Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: new links to the reviews, interviews and more

Black Rainbow

The selections (reviews, interviews and citations at the links below) of undeservedly (and a few deservedly) under-appreciated audio/visual experiences...As always, thanks to all the contributors and you readers...

Forbidden Games

Allan Fish: Jeux interdits (aka Forbidden Games); Mouchette

Anne Billson: favorite horror films (and part two)

Anonymous: The Virgin Suicides

Bill Crider: Young Sherlock Holmes [trailer]

B.V. Lawson: Media Murder

BNoirDetour: Pickup on South Street

Colin: Day of the Outlaw

Comedy Film Nerds: LA PodFest; Everest; Pawn Sacrifice; Shawn Merek on LA PodFest, Black Mass, EarBuds, etc.

Cynthia Fuchs: 99 Homes; Everest

Dan Stumpf: Conflict

David Cramner: Longmire (Season 4)

David Vineyard: Blake and Mortimer

Dorian Bartilucci: Agnes Moorehead

Doug Loves Movies: with Jon Hamm, Kumail Nanjani, and Max Landis

Elgin Bleecker: Call Northside 777

Elizabeth Foxwell: Fast and Loose

Evan Lewis: "The Three Troubledoers"

Gary Deane: The Glass Alibi; The Big Bluff

George Kelley: House of Cards (US season three)

Gilligan Newton-John: Street Trash

Iba Dawson: They Made Me a Fugitive

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Duelling serials: Superman v. Atom Man

Jackie Kashian: Easy A; Matthew Diffee (cartoonist, juggler, musician)

Jacqueline T. Lynch: Joan Crawford

James Reasoner: Sleepers West

Janet Varney: Joy Osmanski

Jerry House: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "Appointment at Eleven"

John Grant: A Killer Walks; It Couldn't Have Happened (But It Did)

Jon Warner: Kes

Jonathan Lewis: San Quentin

Judy Geater: William Wellman

Juri Nummelin: Black Rainbow

Karen Hannsberry: 1947 in film

Kate Laity: A Woman's Secret; "The Underpass"

Kelly Robinson: 31 Days of Silent Horror

Ken Levine: Approaches to comedy; Life in Pieces, for example; obscure jokes in sitcoms

Kliph Nesteroff: The Hollywood Palace: Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Edie Adams, Buddy Rich (1969)

Kristina Dijan: Elevator to the Gallows; The Double Man; Green for Danger; Golden Salamander; The Murder of Dr. Harrigan

Laura G.: Confession (1937 film); The Cherokee Strip; Dr. Gillespie's Criminal Case; Wyoming Mail; Moonlight on the Prairie; Walter Pidgeon 

Lee Price: The Fallen Idol

Lindsey: Carve Her Name with Pride; Robert Mitchum 

Lucy Brown: Dancing on the Edge

Marilyn Ferdinand: Cria Cuervos

Marty McKee: The Interns: "An Afternoon in the Fall"; Beyond the Reach; The Expendables III

Mystery Dave: Dear White People

Patricia Nolan-Hall: Down to the Sea in Ships

Patrick Murtha: The Lynch Pin

Patti Abbott: DeliMan; Mistress America

Pop My Culture: Matt Kirshen

Raquel Stecher: A Face in the Crowd

Rick: Quartet (1948 film); Hugh Fraser

Rod Lott: Turkey Shoot; The Editor; The Spirit (1987 film); Into the Grizzly Maze

Ruth: Love from a Stranger

Scott Cupp: The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy

Sergio Angelini: Ed McBain's 87th Precinct: Lightning

Sex Nerd Sandra: at LA PodFest with Tristan Taormino (sexually explicit discussion)

Stacia Jones: Jewel Robbery; Gloria (1980 film)

Stephen Bowie: TV and the legacy of the Red Channels blacklists

Steve Lewis: The Flash: "Pilot" (2014); The Grid; The Remarkable Andrew

Todd Mason: spoken word/audio drama record labels: Prestige Lively Arts; Alternate World Recordings and Analog Records

Victoria Loomes: Mon Oncle

Vienna: Hunt the Man Down

Yvette Banek: Homecoming

Alternate World Recordings and Analog Records: Spoken-Word and Audio Drama devoted to fantastic fiction

Alternate World Recordings first issued an LP, by actor and professional reader Ugo Toppo, of Robert Howard's work as From the Hells Beneath the Hells in 1975,  which had sold out by the point in 1977  when the ad below was put together, offering the balance of the recordings they would release. Analog Records was a short-lived flier taken by the staff of the magazine to see if there was much of a market that AWR and the more established spoken-word labels (Caedmon, Spoken Arts, et al.) was perhaps not saturating...the dramatized Nightfall (with a brief conversation between Asimov and Analog editor Ben Bova appended) was their only release, though if there had been a second it was apparently set to feature Gordon Dickson's Dorsai stories and at least one or two of the songs he had written to go along with them. AWR's Shelley Levinson, in the '70s married as Shelley Torgeson, went on to co-found the Harlan Ellison Recording Collection among other work; her short film "Violet" won an Oscar in 1982.

