It’s a good thing Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder’s classic noir of desire–for lust, money and revenge–was made in 1944, because it wouldn’t get made today. Not because it still isn’t a great movie–it is. But because thanks to the obdurate, formulaic rules that studio execs and their coverage readers swear by nowadays, (incanted like the…
So let’s say you and I are two out-of-work musicians and we see a bunch of hoods gun down some other hoods. What’s the first thing we do to ensure we keep living? Dress up as women and join an all-girl band. Right. First thing that occurred to me, too. That Jerry (Jack Lemmon) and…
Former loves are sometimes best viewed in memory. Seeing them again after all these years can be depressing (“Could she have really twisted me up so bad?”) and even disillusioning (“OMG, let me out of here!”) So when I got the restored version of The Third Man (1949) it was with some trepidation that I…
Wikipedia lists John D. MacDonald as a prolific writer. Ya think? Seventy-eight books with more than 75 million copies in print, plus nearly 500 short stories? That’s not prolific, that’s Brobdingnagian. Compare that to Raymond Chandler, whose career output was six novels and about two dozen stories. But there is more than just tonnage to…
I picked up my first Ross Macdonald, Sleeping Beauty, back in the late ’70s, at an Aardvark second-hand store, for twenty-five cents. I know I paid a quarter for it because I still have the book; and on its cover, the title’s literal sleeping beauty—eyes closed, a discreet suggestion of breast, hair spread out like…
Stuff happens. In our lives these events are seen as accidental turns of bad luck, meeting the wrong person, saying the worst thing possible. Most of the time we don’t perceive them as life-changing epochs in our personal history. Only later, as we look back, do we perceive them as coulda, woulda, shoulda, if-only milestones.…
It’s been nearly thirty-eight years, yet Roman Polanski’s Chinatown remains easily the best detective movie of all time. Not only because of its signature closing line, or the tour de force performance by Jack Nicholson, or Faye Dunaway and John Huston showing their acting chops, or the way Polanski uses the camera to give us…
