Ralph Nelson’s jazzy, hard-boiled noir Once a Thief stars Alain Delon as Italian (!) immigrant Eddie Pedak with a criminal past who’s just trying to go straight, but his gangster brother Walter (Jack Palance) keeps dragging him back into the fold. Opening with the cold-blooded killing of grocery store owner Lisa Wing (an uncredited actress),…
Carey Jackson (Robert Montgomery), foreign correspondent for a huge magazine conglomo, has found himself in his employer Carlton Towne’s leather-lined office (“Must be like living in a wallet”), about to be fired. The company is closing their Vienna office because of post-war censorship, but there’s no work for him back home, either. At the last…
After years languishing in greymarket DVDs, the 1980s private detective series Spenser: For Hire finally got an official release from Warner Archive in 2014. Just a few weeks ago, Warner released Spenser: For Hire: The Complete Second Season on DVD, with the third season surely arriving soon. Featuring Robert Urich as the titular detective, Spenser:…
Once again digging into their television vaults, Warner Archives brings us the complete first season of the surprise 2003 Fox comedy hit “Wanda at Large,” now out on DVD. Starring comedian Wanda Sykes as Wanda Hawkins, an outrageous stand-up comedian and local television personality in Washington, D.C., “Wanda at Large” was known for its combination…
Black Patch is a dark and serious film, which is why it has an adorable little line drawing of the marshal and his badge on the poster. Directed by Allen H. Miner, known primarily for his television work, Black Patch (1957) is a strange and wonderful little Western, a true independent film that took…
In 1933, at the height of the Depression, a nation in desperate need of distraction broke box office records for the lavish Hollywood musical 42nd Street. This unabashed slice of wish fulfillment is an undisputed cinematic classic, the granddaddy of all Hollywood backstage musicals, and now out on Blu-ray courtesy Warner Archives. Theater director Julian…
“Boy,” I can hear you saying now, “I can’t believe no one made a movie that was a cross between Laura, Mildred Pierce and All About Eve.” Well, folks, I am here to make your day: The Velvet Touch, the 1948 drama starring Rosalind Russell, is indeed a mix of murder-based melodrama, set in the…
The Flying Cloud, a ship out of New York, lands in San Francisco after over 100 days at sea. The sole female passenger, one Miss Mary Rutledge (Miriam Hopkins), is cynical and aloof, and upon her arrival in the town, it’s no wonder: she’s essentially a mail-order bride sent to marry a man she doesn’t…
If early Hollywood films are any indication, a good 47% of women by volume found themselves abandoned, unmarried and pregnant at some point in their lives. They rarely suffered much by way of social ostracism — there was almost always a progressive aunt or someone willing to pass the child off as their own —…
The Wild Affair (1963) is a charming, light and sophisticated British sex comedy, sadly forgotten despite being incredibly influential in its day. A vehicle for early-60s cinematic It Girl Nancy Kwan, The Wild Affair concerns a young working girl, her hapless fiance, assorted colleagues and the ever-present worry that one has not lived enough before…