. However, that omits the voiceover. Hopefully the rest was unchanged.

We’re in Los Angeles but it doesn’t seem like it because we hardly see it. We spend most of the film at the home of Dr. Ellen Carpenter, an astronomer who specialises in solar activity. If we leave the house, it’s to visit her at work so that we can see the life that she tries to have, a life with a purpose and the potential for more, as a co-worker, David Eastman, tells her he’s in love with her. However, she’s unable to fully embrace life so keeps him at arm’s length.

Demons of the Mind (1972)

Director: Peter Sykes
Writer: Christopher Wicking, from a story by Christopher Wicking and Frank Godwin
Stars: Paul Jones, Patrick Magee, Gillian Hills, Robert Hardy, Michael Hordern and Yvonne Mitchell

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I wanted to see 1973’s Yellow Dog for Robert Hardy’s centennial but it’s stubbornly elusive and I couldn’t find a copy. Instead, I went with this kinda sorta Hammer horror from the year before. I hadn’t seen it before and he’s the lead character, however the order of credits reads, so it seemed like a good choice. However, now I understand why it’s not better known.

It worked best for me as a mood piece, a sort of impressionistic painting, because the film is as unhinged as its subject matter. We’re never quite sure of much that happens or why and, if I ever imagined that the ending would clear it all up, then I was horribly wrong. Half of me is eager to watch it again to discover what I had missed that would make sense of it all, but the other half is convinced that it wouldn’t help.

Initially, it’s all about Elizabeth. She’s in the back of a horse drawn carriage heading home to her family’s castle down a woodland path. It could easily be a Disney princess story but she clearly doesn’t want to be there and her older companion drugs her. Then she calms and we drift into either a memory or a dream. I’m not sure which, given that she spends it blissfully with a woodcutter but neither of them speaks.

The Light of Asia (1925)

Directors: Franz Osten and Himanshu Rai
Writer: Niranjan Pal, “with specially selected titles from Sir Edwin Arnold’s masterpiece”
Stars: The Indian Players Company

Index: That's a Wrap!

It’s well known that 80% of American silent films are lost. That’s a painful statistic to think about but, in India, the equivalent percentage is a staggering 98%. Of the 1,338 known silent films made in India, only twenty-nine survive today and not all of them completely.

That makes The Light of Asia or Prem Sanyas a historic film, though it wasn’t entirely Indian. It was shot on location in the British Raj, most of it around Lahore, the city ironically now in Pakistan. Its cast was drawn from the Indian Players Company, so it looks authentic.

Another reason it looks authentic is because the Maharajah of Jaipur lent huge assistance. The story really isn’t deep so it takes time with extras: rituals, costumes and pageantry. That help allowed a vast amount of architecture to be on display and legions of local extras.

Himanshu Rai, the film’s lead actor, is even credited as its co-director. Nine years later, he would create the Bombay Talkies studio, a key element in the rise of Hindi cinema in a nation where each tongue has its own film industry.

Little Annie Rooney (1925)

Director: William Beaudine
Writers: Hope Loring and Louis Lighton, based on a story by Catherine Hennessey
Star: Mary Pickford

Index: That's a Wrap!

Based on my rating alone, I clearly enjoyed Little Annie Rooney back in 2005, but that was a little before I started reviewing movies, so I’m unable to tap into my thoughts at the time. In 2025, I can’t ignore the obvious fact that Mary Pickford was far too old to play this role.

The thing is that she knew it too. She was a big star in the teens, very possibly the biggest, and she built her career on playing children, a natural gravitation for someone four foot ten who looked great in curls. That was believable in 1917 when she played The Poor Little Rich Girl and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm at twenty-five, but she’d become the most powerful woman in Hollywood, a co-founder of United Artists with complete control over her films. So she moved on to adult roles, as you might expect.

Unfortunately, the public didn’t follow her. They still wanted “the girl with the curls” and they told her so after she asked them during an interview for Photoplay. So she made this, a feature that opens with a protracted battle in the back streets of a bowery between Annie’s gang and the Kid Kellys. Every participant is a kid and looks it, except for Pickford. It seems anomalous to start with and gets progressively more awkward as she and fifteen year old Joe Butterworth start leaping onto each other.

Please Murder Me! (1956)

Director: Peter Godfrey
Writers: Al C. Ward and Donald Hyde, based on an original story by E. A. Dupont and David Chantler
Stars: Angela Lansbury, Raymond Burr, Dick Foran, John Dehmer and Lamont Johnson

Index: 2025 Centennials.

This didn’t turn out to be the greatest movie that Angela Lansbury ever made, but I’ll leave it to others to look at Gaslight, The Manchurian Candidate and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, to cite just three. It didn’t turn out to contain a great role for her either, though I always like her as a villain, even if she didn’t. What it did turn out to be was an interesting failure and a pristine opportunity for Raymond Burr, billed second.

He’s Craig Carlson, attorney at law, and this starts out with him walking through dark film noir streets, checking pawnshop windows and buying a gun. He comes back to his office and dictates a fantastic message to Ray Willis: “In exactly 55 minutes, I will be dead. Murdered.”

