As frequently, I suspect a few more links will be added over the course of the day, from folks who haven't had a chance to post yet (myself among them). But here are the prompt entrants, and, as always, thanks to those who contribute the reviews and citations below and those of you who read these...and please let me know if I've overlooked a citation of yours or someone else's...Bill Crider: The Benny Goodman Story (trailer)
Brian Arnold: 1982 Saturday Morning Pac Preview Party; Frequency
Chuck Esola: Yor, Hunter from the Future
Cullen Gallegher: 2011 NoirCon David Goodis Memorial Video
Dan Stumpf: Hamlet at Elsinore
Ed Gorman: Carolyn Hart on Writing Out Loud; Max Allan Collins on louts
Evan Lewis: Robin Hood of the Pecos
Geoff Bradley: Trial and Retribution (fourth series)
George Kelley: Nude Nuns with Big Guns
Iba Dawson: Layer Cake
Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: The Crime of the Century
Jack Seabrook: Robert Bloch on Television: "Bad Actor" (Alfred Hitchcock Presents:)
James Reasoner: Last Hours Before Morning
Jerry House: Chinatown After Dark
John Charles: (Zane Grey's) King of the Royal Mounted
Juri Nummelin: Plunder RoadKate Laity: Thirst aka Bakjwi ("Bat") (2009) and Linear Obsessional Recordings
Mark Hand: Anarchism's Enemies on All Sides: Chris Hedges vs the Occupy Anarchists
Marty McKee: The Men from Mobius
Michael Shonk: Bold Venture (1958-59)
Patti Abbott: The Swimmer
Randy Johnson: Tony Rome
Rod Lott: Ruby (1977)
Ron Scheer: Rimfire
Scott Cupp: The Rocketeer
Sergio Angelini: Crescendo (1970)
Stacia Jones: List Inconsequential
Steve Lewis: Bedelia
Todd Mason: Shame (aka Skammen); The Devil's Eye (aka Djävulens öga) and "Maria, Me and a Monster"
It's improbable that any of the mature films of Ingmar Bergman can be considered truly overlooked (a few of his early efforts, such as Monika, are slight enough that overlooking them might well be permissible to all but the serious student of his work), but I do tend to find relatively few fans of The Virgin Spring or Persona or Hour of the Wolf or Wild Strawberries or Fanny and Alexander or The Seventh Seal or even The Magic Flute (staggering just to list them, really, at least to me, and I'm not alone) have also looked further to Bergman's compelling sf film, Shame, a devastating and only slightly surreal It Can Happen Here for a small Swedish island community, caught up in the conflagration presumably sweeping the larger society, or my favorite of Bergman's comedies (contrary to common prejudice, this is not oxymoronic), the Don Juan fantasy The Devil's Eye. One might wish to turn to the charm and wit of Don Juan's deal with the Devil, who challenges the seducer to take advantage of a virtuous young woman, but she is more sophisticated than either of her opponents has expected...after the emotional wrenching that Shame induces. Skammen forms a sort of trilogy, I gather, with Hour of the Wolf (in its turn, the best of Bergman's horror films) and Persona (the most surreal of his works), at it's the equal of those masterworks. The Devil's Eye is certainly in the same league, and both are eminently worth seeing particularly if one is looking for further work from perhaps the most fully-realized artist we've had among writer/directors in film.And now for something completely different: a pilot for a webseries, written by comedian/actor Maria Bamford and actor/comedian James Urbaniak, and starring them and such other fine hyphenates as the married couple Janie Haddad and Paul F. Tompkins, and I suspect the death of one of Bamford's pugs might've contributed as much as busy-ness and other commitments to only this episode having been produced so far...as directed by David Avallone, whom I wondered if he was any relation to Michael, till I noted that DA's YouTube handle is EdNoon, which seems to answer that question in the affirmative. Left-clicking below to get the image in full-screen is definitely recommended.
Walter Albert: The Hot Heiress
Yvette Banek: The Classic Movie Dogathon; Murder, She Said (1961)
I'll have an entry today, Todd. I'm working on it now. Toodle-loo!
ReplyDeleteI'll be back.
My entry for this week is now up and running. Thanks!
ReplyDeletehttp://meandyouandablognamedboo.blogspot.com/2012/02/tuesdays-forgotten-film-frequency.html
Hey, thanks for all the links! I apologize for not posting over here sooner.
ReplyDeleteI had someone suggest Wild Strawberries to me recently, also with the notion that it wasn't very widely seen. That's surprising to me, and rather sad because it's a fine film, one of my favorite Bergmans.
Not at all; thank you for all the interesting posts, and you're quite welcome.
ReplyDeleteMy tortured syntax was trying to get across that even fans of WILD STRAWBERRIES and Bergman's other most famous films often seem not to have seen THE DEVIL'S EYE or SHAME/SKAMMEN, which strikes me as a huge pity (THE DEVIL'S EYE hasn't even been touched by Criterion once, for example...SHAME, neither, I think). But that even the most popular works of Bergman falling into relative obscurity is pretty amazing to contemplate. The nightmare vignette at the begin of WS might alone be considered his best horror film, and the balance of the film is pretty damned brilliant.
Thanks for the kind words, Todd. Yes, Michael was my father. And in fact, the first web series I ever did was an adaptation of the last Ed Noon novel, the unpublished SINCE NOON YESTERDAY. The series bounced around a bunch of websites, and now has the indignity of living on Spike.com (after they bought Ifilm, the last legit host.) I made that back in '99, about a decade before making a web series was a good idea.
ReplyDeleteAlso... SHAME is one of my favorite Bergman films, and it's amazing (and a little, you know, shameful) how obscure it's become.
Thanks for the confirmation, and sorry it's taken me a while to find your response here...and condolences on the lack of support the Ed Noon project saw. (Oddly enough, though I was a serious PLANET OF THE APES fankid at the time BATTLE FOR was unspooling in theaters, and that the only one I got see in one, the only novelizations I picked up were your father's for the second film and Jerry Pournelle's for CONQUEST. Your father did a much better job.)
ReplyDeleteIt is remarkable the degree of neglect SHAME has faced, isn't it?
Thus memory plays me false...John Jakes novelized CONQUEST, not Jerry Pournelle. Hey, both would be on the bestseller lists by the end of the '70s.
ReplyDelete