Underrated Movie #52: The Killing

Title: The Killing
Year: 1956
Director: Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove)
Writers: Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson, based on a novel by Lionel White
Stars: Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards (Murder By Contract), Jay C. Flippen, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook (Electra Glide in Blue)

The Story: A career criminal recruits five frustrated working men to help him heist a horse track on race day. As a god-like narrator dissects their failings, we see how a series of small errors lead to one disaster after another.

How it Came to be Underrated: As Kubrick’s films got more and more prestige, this early noir began to look like a work-for-hire by comparison. This may not be 2001, but it’s a serious Kubrick effort, showing his usual mastery.

Why It’s Great:

1. Anyone who’s seen Kubrick’s more famous movies will recognize many of his favorite themes in utero here: the uselessness of ambition, the treachery of emotion and the ironic triumph of fate over free will
2. Jim Thompson barely eked out living as a crime novelist while he was alive, and he was lucky to get the job writing dialogue for this movie (Kubrick was part of his small cult of fans). Since his death, his reputation has soared, and he’s now considered to be not only a great crime novelist, but a genuine literary giant. Straddling both worlds, he's able to provide heartbreaking little vignettes of the criminals’ lives, along with lively hard-boiled dialogue like this: “George has stumbled onto something big!” “That meatball?” “A meatball with gravy!”
   
3. Kubrick made such a classic-looking noir that it seems like it could have been shot ten years earlier, but there are also progressive touches that mark it as way ahead of its time. In one scene a member of the team is doomed by his own racist treatment of a parking attendant. In another, our hero’s grizzled old drinking buddy suddenly admits that he wants to marry him! I react with disbelief every time I watch the movie! Did I hear that right?? But there’s really no other way to interpret it. At least not to my modern ears.
   
4. The crime is planned down to the smallest detail, but it all falls apart. Why? Why do so many bands break up as soon as they get their first hit single? Because people can keep their hopes and fears and jealousies in check as long as there’s no money on the table, but as soon as you can smell success, (to paraphrase Langston Hughes) all the deferred dreams stop sagging like a heavy load and instead start to explode.
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Kubrick’s previous movie was a much lower-budget noir, Killer’s Kiss. His next was his breakthrough into prestige pictures, Paths of Glory. These three great movies nicely showcase the rise of a filmmaker whose ambition could not be contained.

How Available Is It?: It’s available on dvd or you can watch it instantly.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: It Talks!

Underrated Movie #51: Vera Cruz

Title: Vera Cruz
Year: 1954
Director: Robert Aldrich (Kiss Me Deadly, Flight of the Phoenix)
Writers: Roland Kibbee and James R. Webb, based on a story by Borden Chase
Stars: Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, Denise Darcel, Cesar Romero, Sarita Montiel, George Macready

The Story: After coming out the wrong end of the Civil War, a ruined southern gentleman decides to refashion himself as a Mexican Civil War mercenary. Teaming up with a charming horsethief, he tries to earn a fortune by transporting a wagon full of Maximilian’s gold.

How it Came to be Underrated: This movie is in the same league as another western Cooper made that year, High Noon, but it remains far less well known. Alrdich and Lancaster (who also co-produced) both loved to rankle Hollywood by working on their own terms. The result was a lot of great movies, many of which didn’t get the respect they deserved.

Why It’s Great:

1. The basic premise of this movie is so clever that I’m shocked we don’t see it more often: What if a movie like Star Wars culminated in a showdown between Luke Skywalker and Han Solo? We’re so used to seeing the lovable rogue win the trust of the naïve hero that it starts to seems like a foregone conclusion. But what if the rogue turns out to be even scarier than the evil empire he’s helping to overthrow?
   
2. Cooper never settled into the sort of fatherly roles that would have been appropriate for his advancing age. He kept playing lean, desperate gunfighters until the day he died. He used his age to his advantage: Rather than growing soft, he just became more haggard.
   
3. Aldrich specialized in movies about hard men who triumph over harder men, only to find themselves continually stabbed in the back by the soft men they’ve fought to protect. His best films are individually quite powerful, but when you put them all together, they form one grand unified statement, a devastating condemnation of nothing less than the idea of civilization itself.
4. Did George Macready (Gilda, Paths of Glory) ever make a bad movie? He’s one of those character actors like Robert Ryan, who not only elevated every movie he was in, but seemed to have a knack for finding the smartest material. He makes it into this one for one scene as Maximilian, but he has to provide the whole motivation for the war.
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: All three big names went on to make movies that were even more cynical than this one later in the '50s: Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, Lancaster's Sweet Smell of Success, and Cooper's Man of the West. All three are pitch-black gems.