If you want to hook an audience, this is how. Nowadays, it’s tailor made for a trailer, but it works as the prologue too. Of course, it’s a film noir so we leap into flashback and learn how the story progressed to that point.

The Living Idol (1957)

Director: Albert Lewin
Writer: Albert Lewin
Stars: Steve Forrest, Liliane Montevecchi, James Robertson-Justice, Sara Garcia and Eduardo Noriega

Index: 2025 Centennials.

The Living Idol is at once emphatically of its time and also a frequent anomaly for the films of two countries. It’s an anomaly because it’s a Hollywood film with four of the five actors on the poster not American. It’s an anomaly as a horror film shot in Mexico that’s presented in both colour and anamorphic widescreen. It’s an anomaly as a Mexican cultural story, albeit one that’s told by a British archaeologist. It’s only of its time because all the exotic scenes aren’t exotic so much as exotica and it’s about folklore and reincarnation.

The British archaeologist is Professor Alfred Stoner, played by James Robertson Justice. It’s he who takes Juanita and Terry Matthews up the sixty-two steps inside the Pyramid of the Magician to trigger the story.

You see, while Terry is impressed by a stone jaguar idol, Juanita is horrified by it. She stares in abject terror and then flees down the steep steps in her high heels. We’re soon told that, a thousand years ago, a young lady of her age in a blue outfit like hers, was sacrificed on top of that pyramid and eaten by the people. Stoner wonders if she experienced a racial memory.

The Freshman (1925)

Directors: Sam Taylor and Fred Newmeyer
Writers: Sam Taylor, John Grey, Ted Wilde and Tim Whelan
Star: Harold Lloyd

Index: That's a Wrap!

I watched a lot of Harold Lloyd features back in 2005 and ranked this one up there with the best of them, but it doesn’t stand up to a fresh viewing the way that Safety Last! did two years earlier for its centennial. It’s cleverly funny, both because of Lloyd and its intertitles, but it has precious little substance to prop it up.

The premise is almost ludicrously simple. A young man, Harold Lamb, wants, needs, aches to go to college and he’s been accepted to one, Tate University, “a large football stadium with a college attached.” He wants to be popular, so prepares with glee, copying a movie character, The College Hero, right down to the little jig that its star, Lester Laurel, does as he greets people. In his mind, he’s already replaced Chet Trask, the most popular student at Tate.

Of course, that makes him seem ridiculous, a little endearingly, sure, but still ridiculous. It’s enough to gain unwelcome attention from the college cad, who pranks him quickly and often enough for it to become a big deal. Harold has become quickly known to the student body, a feat he interprets as popularity but isn’t. Only late into the movie is it made clear to him that he’s just the college boob.

Being There (1979)

Director: Hal Ashby
Writer: Jerzy Kosiński, based on his novel
Stars: Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Warden and Melvyn Douglas

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I knew very little about Being There going in. I knew that it was a late Peter Sellers movie, it was something of a departure from his typical comedy and it landed him an Oscar nod. And I knew that it was still highly regarded, comedy often dating poorly but this one not so much.

I certainly hadn’t realised that it can viably be considered a cult film; that it was directed by Hal Ashby, who had made Harold and Maude; that it was written by Jerzy Kosiński, he of The Painted Bird fame; or indeed that it had won an Oscar for Melvyn Douglas, a Golden Age actor I’ve enjoyed in many films from the thirties.

Not knowing the story certainly helped. It’s a subtle comedy, meaning that one departure for Sellers was a need for him to underact for once. It’s an unpredictable comedy too, much of the fun for me arising through his character always telling the exact truth without anyone actually realising that.

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Director: Rupert Julian
Writer: uncredited, “from the celebrated novel by Gaston Leroux”
Stars: Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin and Norman Kerry

Index: That's a Wrap!

Just six months after a mysterious phantom wreaked havoc at the famous Paris venue, the Moulin Rouge, in the feature by René Clair, a fresh phantom followed suit at an even more famous Paris venue, the Opera House.

Lon Chaney’s make-up, designed himself, is a marvel that had the audience screaming and perhaps fainting in their seats when Christine unwisely rips off his mask to reveal the horror of his disfigured features. The scenes at the Bal Masque, shot in Process 2 Technicolor, are still gloriously striking, the Red Death’s robe a vivid reminder of blood. No wonder it meant a series of Universal horror movies that would define the genre for decades. After all, Chaney had given them their most successful film two years earlier, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The success of this thematic follow up guaranteed a whole lot more. It merely took the advent of sound to progress the genre further.

Patrick the Great (1944)

Director: Frank Ryan
Writers: Bertram Millhauser and Dorothy Bennett, based on a story by Jane Hall, Frederick Kohner and Ralph Block
Stars: Donald O'Connor and Peggy Ryan

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Donald O’Connor is fairly best known for his Make It Laugh routine in Singin’ in the Rain. It’s one of the all time great scenes to drop the jaw of everyone watching in astonishment at what a human being can actually do. However, that was a result of a lot of work over a lot of years, going back to his days in vaudeville, starting at a mere thirteen months of age, as part of the O’Connor Family, the so-called Royal Family of Vaudeville, as they toured the nation.

