Edgar Ulmer's "The Amazing Transparent Man", 1960

I didn't have much time. Had to get up and go to work. So I watched this. I was surprised that as late as 1960, there were still Hollywood "B" movies that were less than an hour long.

A prison escapee is forced to submit to a scientist's invisibility experiments. The convict's only reaction to this scientific marvel is to use it to commit more crimes.

Bank employees watch impassively when his invisibility wears off during a robbery. Realistically, how else should they react?

The Violent Men, 1955

Edward G. Robinson is a big rancher on crutches driving smaller ranchers off their land. His wife, Barbara Stanwyck, is sleeping with his brother, Brian Keith. Now they're up against Glenn Ford, a Civil War veteran turned pacifist who doesn't want to fight but abruptly starts using his Civil War skills to defend his ranch.

It was pretty violent, I guess, but Glenn Ford and Edward G. Robinson end up being friends even after Ford takes him and his sulking teenage daughter hostage.

Bob Woodward vs Xi Jinping

 From Counterpunch.org:

+So Bob Woodward has known since March that Trump understood the danger COVID posed to the public health, but was lying about it publicly in order to keep the Dow and his poll numbers from falling.

+ What’s Woodward’s share of the body count?

+ On the other hand, the Associated Press obtained government documents in April showing that leaders in Beijing knew the potential scale of the COVID threat by January 14th, but Xi waited six DAYS before warning the public.

Bob Fosse's "Lenny", 1974

Lenny Bruce's delivery must have been really something because nothing he said was remotely funny.

I don't remember my reaction when I saw this movie 45 years ago. I took it as a historical drama even though Bruce died only eight years earlier. At least I went through my teen years hip to Lenny Bruce which came up two or three times over the years. It didn't help me in any way.

Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce.

As late as 1974, a movie in black & white didn't seem like that much of a novelty.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Hand of Death, 1962

I have nothing to tell you. Watching an John Agar movie. He plays a scientist who creates a serum that turns him into a murderous monster. With Joe Besser not long after he left The Three Stooges and Butch Patrick who went on to play Eddie Munster.

Someone noted that, had Night of the Living Dead been made just a year or two earlier, it would have started with a mad scientist or a Voodoo priest doing something to cause the Living Dead to walk around eating people.

It was a more innocent time. And maybe things were better then.

Look at Roger Ebert's initial review condemning of Night of the Living Dead. Back then, horror movies were considered children's films. Ebert saw it in a theater full of children and was appalled, like people who later attacked Beavis & Butt-head because they assumed all cartoons were intended for children.

Once Night of the Living Dead killed horror as a children's genre, there was nothing for kids. There were a few movies produced in Utah, like Seven Alone or The Wilderness Family, but we really had nothing. One time, my uncle took all the kids to a movie. We went to Patton.

This gave Steven Spielberg and George Lucas the opening they needed. Spielberg's friends eventually told him to stop making children's movies so he set about infantalizing the grown-ups. That brought us to the state we're in today.

Attack of the Crab Monsters (Roger Corman, 1957)

Russell Johnson about throw a grenade.

When I was about fourteen, I came across this movie on TV in the middle of the night and loved it. I still like it, but I'm not sure why. I read somewhere that it was one of Roger Corman's more successful movies in its day. He thought it was because he only left in the science fiction elements.

This was the most successful of all the early low budget horror movies. I think its success had something to do with the wildness of the title which, even I admit, is pretty off-the-wall. However, I do think a lot of its popularity had to do with the construction of the plotline. I've always believed that, in horror and science fiction films, too much time is usually spent explaining the characters in depth and developing various subplots. Genre audiences really come to these movies for their science fiction elements or their shock value. Of course they want to understand the characters and want to empathize with them all in order to share the emotions present. But they don't wish to do that at the expense of the other aspects of the picture. I talked to Chuck Griffith about this. Chuck and I worked out a general storyline before he went to work on the script. I told him, 'I don't want any scene in this picture that doesn't either end with a shock or the suspicion that a shocking event is about to take place.' And that's how the finished script read. You always had the feeling when watching the movie that something, anything was about to happen. I think this construction, plus the fact that the creature was big and ugly, won audiences.

That quote came from Wikipedia. But there's a quote in the same article from Charles Griffith saying that Corman would cut out character development anyway.

Researchers and a few sailors are on a remote island. For some reason, they have regular furnished house to stay in. Corman was into Freudian symbolism. A big hole and a radio tower are the main features on the island.

The crab monsters eat people and take over their minds. In some scenes the people hang around and talk to their dead friends who speak to them in voice over while the crabs systematically destroy and sink the island.

The giant crab monsters seem to roll around on wheels. Their legs don't really move.

I didn't realize it was only an hour long.

With Russell Johnson.

 I saw it Pub-D-Hub, a public domain streaming video channel, so I would imagine it's available elsewhere.

Empire of Passion (Japan, 1978)

Set in a Japanese village, 1895.

A rickshaw puller's daughter tells him she wants to go to school. All she wants is a good life.

"Your mother said that when she was young. She hasn't had a good life at all." He says this without sympathy or sadness and seems to think this is reason for his daughter not to have good life, either.

The guy's wife starts sleeping with a much younger man who is terrible to her. It doesn't do her any good, but he forces her to help murder her husband and dump him down a well. She tells the neighbors he's working in Tokyo. He never writes because he's illiterate.

Then his ghost starts to appear to her, picking on her and not the man who played a somewhat larger role in his death.

I had seen this movie when I was high school but didn't remember it well. The husband was pitiful but not sympathetic, the boyfriend, if you can call him that, was horrible.

There's stuff about 1890's Japan. The neighbors are sure she did something but the local constable explains that in the New Japan, he needs evidence. I don't remember what information he required before he began torturing confessions out of them.

Available on the Criterion channel.