How Available Is It?: You can get it on dvd or watch it instantly.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: By Day I Am Known As Senor Suerte—Mister Luck, But At Night I Become Senor Muerte—Mr. Death!

Underrated Movies: Special Guest Picks #4 (Part Two)

And here's four more picks by The Daily Show's Elliott Kalan:

Save The Green Planet (2003)

Director: Jang Joon-Hwan
In all the fuss over Oldboy (which I'm not knocking, mind you) it seems like everyone missed the real find of South Korean cinema. A deranged young man and his acrobat girlfriend kidnap the CEO of a chemical company so they can torture him into admitting the truth: that he is an alien prince sent to earth to begin the planet's destruction. Save the Green Planetis everything a movie can offer -- comedy, horror, suspense, mystery, epic science fiction, romance, and a surprisingly heartfelt plea for world peace and better working conditions in Korean chemical plants. At every turn it will either stun you or baffle you with its audacious breakneck tonal shifts and stunning disregard for the way movies are supposed to work.

The Devil and Daniel Webster aka All That Money Can Buy aka Here Is a Man (1941)
Director: William Dieterle
A powerful mix of cornpone, Americana, fun, and genuine nightmarishness, The Devil and Daniel Webster is one of those movies that feels like it was made just for me. "A fantasy-drama about the promise of America where the devil's mistress literally dances a man to death? Awesome!" But as a recent public screening proved, other people like it, too. Walter Huston is amazing as Mr. Scratch, Edward Arnold sparkles as the Great Orator, and Simone Simon is literally sexy as hell. Wrap it up in one of Bernard Herrmann's greastest scores and a perfect ending and it becomes a shame that people refer to this movie as a "minor classic". It is quite a major classic, good sir!

Zodiac (2007)
Director: David Fincher
Greeted with rave reviews and then quietly stowed away in the back of the cinema closet, the only David Fincher movie I enjoy watching hasn't gotten the respect it deserves. A taut retelling of the Zodiac Killer case anchored by great performances from Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr. (and somehow amazingly suspenseful over its 3 hour running time), Zodiac is more than another serial killer film. As it gradually unfolds and the years pass, it becomes an intense treatise on the nature of time and memory, and the inability to ever really know the past. As obsessed men seek ever more detail about these terrifying crimes, the reality of life passes through their fingers. History is a ghost, personal history even more so. No matter how much we ask ourselves "How sure are you on a scale of 1 - 10?", tragically we can never quantify our experiences or capture time. (For this reason Zodiac always makes me think of the song "Finishing the Hat" from "Sunday in the Park From George".) After only three years Zodiac is due for a rediscovery, which is kind of sad in its own way.

The Fall (2006/2008)
Director: Tarsem Singh
Currently settling into the position of "cult oddity" but deserving so much more, Tarsem Singh's labor of love The Fall is one of my favorite recent movies, and something I never thought I'd see -- a beautifully shot, captivating story about a little Romanian girl, a Los Angeles hospital, and the epic adventures of Charles Darwin's pet monkey. I don't care what anybody says! Sure it drags a little towards the end! But it's an amazing movie, a startling personal vision of the kind we're not used to seeing in American film. And after multiple viewings I still cry at the ending, when a montage of silent film comedy pratfalls becomes a love letter to movies, friendship, and the idea of escape.

Thanks again to Elliott Kalan for eight great picks! Let's see, yesterday I mentioned Elliott's NYC screening series Closely Watched Films and his podcast The Flophouse, so today I'll spotlight entirely different output from this multifaceted guy: He wrote a fascinating article for the most recent issue of Popular Mechanics about The Legacy of the 1939 World's Fair and he's got a hush-hush comic book coming out from Marvel Comics, who interviewed him about it.

