Weekly Screening Round-up: 1/18-30

This was a rather schizophrenic week for me, split between classic Westerns and classic Cukor. Highlights: I'm no John Wayne fan. And the more stylized he gets, the less I like him. (Once he's in color, he reminds me of...

#BNoirDetour Film for 1/31: Fritz Lang’s Manhunt

Fritz Lang is known as one of the greatest directors of film noir, one of its founding forces in Hollywood cinema. His career in Weimar cinema and talent for German Expressionism brought for such classics as Metropolis (1931) and M (1931) -- the latter...

#BNoirDetour Promo Video

Using my fledgling Windows Movie Maker skills, I am thrilled to say I created a little video Welcome mat for the #BNoirDetour live tweet I host on Sunday.s It's less than three minutes long, and I can already see ways...

Weekly Screening Round-up: 1/16-1/22

This week I enjoyed a trio of fun films: Our Betters (1933): I've long wanted to see this pre-Code George Cukor comedy about the ills of the upper-class, and at last found it on YouTube! The film is probably most...

#BNoirDetour Film for 1/24: Gaslight (1940)

There is a subgenre of noir that brings the characteristic visual style and the narrative of distrust to a different age. British settings of the Edwardian era proved particularly popular, as seen in such films as The Lodger (Hitchcock, 1927) and Hangover Square (John...

Cukor, Hepburn, and “The Keeper of the Flame”: Symbiotic Collaborations Blogathon

Prolific gay Hollywood director George Cukor was labeled a “woman’s director” early in his career. The term was partly a homophobic slur, but it also points to his success with actresses, particularly strong-willed or “difficult” stars, from Joan Crawford to...

Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon: Stanwyck & Noir

As a film noir blogger, there could be no question about my contributing to the "Remembering Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon" hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood. Stanwyck is a highlight of the original Hollywood noir cycle, starring in...

Femme Fatale Hunt: A Day with Gail Patrick

While perusing films that might be appropriate for #BNoirDetour, I stumbled across Wives Under Suspicion, directed by James Whale. I’d never heard of it, but the title seemed pretty noir. Also, I’ve seen very few of Whale’s productions and I...

Co-hosting a #BNoirDetour double feature for 1/17: THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK and THE SCAR

Here is MovieMovieBlogBlog’s announcement of the #BNoirDetour double feature for Sunday:

The lovely Salome at BNoirDetourhas once again pulled a “Mike Douglas” and is generously allowing me to co-host her Sunday-night Live Tweet as a double feature. So we’re showing a couple of films-noir that have to do with the fracturing of famous faces.

First at 9:00 p.m. EST, Salome brings us The Face Behind the Mask (1941), starring Peter Lorre and Evelyn Keyes. Salome will probably write about this movie on her own blog, so I don’t want to give too much away myself. Suffice to say, Peter Lorre really gets burned in this movie, in more ways than one.

Then at 10:20 p.m. EST, I rudely push Salome aside so that I can present The Scar (1948). It stars Paul Henreid as a gangster on the run who hightails it to a small town, where he discovers that he bears a striking resemblance to the town’s psychoanalyst…

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