Lady in the Lake (1947)

It's all in subjective shot, seen through the eyes of Philip Marlowe as he tries to find a missing woman. We never see him except when he looks in a mirror. I suppose it made it hard for them to edit scenes since everything's a continuous shot, the camera moving slowly. Sometimes his hand comes into the frame. The gimmick just didn't work very well. It didn't make it realistic. Robert Montgomery's performance, mostly voice-over, was one-note.

A Christmas Noir on the Criterion Channel. The story begins a couple of days before the holiday and ends Xmas morning.

I liked the Southern gigolo. But the whole thing was people looking directly into the camera as they talk to the detective. In one scene, he stares at a closed door as he talks on the phone. The bits of violence don't work very well.

Robert Mongomery, Audrey Totter, Lloyd Nolan.

An hour and forty-five minutes.

Rear Window (1954)

This was one of several movies that Hitchcock owned the rights to. He pulled them from circulation to increase their value for his daughter. They were re-released in 1984, each playing for one week at a local theater. I dragged a friend kicking and screaming to see them. I think Rear Window was the first one we saw, and he shut up after that. 

How many movies have imitated Rear Window? Does this mean it's dying from over-exposure or that it's still obscure enough that they think they can steal from it and no one will notice? The Simpsons did a spoof of it.

This is why you should watch movies alone. If you're with a group, you have to make a safe pick everyone will enjoy and you'll get tired of any objectively good movie. 

I just watched it again last night. My brother's in town and he turned it on. 

"Frank Cady's in it," I said watching the opening credits. He was Sam Drucker in Green Acres and Petticoat Junction. He was the guy sleeping on the fire escape with his wife which I would consider a stunt.

Greg Brady's lip in the UFO episode

One time a movie director went ballistic when Steve McQueen arrived on location riding a motorcycle. The slightest mishap on that thing would delay or halt production and cost them millions. 

Well, I'm sitting here in the middle of the night watching The Brady Bunch, the episode where Bobby and Peter keep seeing a UFO. 

What's that on Greg's lip, I wondered.

I googled it. It was a common question. They said he cut himself shaving in the episode, but Barry Williams had been in a minor car accident. Not everyone wore seatbelts back then. He had this little bandage on his lip.

In the early seventies, my family got a car with a buzzer that would go off until you put on your seatbelt. People would pull the seat belt out just far enough that the buzzer would stop and sit there holding it to spare themselves the indignity of actually fastening it.

The episode where Marcia gets hit in the face with a football was reportedly written because she injured her nose in a car accident.

I don't have a point here. I was going to ponder what the best course of action would be if one of the kids on the show was unable to continue.. Should they bring in another kid who looked like him like the new Darrin on Bewitched? On My Three Sons, they wrote one off the show and adopted another one. 

Murder by Contract (1958)

A really annoying existentialist hitman travels to California to murder the witness against an organized crime boss. At one point, I thought it would be one of those honor-among-murderers thing. He's outraged when he learns he's supposed to kill a woman, but it's because he thinks he should have been paid extra because women are "unpredictable".

There's no one to get behind in this thing. He only has two weeks before the trial starts, but he spends day after day just hanging around. He wants to go to the beach. The two guys there to assist him are getting panicky. The woman is under guard by police at her house. The hitman finally comes up with an elaborate plan to murder her.

He later decides the job is "jinxed" and refuses to go forward.

Directed by Irving Lerner. Starring Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine and Herschel Bernardi.

Martin Scorsese said it was the movie that had the greatest influence on him, but he also called it a "guilty pleasure":

...there’s a getting-in-shape sequence that’s very much like the one in Taxi Driver. The spirit of Murder By Contract has a lot to do with Taxi Driver. Lerner was an artist who knew how to do things in shorthand, like Bresson and Godard. The film puts us all to shame with its economy of style, especially in the barber-shop murder at the beginning. Vince Edwards gives a marvelous performance as the killer who couldn’t murder a woman....

Reportedly filmed in seven days. 

81 minutes. Free on Tubi.

Ryan O'Neal dead at 82

Ryan O'Neal has died at 82.

The things that stand out to me was the time he punched his teenage son, Griffin, in the face knocking his teeth out because he had developed a drug problem. This was reported in the press at the time but nothing happened to him. O'Neal first forced Griffin to snort cocaine when he was eleven. He was later arrested for trying to shoot him. And there was the time he hit on his daughter, Tatum, at Farrah Fawcett's funeral.

A horrible person who should have died 60 years ago.

Norman Lear, RIP

Norman Lear died December 5th at age 101. Created shows like All in the Family and several spin-offs and spin-offs of spin-offs such as Maude, The Jeffersons and Good Times. I didn't know it until years later, but Diff'rent Strokes and Facts of Life were his work, too. His shows had their own extended universes.

Even as a ten-year-old, I didn't understand why a supposedly radical or at least liberal show like All in the Family was so anti-working class. The audience would laugh whenever Archie mentioned that he was in World War Two and I would strain to see the joke. Why was a radical like Meathead so dismissive of the war against fascism? Now I find it strange that four adults live together and the only one with a job was the bad guy.

Here are the words of Richard Nixon himself on All in the Family:

“Archie is sitting here with his hippie son-in-law, married to the screwball daughter. The son-in-law apparently goes both ways. This guy enters. He’s obviously queer, wears an ascot, but not offensively so. Very clever. Uses nice language. Shows pictures of his trip and all the rest. And so then Arch goes down to the bar. Sees his best friend, who for two years used to play professional football as a linebacker…God, he’s handsome virile, strong, this and that. And then the fairy comes into the bar…”

I know the episode he was talking about. I guess it's nice that Nixon watched. I had Republican grandparents who liked the show, not because they were rooting for Archie but they were amused by Meathead's frustration with him.

I wish they'd show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman again somewhere. 

Street Girls (1975)

Couldn't find a good picture from movie, but here's where
one scene was filmed, although it was snowing
in the movie.

Maybe that's what the place was like in the early '70's.

I came across a rather seedy movie on Tubi, released in 1975, called Street Girls. A father comes to Eugene, Oregon, looking for his daughter who had gone away to college. He didn't know that she had become a stripper and a prostitute.

The father goes to a strip club and loves it. I thought the scene would end with him realizing that the girl he was leering at was his daughter, but no such luck.

I didn't know we had strippers and prostitutes here back then, but I was 12 or 13. How would I have known.

The movie was made during the urban renewal craze, so there were buildings that had been torn down and not yet replaced. They mentioned the Smeede Hotel which was an office building at that point, one of the few old buildings they didn't bulldoze. They really wrecked downtown. 

Made three years before Animal House which made the town look so much better.

The script was co-written by Barry Levinson who was assistant director. It wasn't a regional film. Made for $35 thousand, about $200 thousand today.

A lot of nudity, prostitution, drug use and human trafficking. 

Teen-age Strangler (West Virginia, 1964)

"What kind of nut would do something like this?" says an ambulance driver taking away one of the victims.

A triumph of regional cinema. It was shown theatrically into the 1970's. 

A strangler is murdering high school girls in Huntington, West Virginia, and misunderstood Jimmy (Bill Bloom) is the prime suspect. Teenagers aren't entirely cooperative with police because they're trying to conceal their drag racing and forbidden love.

Jimmy's younger brother Mikey (John Humphries) steals the show. It was his first time acting and only movie. He was teary and guilt-stricken because his big brother took the blame for his stealing a bicycle which set Jimmy on his downward spiral. Jimmy tells him to stop his sniffling and a cop tells him to calm down at one point. I thought they should mother him.

61 minutes. Tubi has it in both its original form and the MST3k version.