Underrated Movies: Special Guest Picks #4 (Part One)

Hi, gang, I'm pleased to announce a very special guest with a deep knowledge of movies. Emmy winner Elliott Kalan was cool enough to drop eight write-ups on me so far, too many for one day, so let's do our first ever Special Guest Picks 2-parter! Here's Part Uno:

The Sea Wolf (1941)
Director: Michael Curtiz
Edward G. Robinson in one of his greatest roles as Wolf Larson the Milton-worshiping seagoing sadist who forces Ida Lupino and John Garfield into marine servitude next to Gollum-like gremlin from hell Barry Fitzgerald. And they're all backed up by the greatest master craftsmen the Warner Brothers studio machine had to offer. The Sea Wolf is a masterful piece of entertainment, gripping and eerie, which would fit in just as easily with the Universal horror classics as it does with the later film noir tales of deviance. So how come nobody ever talks about it?

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
Director: Joseph Sargent
Many movies age well. Fewer movies age BETTER. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is one of those movies. Just as suspenseful, funny, and exciting a crackerjack thriller as it was upon first release, its amazing ability to create a living breathing simulation of 1970s New York makes it a fascinating and invaluable document of those times. The little details that once served only to add verisimilitude have become beautiful moments trapped in amber for future generations to gaze at. That is, if they're not too busy hanging off the edge of their seats.

The Prestige (2006)
Director: Chris Nolan
Unfortunately buried by another, far less interesting 2006 19th century magician movie (what are the odds, huh?), The Prestige is a cold scalpel slash of a film delicately dissecting the hateful competition between two extremely handsome stage performers whose rivalry leads them to ever-darker areas of intrigue and deception. It's a machine-like movie, but if it wasn't then its ridiculously complex multi-flashback nesting doll plot structure wouldn't work as seamlessly as it does. Sure, it's got a twist ending (two, really), but don't focus too much on those. Buried beneath them is a metaphor for the act of filmmaking itself, the reporduction of things and images and the agreement we make not to admit how horrified we'd be if the things we see routinely on screen were to actually occur. Plus, David Bowie plays Nikola Tesla -- greatest casting decision ever.

Hollow Triumph aka The Scar (1948)
Director: Steve Sekely
Failed med student Paul Henreid also fails at a criminal career, and then, while running from the mob, fails to escape into the life of an identical doctor with a tell-tale scar. This is the bleakest of film noirs, in which existence is a series of mistakes, bad decisions, fatal coincidences, and out-and-out fuck ups. Shot with style and verve and loaded with bizarre touches, stumbling a few times but stumbling honestly, it's one of the buried gems of the genre.

Elliott Kalan won an Emmy at his day job writing for "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart". Even before he was on the writing staff, he helped put together Jon's Oscar Gay Cowboy montage, so the guy knows his movies. Here in NYC, he hosts the delightful monthly screening series Closely Watched Films at 92Y Tribeca. He's also, like our last guest, a co-host of the Flophouse podcast, where he once memorably pitched a Ziggy movie.

Underrated Movie #50: Miami Blues

Title: Miami Blues
Year: 1990
Director: George Armitage
Writer: George Armitage, based on the novel by Charles Willeford
Stars: Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Fred Ward

The Story: A rampaging sociopath falls for a giggly prostitute, then steals the badge and gun (and false teeth) of a sad-sack cop. To his great surprise, he discovers that a little bit of legitimacy can be addictive.

How it Came to be Underrated: This didn’t get much of a release because its distributor, Orion Pictures, was going under. It became a cult hit on video, though.

Why It’s Great:

1. Baldwin was always great, but his problem early on was that he had the soul of a character actor trapped inside the chiseled features of a leading man. Only now that he’s weathered and thickened can he been recognized as one of our best. (I loved it on “30 Rock” when Liz Lemon looked at a real picture of the youthful Baldwin and lamented: “What happened?? Your eyes were so blue!!”) This movie gave him a great early opportunity to let some madness shine through those baby blues.
   
2. Fred Ward never got as much work as he deserved, but he had a hell of a great year in 1990: this, Tremors and Henry and June! I hope he didn’t think he’d get a range of roles that lively every year.
3. Leigh became a little mannered in later years, but she could not be more raw and winning and unaffected here. The easy choice would have been to play her dim-witted role as just a victim, too dumb to see what’s wrong with this guy. She does something far more interesting. They say that when a true sociopath looks at you, their eyes are so direct and intense that you wonder if you’ve ever really looked anyone in the eye before. We see Leigh respond to that energy, even though she knows better.
   