Theodore Sturgeon also recorded excerpts from More Than Human for Caedmon, and the Library of America has some on-line here.

From UnEarth: The Magazine of Science Fiction Discoveries, Winter 1978; courtesy Jesse Willis at SFFaudio.

 Includes "When It Changed", "The Great Happiness Contest", "Gleepsite" & "Man, One Assumes, Is The Proper Study Of Mankind". 

Featuring the painting Ed Emshwiller did for the Sturgeon issue of F&SF

As reissued by the HERC (note logo at bottom right)

Courtesy Evan Lewis, who has the sound files up at his blog.

Further images of Nightfall:

Further images of Frankenstein Unbound:

Further images of Blood!

Prestige Lively Arts, a mostly spoken-word sub-label of the jazz, blues and folk recording company...: Saturday Music and Spoken Word Club on Sunday

Prestige Records was first and foremost a jazz label, one of the many interesting small jazz labels of the 1950s, but one which also branched out over the course of that decade and the next, to include considerable blues, folk and what would now be classed as world music...and a small line of what eventually became a spoken-word sub-label, though the first release, in 1961, was an attempt at a pop album, one by Billy Dee Williams...Prestige was bought up by Fantasy Records as one of its early major purchases in the 1970s, and now as a result belongs to Fantasy's inheritor, Concord Jazz. (The links below are to online archives of the albums' content, or at least samples.) List below courtesy of the Prestige Records Discography Project.

I'm just old enough to remember her best from the sitcom Maude...

Prestige Lively Arts 30000 series (12 inch LP)

LA 30001   Billy Dee Williams: Let's Misbehave

1. A Taste of Honey
2. Let's Misbehave
3. Don't Cry
4. Life's a Holliday
5. I Like It Here
6. Warm Tonight
7. Nothin' for Nothin'
8. I Wonder What Became of Me
9. House of Flowers
10. Red Sun Blues

LA 30002   A Taste Of Hermione Baddeley

Hermione Baddeley (reading) 1961

	I Changed My Sex A Week Ago Today
	Winter In Torquay
	Poor Little Cabaret Star
	Missing The Bus
	Je Suis
	Lonely Little Lotus
	Old Girls
	You
	Reprieve

LA 30003   Roddy McDowall Reads The Horror Stories Of H.P. Lovecraft

"The Outsider"
"The Hound"

Bradbury's own 22 copies of the Meredith reading LP.

LA 30004   Burgess Meredith Reads Ray Bradbury

Marionettes, inc 
There will come soft rains 

LA 30005   Larry Storch Reads Philip Roth's Epstein

from Goodbye, Columbus

LA 30006   James Mason Reads The Imp Of The Perverse And Other Stories By Edgar Allen [sic] Poe

The sleeve proofreading at Prestige was perhaps not all it should've been...

LA 30007   James Mason Reads Herman Melville's Bartleby, The Scrivener

LA 30008   Morris Carnovsky Reads Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground

LA 30009   Norman Mailer Reads Norman Mailer

September's Underappreciated Music: the 5th Anniversary links

Fifth Anniversary List...Five Years of UnderAprpreciated Music...congratulations, and thanks, everyone!

The monthly assembly of undervalued and often nearly "lost" music, or simply music the blogger in question wants to remind you reader/listeners of...this week, even more jazz than usual (including the jazz artists who created rap, Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets), and a Billy Joel undercurrent...
Patti Abbott: "Speak Low"

Brian Arnold: "Autumn Leaves"

Miriam Makeba: "Chove Chuva"


Jayme Lynn Blaschke: Friday Night Videos

Paul Brazill: A Song for Saturday

Jim C.: Horace Silver Quintet with J. J. Johnson: The Cape Verdean Blues; Monty Waters: The Black Cat

Sean Coleman: Joseph Bridge: "Brenda"; Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Ragged Glory; Billy Joel: Turnstiles

The Augusta Bluegrass Women: "Road to Columbus"


Bill Crider: Song of the Day; Forgotten Hits: Local Charts

Jeff Gemmill: Top 5s; Mary Black in concert, 1994

Jerry House: Dave Mallett; Daily Music+; Hymn Time

George Kelley: Erroll Garner: The Complete Concert by the Sea

Kate Laity: Marty Robbins: "Some Memories Just Won't Die"

