Black Gate

You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

I decided to kick off this year’s A (Black) Gat in the Hand run with a look at a stellar issue of Black Mask. And the March 1, 1932 one was a knockout. Note the catch phrase on the cover was “Detective, Western, Stories of Action.” Just two issues prior, in January, the cover illustration featured a cowboy wielding a pair of six shooters. Even with non-Western stories from Erle Stanley Gardner, Raoul Whitfield, and Stewart Stirling. The shift towards hardboiled had been made, but the Mask was still appealing to other pulp genres. Competitor Dime Detective had only started up the month before.

But man, the March issue delivered hardboiled like a tommy gun, backed up with a pineapple through the window. No, not the kind of pineapple they use in Psych (great show!). I will argue that it was one of the best Black Masks ever. Considering that there is no Hammett story, it’s a bold claim.

…

Read More Read More

One-Armed Swordsman (Hong King, 1967)

Though visionary director King Hu established the elements of the modern wuxia, or Chinese historical swordplay film, it was fellow Hong Kong director Chang Cheh who really took the ball and ran with it. He followed hard on Hu’s Come Drink with Me and Dragon Inn with his own wuxia action movies and quickly became one of Asia’s top-grossing directors, with a style that drew on Hu but also Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, America’s Sam Peckinpah, and Italy’s Sergio Leone. After about a dozen swordplay films, he turned to unarmed martial arts, helping to define the burgeoning kung fu film genre. All told, he made over ninety films for Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers studio and was a major influence on later directors such as John Woo, Robert Rodriguez, and Zhang Yimou. Let’s take a look at his first three wuxia films, each of which builds on the stylistic advances of the previous.

One-Armed Swordsman

Rating: ****
Origin: Hong Kong, 1967
Director: Chang Cheh
Source: 88 Films Blu-ray

King Hu reinvented the modern wuxia film in 1966 with Come Drink with Me, then left the Shaw Brothers film factory for Taiwan. But the Shaw Brothers had another top-notch action director in Chang Cheh who began his own series of historical martial arts movies with One-Armed Swordsman, which broke new ground with its dynamic and colorful swordplay and was an even bigger hit in Asia than Come Drink with Me.

…

Read More Read More

The Fall of the Roman Empire (USA, 1964)

Big-studio Hollywood historical epics had a good run, arguably starting with the films of Cecil B. DeMille in the Twenties, flourishing throughout the Fifties and peaking around 1960 with grand features like Ben-Hur (1959) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). But in the early Sixties the theater-going public seems to have lost their taste for big epics, right about the time those same epics began letting them down, either becoming unbearably ridiculous in their depictions of other cultures or bogged down in turgid self-importance. Actors like Charlton Heston, who’d made a career out of swaggering through ancient and medieval studio sets with a sword on his hip, gave historical epics one last go and then shrugged and reinvented themselves as Seventies action stars.

The Fall of the Roman Empire

Rating: **
Origin: USA, 1964
Director: Anthony Mann
Source: Genius Products DVD

A grand historical epic, from the producer and director who’d made El Cid (1961), starring Sophia Loren, Christopher Plummer, Alec Guinness, and James Mason, with cinematography by the great Robert Krasker and action scenes directed by Yakima Canutt, in the same late Roman setting as Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000). What could go wrong?

…

Read More Read More

Today I’m trying to fit in with the cool kids. I usually have to sit by myself at the Mystery table. But this week, I pull my booster seat up to the Horror table. I love a good homage movie that is also funny. Something that’s more pastiche, than lowbrow parody. The best example I can think of is Galaxy Quest. It pokes fun at the science fiction mores and tropes, largely established by the original Star Trek television series. And it does it by delving deeply into the cult fandom which that show inspired. It has a tremendous cast and is lovingly hilarious. It’s clever funny; The British Office. Not dumb funny; Dumb and Dumber (which I find utterly stupid and unwatchable).

In the mystery field, it’s Without a Clue, which turns the Holmes story on its head. Ben Kingsley is the genius, crime-solving Doctor Watson, who hires the unemployed, drunkard actor, Reginald Kincaid, to play Holmes for public consumption. Watson feeds Holmes clues, solutions, lines, the works; and Michael Caine is utterly fantastic as the front man, the great Sherlock Holmes. It’s brilliant and hilarious. One of my five favorite Holmes movies.

Some would point to Army of Darkness as this type of movie in the horror field. It’s Bruce Campbell’s Evil Dead Light. I get it (and The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. is my all time second-favorite TV show). For me, Tucker and Dale vs. EVIL is right there with Galaxy Quest, and Without a Clue.

This movie has all the pieces; a road  encounter with hillbillies; college kids in the woods; chainsaws and wood chippers; skinny-dipping coeds; a massacre at the same place twenty years before; bodies piling up one at a time: it’s all there. But it’s all turned upside down!

…

Read More Read More