4. I don’t know how much Norman Greenbaum charges filmmakers to use his rock anthem “Spirit in the Sky”, but it’s not enough. That song has kicked a lot of movies into high gear, but this is the movie I always I always associate with it.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Willeford wrote a lot of beloved crime paperbacks (including a few more starring Ward’s detective character, Hoke Mosely) but the only other notable movie adaptation was another cult classic, Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter.

How Available Is It?: It’s on a bare-bones, non-anamorphic dvd.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Willeford Also Published Under the Alias W. Franklin Sanders. For Example:

Underrated Movie #49: The Slums of Beverly Hills

Title: Slums of Beverly Hills
Year: 1998
Director: Tamara Jenkins (The Savages)
Writer: Tamara Jenkins
Stars: Natasha Lyonne (American Pie), Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine), Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler), Kevin Corrigan (Buffalo ’66)

The Story: A teenage girl in 1976 is hustled from place to place in Beverly Hills by her formerly-well-off father, who’s desperate to keep his family in upscale addresses that he can’t afford. They finally get access to money by taking in their mixed-up niece, who teaches the daughter some untraditional lessons about life and love.

How it Came to be Underrated: It’s virtually impossible for women writer-directors to seize the bullhorn in the aggressive boys’ club that is independent filmmaking. This is partially because marketers don’t know what to do with a film unless it punches you in the gut. Smaller movies like this one too often go under the radar.

Why It’s Great:

1. This is the sort of laid-back, scruffy comedy that forces you into an older rhythm of movie-watching. It gradually creates a believable and lovable world out of a hundred little right-on details, some that are unique to its kooky setting and some that are universal.
2. In America, we like to pretend that the poor can get rich. That rarely works out, but everybody does have the right to pretend to be rich, provided they have a little bit of hustle, a willingness to borrow, and a whole lot of self-delusion. Entertainment doesn’t always have to sell fantasies of wish-fulfillment, it can also find comedy and drama in the wreckage that those unrealistic fantasies leaves behind.
   
3. Kevin Corrigan once again plays his trademaked lovable loser character but for once he gets to play the “romantic” lead. Actually, he’s only interested in Lyonne for her body, but the movie imagines a crazy alternate world in which bodies aren't especially evil. Can it be possible that not getting overly attached is actually a healthy instinct for a teenage girl? Shock! Horror!
   
4. In most coming of age movies, boys seek out sex, while girls seek out love. Sex for girls is merely a monster, and nothing good can come of it, but that’s okay, because good girls don’t want it anyway. Lyonne lacks money, tact and parental guidance, but she’s gifted with an uncanny ability to follow her own mostly-healthy moral compass. It turns out that, despite what we've seen before, some girls can actually trust their own instincts to get them through adolescence.
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: It took Jenkins ten years to get another movie made, but she finally found a well-deserved audience her second time out with The Savages.

How Available Is It?: It’s available on a bare-bones dvd.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: They Said I Was Fast!

Comics I Love Even Though I've Only Seen the Covers #9: Boy Loves Girl

But that love, alas, is not exactly reciprocated...

Isn't romance sweet?

Underrated Movie #48: Monsieur Hire

Title: Monsieur Hire
Year: 1989
Director: Patrice Leconte (The Girl on the Bridge)
Writers: Patrice Leconte and Patrick DeWolf, based on a novel by Georges Simenon
Stars: Michel Blanc, Sandrine Bonnaire (La Ceremonie)

The Story: A woman has been killed and the police suspect an antisocial, middle-aged man who likes to spy on his beautiful young next-door neighbor. But just when we start to worry about the object of his gaze, she turns the tables on her voyeur and takes control of the situation.

How it Came to be Underrated: Leconte’s career is still going strong, and he’s one of the few French directors whose films routinely get released in the States, but he’s never become a household name over here. It doesn’t help his recognition factor that he keeps migrating through different genres, mastering each one and then moving on. What his films always have in common, however, is a heartbreaking romanticism.

Why It’s Great:

1. Americans are hopelessly neurotic about sex, so we demand our movies either demonize it or worship it. Leconte, on the other hand, is able to take a more nuanced view, shown by the audience’s complex relationship with Bonnaire. She is an object of desire with desires of her own, both wanted and wanting, both victim and vicitmizer.
   