Steve Lewis (and one by Michael Shonk): Music I'm Listening To

Light in Babylon: "Hinech Yafa" 


Todd Mason: some jazz singers and Buffy Sainte-Marie and Five Years Ago: Rainy Day and The Bunch

Patrick Murtha: Hustlers Convention

Lawrence Person: Shoegazer Sunday

Charlie Ricci: Billy Joel: "Hey Girl"; Gil Scott-Heron: "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"

Michael Shonk: Morphine: "You Look Like Rain"

Trunkworthy (courtesy Bill Crider): The Monkees 

Danielle Nicole Band: "Grits Ain't Groceries"


Divna Ljubojevic and small choir in concert:

FFB: PUNAHOU BLUES by Kirby Wright (Lemon Shark Press 2005)...another thought.

Despite the fact that I'm about as close to the ideal audience for this novel as it could have, since I, like Wright, attended Punahou Academy in Honolulu in the 1970s (though I began sophomore year there in 1979, rather than attending as he did in the early '70s), and even came to Hawaii with my family from the Boston suburbs of New Hampshire (the mother of the protagonist has strong family ties back in her hometown, the Hub), I was disappointed. It's not ill-written so much as uninspired; unusually large chunks of the novel are devoted to recounting sports-related adventures of the young Jeff, whom we follow from late elementary school at the more overtly Christian Star of the Sea to his matriculation at Punahou for 7th Grade and passage through to high-school graduation, but Wright won't make anyone forget about William Campbell Gault nor Michael Shaara in these passages; they do demonstrate more engagement than much of the the rest of the book does, particularly the oddly muddled portrait of Jeff's borderline-abusive father, who is initially described as hapa-haole (literally "half-stranger" but in most contexts in the Islands meaning half-pale Caucasian, often half Asian or more often originally half-Hawaiian) and yet later his father is apparently only 1/8th Hawaiian; his ancestry is only a small part of what's out of focus about him, and the protagonist's mother also seems rather schematic, even more than either might actually be to a not terribly bright boy like Jeff. Wright drops a Whole Lot of Hawaiian words into his dialog, but relatively little of the common creole of Hawaiian Pidgin, so while people are always referring (believably) to makai (in the direction of the ocean) and mauka (in the direction of the mountains in the center of Oahu) and less common borrowed words, only some are likely to drop in much more than "da kine" (the Hawaiian Pidgin equivalent of "whatsits" or "you know, that thing"--from  "the [or that] kind of thing"--often used to emphasize the next adjective or noun, as in "da kine moke"--where "moke" or "moak" are somewhat oddly preserved from early 20th Century rather common US slang for "tough guy"; "da kine moke" = "really tough guy"--Brits and Aussies use or have used the term for donkeys and beat-down horses, respectively, apparently), and hardly anyone says "brah" (as in "bruddah" or brother/hey, you) or the odd bit such as "garans ballbearins" ("I swear" or "It's a lock/sure thing" after "guaranteed ball-bearings" originally). But, then, maybe Wright knew a lot of people who never said too much in Pidgin, and he does provide a useful glossary for those Hawaiian words that might not be utterly clear in context (I haven't read nor heard "akamai"--smart--for a long while). Weirder by me, and I'll definitely grant this might be more in tune with the times it's set in, since I wasn't there in those years, but was there very soon after (I recognize both at least two names of teachers Wright thanks in acknowledgements and the portraits of at least two faculty as being based on unfortunate people I remember as well), is that Jeff is continually obsessed only with blonde girls in his grades, till he finally discovers in his repressed, rather half-assed way that he can as well be attracted to a Korean-American girl by the last weeks of his last semester. Entirely too much of the book feels like an attempt at post-minimalist resetting of Dobie Gillis in a Honolulu context, and as such, it's rather unengaging...but readable. The first two chapters were first published in Chaminade Literary Review, the little magazine of the Catholic university on Oahu, and that doesn't surprise me...it's a reasonably good portrait, if spartan, of Oahu and bits of Molokai in its period...but it's not what it could be, and that's a pity.

And while the last day of the school year might well've been "Kill A Haole Day" in the early '70s, it was "Kill Haole Day" in the latter '70s and early '80s--articles the first things to be streamlined. Which was sad, but as a relatively big guy at Punahou, not something I had to worry too much about. (Pale Caucs particularly in the public schools likely to get roughed up a bit, not so much killed, by da kine mokes.) I was mostly more about laughing at seniors who tried to "discipline" me for eating in the Senior Dining Room or sitting on the Senior Bench with friends...which I barely recall doing as an actual senior. The Kangaroo Court nearly everyone on campus thought was just the greatest fun wasn't quite The Chocolate War-level insane, but rather too far along that spectrum for my taste. How better to get one ready for Skull and Bones, though?

