Background They say write what you know. Malcolm Braly (1925-80) knew prisons. Orphaned as a teenager, the Oregon native spent the majority of his years aged approximately 17-40 behind bars. A career burglar and multiple parole violator, he was in a reform school at 17 and in the facility at San Quentin for the crux…
Daphne du Maurier’s novel My Cousin Rachel is a study in character ambiguity. Published in 1951, it takes place—not unlike her earlier Rebecca (1938)—on a sprawling estate in the author’s beloved Cornwall. Du Maurier again works in the mystery-romance mode, and to a large degree, My Cousin Rachel inverts her most famous novel’s premise. Rebecca charts the…
In 2014, I wrote an appreciation of Dario Argento’s 1970 giallo film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. In that post, I mentioned that while many have always considered it a given that the Italian director’s superb debut is based on The Screaming Mimi—a 1949 American crime novel by Fredric Brown—Argento didn’t credit the book…
I originally planned this to be a Page to Screen article comparing Carl Theodor Dreyer’s (1899-1968) 1932 horror film Vampyr with In a Glass Darkly (1872), the collection of mystery stories penned by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873). The film is regularly noted as being based on the short fiction works, but after reading Sheridan Le…
I’m not sure if Criterion Collection is releasing a new edition of the 1980 movie Hopscotch because of the timeliness of the plot, but timely it is. A retired CIA agent who threatens to publish a book filled with leaked classified information … um, yeah, that kinda gels with the present times here in the…
Some admirers of the science fiction novel Roadside Picnic, written by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, might feel that the book has not received the critical and popular recognition it deserves, particularly in comparison to the film that was made from it: Andrei Tarkovsky’s widely celebrated Stalker (1979). But really, those of us who…
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) might be the most well-known movie about an outlaw couple, and Gun Crazy (1950) might be the best. But the title that many credit as the original gangster couple film was made before either of those. Critically revered auteur Nicholas Ray made his directorial debut with 1948’s They Live by Night,…
The season finale sees the long overdue returns of Anansi and Bilquis. While Mr. Nancy (Orlando Jones) is tailoring suits for big cheese Wednesday (Ian McShane) and his henchman Shadow (Ricky Whittle), he decides he must tell a story. One of a queen. We get the rundown of Bilquis (Yetide Badaki), watching her status slowly…
At the Ibis and Jacquel funeral home, the bodies are piling up and keeping the godly duo busy. But Jacquel notes Ibis’s fingers are itching to return to writing and excuses his partner to begin another Coming to America, this one beginning in 1721. Ibis writes: “It is fine fiction that America was founded by…
The Coming to America segments have been my personal favorites thus far in the first season of American Gods, so much so that they often steal the show. But what a disappointment this week’s opening turned out to be. Maybe it was the slow-mo action scene that lacked any palpable tension as a group of…