2. Hitchcock convinced us that the only mode for making thrillers was his own cool detachment. Leconte clearly loves Hitchcock, but he incorporates Hitch’s tricks into a different tradition. Leconte’s camera is more subjective and more intense. The initial Hitchcockian sang froid gets subtly steamier until it succumbs to the hothouse of the characters’ obsessions.
3. This is a very simple story, efficiently told, with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it running time of 79 minutes. There is precisely one real twist, placed at the exact midpoint of the film. This sort of streamlined, elegant structure is only possible if you have total faith in your actors to convey everything with their glances. Luckily, Blanc and Bonnaire are both masters of the bottomless stare.
   
4. 1989 is on record as one of the worst years for fashion in the history of the world, so how can everything look so stylish? I know that the French can dress poorly when they really want to, but apparently, they can also shrug off the bad instincts of their peers at any time and rediscover a more classic, timeless style underneath. There’s hardly a sweater or perm in sight.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Film buffs are only now starting to rediscover all the great French crime films of the ‘80s. Diva is even more stylish than this one, albeit a little bit more dated. Garde a Vue is another elegant little thriller about a pitiful man under suspicion.

How Available Is It?: It’s on dvd again, after being unavailable for a time.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: More Suspense!

Underrated Movies: Special Guest Picks #3

It's a shortened week here at Cockeyed Caravan, but I've still got time for some Special Guest Picks! Today's special guest is Dan McCoy. Dan's picks run the gamut from the merely under-praised to the totally obscure. His tastes are a bit darker than mine, so be prepared for a list with a little more bite to it:

Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) – Imagine if the kinkier Alfred Hitchcock of Psycho re-made his own The Lady Vanishes, and you’d get some sense of Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake. Preminger and his screenwriters Penelope and John Mortimer (the latter also known for creating Rumpole of the Baily) made a film that stands head and shoulders above other “is it all in her head?” missing person thrillers by making it seem all too possible it IS all in her head—aided by the frantic performance of Carol Lynley as Bunny’s mother, Ann Lake. And check out the supporting cast: Sir Lawrence Olivier, Noel Coward, and Keir Dullea, proving that he did something other than 2001. Plus, for sixties flavor, you also get a performance by The Zombies and a great Saul Bass credits sequence.

The Return of the Living Dead (1985) – It isn’t underrated by horror fans, but it’s certainly less well known than the George Romero (Night, Dawn, Day, and… er, Land and Diary) zombie films that it shares DNA with. John Russo, co-screenwriter of Night of the Living Dead, split with Romero but retained the rights to the “Living Dead” title, an option he’s exercised primarily by releasing terrible colorized versions of NOTLD with “new” footage starring now-30-years-older actors. However, before that, he teamed with director/screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (writer of Alien) to create the greatest—and scariest—zombie comedy not named Shawn. It’s less a Night sequel than, as my friend Stuart says, “a punk-rock remake.” However, would any modern film starring a bunch of teens also find time for great middle-aged character actors like Don Calfa, Clu Gulager, and James Karen (best known as the evil land developer who moved the headstones but DIDN’T MOVE THE BODIES, in Poltergeist)? This is a movie where bad things happen not because of horror movie contrivances, but due to everyday bad decisions you make out of boredom.

The Wrong Guy (1997) – No, not Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, although star and co-writer Dave Foley’s ("The Kids in the Hall", "NewsRadio") film plays off Hitchcock’s trademark plot of the innocent man, wrongly accused. A man (Foley) publicly threatens to kill his boss, only to later find his boss murdered. He assumes his actions have made him a wanted man, never realizing that the security cameras have already cleared him. So he goes on the lam from no one, desperate to solve a killing for which he is not a suspect. Howard Hawks’ famous maxim states that a good movie is “three good scenes, no bad ones.” I wouldn’t claim there are no bad scenes in The Wrong Guy. The middle, in particular, sags. However, it has at least three scenes that made me laugh as hard as anything in a decade, and it outdoes both the troubled Kids in the Hall film Brain Candy and Mel Brooks’ Hitchcock pastiche High Anxiety which makes the spoof mistake of substituting references for satire.