For mostly more well-loved books this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links to the reviews, interviews, etc.

Get Carter

The selections (reviews, interviews and citations at the links below) of undeservedly (and a few deservedly) under-appreciated audio/visual experiences...As always, thanks to all the contributors and you readers...two approaches to How to Marry a Millionaire, the film, this week...through Bacall and Monroe...

Aaron West: Zero for Conduct

Allan Fish: Los olvidados (aka The Young and the Damned)

Anne Billson: Scandinavian horror film

Anonymous: Angel Face; Nobody's Fool; Three Days of the Condor

Bill Crider: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film) [trailer]

B.V. Lawson: Media Murder

BNoirDetour: Shack Out on 101

Sicario

Colin: Dakota Incident

Comedy Film Nerds: Erin Foley

Cynthia Fuchs: Sicario; Black Mass

Dan Stumpf: Chamber of Horrors (1966 film)

The Dana Gould Hour: "Paging Dr. Cyclops"

David Cramner: Longmire (Season 4)

Help!

David Vineyard: Kraft Suspense Theater: "The Deep End" (based on The Drowner by John D. MacDonald)

Dorian Bartilucci: A Hard Day's Night; Help!

Doug Loves Movies: Sarah Silverman, Leonard Maltin, Owen Benjamin, Esther Povitsky

Elgin Bleecker: The Bastard (aka The Cats; 1968 film)

Elizabeth Foxwell: Tales of Tomorrow: "Age of Peril" (based on "Crisis 1999" by Fredric Brown)

Evan Lewis: Fallen Angels: "Fly Paper" (based on Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op story)

Cat People

Gary Deane: Slander

George Kelley: four Marilyn Monroe films

Gilligan Newton-John: School Spirit; The Invisible Maniac

How Did This Get Made?: Maximum Overdrive

Iba Dawson: Halloween recommendations

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Half-Nelson

Jack Seabrook: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "The Derelicts"

Jackie Kashian: Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work; Dana Gould; David Koechner
Courtesy Jackie Kashian:


Jacqueline T. Lynch: Holiday Affair

James Clark: Miami Vice (the film)

James Reasoner: Chino; Yuma 

Janet Varney: Mary Birdsong

Jerry House: Invasion of the Saucermen

John Grant: The Impossible Murder; Highly Dangerous; The Heart of Justice; "Monster"
Monster - Jennifer Kent from Jennifer Kent on Vimeo.

Jonathan Lewis: Drums Across the River; 40 Guns to Apache Pass

Judy Geater: Thunder Birds

Karen Hannsberry: Lilly Turner

Kelly Robinson: The Great Gatsby (1926 film)

Ken Levine: Emmys; Emmys some more; Emmys past

Kliph Nesteroff: Day at Night: "Archie Moore"

Curse of the Undedad

Kristina Dijan: The Phantom of Crestwood; City that Never Sleeps; The Hidden Hand; Curse of the Undead; The Cobweb; Yellow Sky; Get Carter (1971)

Laura G: I've Always Loved You; Jubilee Trail; Pollyanna (1960); The White Angel

Lindsey: Turner Classic Movies this week; Give a Girl a Break; The Talk of the Town (film); The Thin Man and its sequels

Lucy Brown: Heavens Above!

Marty McKee: 10 to Midnight; Vigilante Force; Vendetta

Mystery Dave: Frankie and Alice

Patricia Nolan-Hall: The Sunshine Boys; The Red Pony; The Shootist

Patrick Murtha: Hustlers Convention

De Tweeling

Patti Abbott: Twin Sisters (aka De Tweeling)

Pop My Culture: Paul Brittain

Raquel Stecher: Splendor in the Grass

Rick: The Bold Ones: The Protectors; Adam Adamant Lives!; The Baron

Road Stories: Cathy Ladman; Carrie Snow

How to Marry a Millionaire

Rod Lott: Angst; Lake Placid vs. Anaconda

Ruth: How to Marry a Millionaire (film); Flying Deuces

Sam Juliano: Cinema Paradiso

Scott A. Cupp: The Invisible Woman (1940)

Sergio Angelini: Ed McBain's 57th Precinct: Ice

Stacia Jones: June Bride

Stephen Bowie: Lee Harvey Oswald v. television

Stephen Mullen: Ivan's Children

Touch of Evil

Stephen Romano: 10 films of Obsession, Deception and Survival

Steve Lewis: Doctor Who: "The Monster of Peladon"

Victoria Loomes: To Have and Have Not

Vienna: Abilene Town

Yvette Banek: Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York 

Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York

The Invisible Woman