By that point in his career, he’d become the sidekick but he got to that point playing leads for Universal in smaller pictures like this one. I’ve seen a few of them, but that one that blew my mind was Curtain Call at Cactus Creek, which I watched for Vincent Price’s First Thirty. It’s hardly a great movie and it ends horribly, but O’Connor is simply amazing in it, as the entire crew of a travelling troupe, doing every single behind the scenes task, often all at once.

Fright (1971)

Director: Peter Collinson
Writer: Tudor Gates
Stars: Susan George, Honor Blackman, Ian Bannen and John Gregson

Index: 2025 Centennials.

There are plenty of things wrong with Fright that I can’t ignore, but there are also a heck of a lot of things right with it that I can’t ignore either. With half a century of hindsight, it’s an impressively powerful pioneer of a movie that deserves more attention and I’m happy to give it some as a celebration of Honor Blackman.

I wasn’t aware of it until now, but this is the progenitor of the babysitter in peril movie, a title only challenged by a short from the same year, Foster’s Release, with Dan O’Bannon as the proto-slasher. Here, that’s the similarly named Ian Bannen, who’s far from a one note slasher.

The plot isn’t a strong point, because it does little more than the tagline on IMDb states: “A babysitter is terrorized by the child’s father, escaped from an asylum.” That’s pretty much it for story but not for the film itself because the actors, the director and, surprisingly, the sound editor all bring a lot more to the table.

Fortune is a Woman (1957)

Director: Sidney Gilliat
Writers: Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, adapted by Val Valentine from the novel by Winston Graham
Stars: Jack Hawkins, Arlene Dahl, Dennis Price, Violet Farebrother and Ian Hunter

Index: 2025 Centennials.

In many ways, this is a quintessential British film, but I’m watching it for an American, as Arlene Dahl would have been a hundred years old today. The next most prominent woman in the cast, Greta Gynt, was Norwegian, but made her career in British film. Dahl didn’t. She only made two films in the UK, Wicked as They Come in 1956 and this a year later.

Otherwise, the names are all British. Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, a famous team in a slew of genres, wrote the script. Launder took the director’s role for comedies but Gilliat for dramas like this and he did here. Jack Hawkins is the star, with other old faithfuls like Dennis Price, Bernard Miles, Geoffrey Keen and even a young Christopher Lee lower down the cast. It was based on a novel by Winston Graham, best known for his Poldark historical series.

I should emphasise that it’s a mystery, as it’s keen to start out like a horror movie. We chase through the countryside to an old dark house, then zoom inside in horror fashion to focus on a painting of the very same house. We zoom in there too and there’s a dead man’s hand. It’s a nightmare sequence, being suffered by Oliver Branwell, an insurance investigator.

Sally of the Sawdust (1925)

Director: D. W. Griffith
Writer: Forrest Halsey, from the play Poppy by Dorothy Donnelly
Stars: Carol Dempster and W. C. Fields

Index: That's a Wrap!

While the star of Sally of the Sawdust is Carol Dempster, playing, well, Sally of the Sawdust, the key name here is her co-star, W. C. Fields, because this is a pivotal film in his career for a variety of reasons.

For one, he plays a versatile show man, Prof. Eustace McGargle. His first and, for my money, most impressive routine is comedic juggling, a routine that’s perfect except when he doesn’t want it to be, at which point he loses balls but uses a quick foot movement to regain them as if nothing untoward had happened. It should not surprise that this was Fields’s specialty as a vaudeville performer.

For two, it’s based on a stage play from 1923 called Poppy. That wasn’t his first experience on Broadway, as he’d debuted in 1905 and was a regular in Ziegfeld Follies revues, but it was a lead role, with Madge Kennedy, that made his name as an actor. He was the only actor to go from play to film and he shot a sound remake, Poppy, in 1936, with Rochelle Hudson.

For three, the routine that gets McGargle in trouble is the shell game, though he insists it’s not gambling at all but a game of skill. “It’s the old army game”, he claims. This film and That Royle Girl after it landed him a contract with Paramount and his first film for them was It’s the Old Army Game.

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.

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Director: John Carpenter
Writers: Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein, adapted by W. D. Richter
Stars: Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall, Dennis Dun, James Hong and Victor Wong

Index: Make It a Double.

James Hong’s Double took me from a movie I’ve reviewed before to a movie I can’t believe I haven’t reviewed before. Nowadays, my go to films from John Carpenter have changed from Halloween and Escape from New York to They Live and Big Trouble in Little China, two movies that I enjoy more and more with every viewing.

This was Carpenter’s Hollywood flop, which cost $20m or so to produce but only took half that at the box office. There are probably a lot of reasons for that but one is that the audience really didn’t understand what it was in 1986.

What they probably expected was an action movie full of Chinese weirdness but without a real understanding of what Chinese weirdness actually looks like. It would happen in the U.S. and Kurt Russell would be the action hero who would take care of it all.