Animal Crackers (1930) – Aficionados usually pick either Duck Soup or A Night at the Opera as their favorite Marx Brothers movie, and both have their merits. The former does away with most of their films’ deadweight (boring/unnecessary romantic leads, long musical interludes), and the latter deals with the same deadweight by more effectively integrating it into the story. I like the earlier, more anarchic, Paramount films over those made at MGM, and, of that group, Animal Crackers just edges out Duck Soup. Insane comedy works best when the crazies have strong foils, and that’s deflated somewhat when the crazies are in positions of power—like Groucho as the President of Freedonia, in Duck Soup. Better to have the boys run roughshod over a society weekend in Animal Crackers. Additionally, Animal Crackers hits a sweet spot in their career, coming after their technically clumsy first film The Coconuts, but still early enough that it’s bursting with invention and routines perfected during their time in vaudeville (like Harpo and the silverware). This is the film with the flash/flask/flisk/flush/flute/fish confusion; Groucho’s “one morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas” speech; Chico’s endless piano recital; the bridge game; the Hungadinga, Hungadinga, Hungadinga and McCormick letter; and Groucho’s two most iconic songs – Hooray For Captain Spaulding (later the theme for "You Bet Your Life"), and "Hello, I Must Be Going", which is still the best way to enter a party. As the funniest Marx film, it’s a strong contender for the funniest film period. Take a look.

Dan McCoy is the founder and co-host of the hilarious movie podcast The Flophouse. He's also the creator of the award-winning animated series 9 a.m. Meeting and the proprietor of Whither Laffs?. The man keeps busy! His comedy pieces have appeared on NPR's Morning Edition and lots of other swell places.

Underrated Movie #47: The Girl Can't Help It

Title: The Girl Can’t Help It
Year: 1956
Director: Frank Tashlin (Son of Paleface)
Writer: Frank Tashlin and Herbert Baker
Stars: Tom Ewell (The Seven Year Itch), Jayne Mansfield, Edmond O’Brien (D.O.A.)

The Story: A down-on-his-luck press agent is ordered to make a singing star out of a gangster's voluptuous girl, under pain of death. Unfortunately, she can’t sing a do-re-mi to save her life. But then the gangster discovers a wild new sound that breaks all the rules... If she can't make it as a lounge singer, maybe she can try this new-fangled "rock-n-roll". But now there's one more problem: the agent and the singer have fallen in love.

How it Came to be Underrated: Both the presence of Mansfield (the poor man’s Marilyn Monroe) and wall-to-wall rock-n-roll soundtrack made this movie look like a quickie exploitation picture, so it took people a while to realize how great it is. Only in recent years have audiences accepted that Tashlin was one of the funniest directors of the ‘50s and Mansfield was actually a sly comedienne who was in on the joke.

Why It’s Great:

1. Tashlin was the only director to successfully make the jump from directing Warner Brothers cartoons to making live-action movies, and the secret of his success was to keep the exact same style. His features have the same anarchy, expressionism, and post-modern glee of the best Daffy Duck shorts.
   
2. It’s astounding how prescient the movie was in recognizing the dawning greatness of rock-n-roll. It’s even more amazing that it's not presented as “kooky teen culture”, but simply accepted as the new essence of cool. It’s as if this movie is set in a delightful parallel world where Perry Como never existed and everybody, no matter how white or old or stodgy they were, instantly recognized the genius of Little Richard.
   
3. Mansfield has so much va-va-voom that it’s downright embarrassing to look at her, so you keep expecting her to fall flat on her face, literally and figuratively. You would assume that the only the only way she could look like that is if she were trying too hard, but instead she manages to be effortless and ego-less. Somehow, Tashlin found the real-world version of Bugs Bunny-in-a-pretty-lady-dress
4. Edmund O’Brien specialized in sad-eyed tough-guy parts, so it’s great to see him get a chance to unleash a belated explosion of comedic bluster as the gangster.
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Tashlin and Mansfield reunited a year later for an even-more-barbed satire called Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

How Available Is It?: It’s available to rent or watch instantly.

Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: The Record of Doom

Robots: The Final Chapter?

Curses! For a third day, the robots have remained in control! Why must they insist on an all-robot-all-the-time format? This I swear, tomorrow there will be an Underrated Movie!

Robot Domination Continues!

If you'r reading this, it means that I still have no internet, so I have once again ceded control to the dreaded blogger-robot! The robot, naturally, insists we continue the All-Robot format:

Will I finally defeat the dreaded twin menaces of Time Warner and the Big Move tomorrow? We shall see...