Eccentric or no, by the time the love triangle between Barbara, Franchot Tone and B-actor Tom Neal turned violent, Barbara was no longer famous, but rather infamous. Her decline continued and in a few short years she was being busted for bad checks and soliciting.
Woman in White is a post-Code lurid Gothic horror, and as such pushes its own boundaries within the genre, mostly through the character of Count Fosco. It’s interesting to note that the film was made in 1946 and not released until 1948, when standards had lessened to a degree; I can’t imagine Frederick’s assertion that he personally has no problem with pre-marital sex being allowed in a film in 1946. But concessions were apparently made to appease the Production Code, and by the time the useless and unstable Frederick reveals himself to be a libertine, he’s been so sufficiently coded as evil and gay that his open-mindedness is easy to overlook.
Not precisely a revival nor a biopic, the 1930 Marion Davies vehicle The Florodora Girl takes little more than a name and the vague idea of a Florodora Girl and transplants her into pre-Code Hollywood, and to strange, though not uninteresting, effect. So light at times that it looks as though it will blow away, reviewer Creighton Peet of The Outlook dubbed The Florodora Girl as “completely delightful nonsense.”
J.D. Dawes (Chuck Norris) has just returned to his home in California after a long-term trucking job in Alaska. His little brother Billy (Michael Augenstein) idolizes him and wants to be a truck driver, too, so J.D. lets him deliver a load of frozen foods by himself — T.V. dinners, more specifically, a fact that hilariously comes into…
Because 1962 was still in the grips of the 1950s, Panic in Year Zero touts the benefits of survival through rampant commercialism. Harry, who very sensibly takes about a thousand bucks in cash with him on fishing trips, soon realizes that there’s nothing in L.A. to go back to, and money is all they’ve got to help them survive. He systematically purchases guns, gas and food… or at least tries to, but is thwarted at every turn by raging selfishness, like when a hardware store owner doesn’t want to take his $200 check. Hey, Harry’s just trying to screw the guy over, as is his God-given right. What’s the problem?
While the link between Westerns and noir films is well documented, very few films have been as literal as Station West in borrowing tropes from one genre and superimposing them onto another.
Fritz Lang’s Spies (Spione, 1928) is gorgeous, as all of Lang’s silents are, full of art deco designs and sharp-edged shadows and perfectly posed extras set amongst some truly stunning visual effects, impressive today, but so incredible at the time that they must have been nearly indistinguishable from magic.
Stanley Kramer was one of the few producers who could make earnest social problem films really work; the melodrama in Pressure Point is a feature, not a bug.
Hitch Hike (Autostop rosso sangue) (1977) is one of the more original and esoteric of the 1970s exploitation flicks, primarily thanks to the unpredictable relationship that develops between Adam, Eve and Walter.
It’s the dawn of the 1980s, and the upper-class hippie holdouts of Marin County, California are snarking and screwing their way through life, certain that health foods and open marriages will save their souls while blissfully unaware that they’re emotionally and psychologically adrift.