My only power

Edgar Ulmer. I thought nudists were more health conscious. Why is he smoking?

I was watching a movie on a public domain Roku channel. It was an old 1930's B movie I had never seen before. It was fifty-five minutes or an hour long, and it had a scene where people pull up and go into a fancy party at a mansion with two rows of butlers you have to pass through to get inside.

"Is this Edgar Ulmer?" I thought. I backed it up. It was directed by Edgar Ulmer. "I can recognize the work of Edgar Ulmer!" I thought. 

I'm like Clint Eastwood in The Good the Bad and the Ugly. He hears some shooting and says, "Every gun plays its own tune." He could tell it was Eli Wallach murdering someone just from the sound of the gunshots.

You might recall that there the time I was watching The Rifleman and there was a shot though the spokes of a wagon wheel and I thought, "Hey! Did Joseph Lewis direct this?" And I was right! Joseph Lewis was known in the '30's as Wagon Wheel Joe because he kept doing that in his B movies. Filming through a wagon wheel wasn't THAT interesting and it made it difficult to edit.

You know what else I'm like? I'm like The Specter. I told a friend about this old comic book reprinted in Jules Pfeiffer's book The Great Comic Book Heroes. The Specter at one point is able to see through a person's skull and see the patterns in his brain and read his memories.

"What a stupid super power!" my friend said.

"Well, he could do other things," I said.

The ability to guess who directed a 1930's B movie if it was directed by Edgar Ulmer or Joseph Lewis is pretty useless. You can just look at the credits and see who directed, and what good does it do you?

On the other hand, I was talking to a guy who worked at Wendy's. I told him I liked it better when they used Nalley's mustard and they had changed to French's, and he was touched. He didn't think anyone cared about the food he lovingly prepared.

What about William Beaudine? Could I spot William Beaudine's work if I had to? I usually like William Beaudine's B movie directing better than Lewis's or Ulmer's, but Beaudine got no respect. Beaudine's movies tend to have racist jokes in them, though, the bastard.