Monday, June 20, 2011

Introducing 'Pretty Little Maids, All in a Row'

A look at the "popular post" list shows both what people visiting are Googling for, but also what they click through to via the "You might also like feature at the bottom of each entry on the blog.

To serve those of you looking for pictures of and posts about actresses and pretty women in general, I have created an archive blog that's fed by the five most-frequently updated Cinema Steve blogs. Click here to visit Pretty Little Maids, All in a Row.

If you already follow several of my blogs, there won't be a whole lot at Maids you won't already have seen or read, although I will be swapping out many of the stills from the original posts to more closely match the theme of the archive. That will be a process way down the list of priorities.

However, if you do check it out, I hope you enjoy it as much as I know Groucho would.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Apocalypse Corman!
(or 'Three actors, three days, and three bucks')

Last Woman on Earth (1960)
Starring: Betsy Jones-Moreland, Antony Carbone, and Robert Towne
Director: Roger Corman
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

A crooked business man (Carbone), his wife (Jones-Moreland), and his young attorney (Towne) through a fluke survive a mysterious disaster that kills every living thing on the surface of Earth's northern hemisphere, perhaps in the entire world. They attempt to forge a life on the now deserted planet, but how long can two men tolerate each other with just one woman between them? Not very long.


There isn't much more to this film that that paragraph. If I told you that one man kills the other, and the remaining couple lives happily ever after, I wouldn't be spoiling the film, because that's the outcome that's set up early on, and it's an outcome that's never in any doubt.

The cinematography and acting is serviceable for a film which was probably written on the back of cocktail napkins, for which much of the dialogue was probably ad-libbed (the only explanation I can think of for inexplicably repeated lines within the same scene), and which was only made because "Creature from the Haunted Sea" wrapped a few days early and director/producer wanted to squeeze as much work out of the cast and crew he had brought to Puerto Rico as possible.

But for a movie that was probably made in a single-digit number of days, it isn't all bad. The characters are interesting in a community theater one-act play sort of way, and the story moves along at a quick pace. While there isn't a whole lot that happens in this film, you can still watch it and not get bored. Antony Carbone is particularly interesting as the crooked business man, mostly because you know that he's going to kill someone before the film's over. The only question is who.

That's not to say that it's necessarily worth watching unless you're interested in what an "artsy" Corman film might look like, or if you want to check out the humble beginnings of the writer of "China Town". But in the final analysis, this is yet another Roger Corman production where the poster art is more interesting than the film itself.


Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Picture Perfect Wednesday:
Signs of the Bad Economy

She can't afford shirts...

... she can't afford pants...

... she has to ride the bus to work...

... and she gave her soul to a nameless Lemurian demon god
for a carton of cigarettes.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Picture Perfect Special:
Princesses of Mars, Part Ten

More visions of Martian Princesses, as the series enters double-digits!

By Dave Hoover
By Marc Laming
By Rich Larson
By Gene Gonzalez
By Rafael Kayanan

Friday, June 10, 2011

This file could probably have stayed hidden

Secret File: Hollywood (1962)
Starring: Robert Clarke, Francine York, Sydney Mason, John Warburton, Bill White, and Maralou Gray
Director: Ralph Cushman
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

A former private detective (Clarke) is hired by a scandal sheet to take pictures of celebrities for the publication. However, he soon discovers there is a dark and deadly side to the magazine's activities, and he find himself in the middle of blackmail schemes... and ultimately having to prevent his own murder.

"Secret File Hollywood" is a film that reminded me of the crime dramas from the old time low-budget studio PRC, an outfit that one could say was making film-noir movies before the subgenre existed. Like those films, "Secret File Hollywood" is populated almost exclusively by deeply flawed and unpleasant characters, living in a dank version of Los Angeles that feels all the more dirty and sleazy because of the cheap sets and low production values of the films. Glamour is the last thing you'll find in most PRC movies, although nihilism is present in large amounts.

The film's villain also shares a trait with many of those who moved through the plots of the PRC films with sneers, growls, and maniacal laughter; he is executing an insane revenge scheme in an unnecessarily complex fashion. And then there's the fact his secret identity isn't so secret, because the cast of characters is so small that there's only really one possibility as to who he might be.

The acting is decent and what you might expect if you consider the aura of a 1940s low-budget quickie that surrounds this picture. There isn't a scene where I wish they didn't pick up the pace a bit, but the actors generally provide solid performances of their stock characters.



Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Monday, June 6, 2011

A Cab Calloway Classic

I'm starting the week with something a little different: An entire short film you can watch right here on the blog.

Cab Calloway's Hi-De-Ho (1934)
Starring: Cab Calloway, Fredi Washington, and Ethel Moses
Director: Fred Waller
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

Jazz star Cab Calloway (Calloway) advises a porter to buy a radio in order to keep his wife from stepping out while he is away from home. Unfortunately, the wife (Washington) stays in with Cab Calloway himself.


This fun little ten-minute short features a trio of great Cab Calloway songs, including "The Lady with the Fan", a song written specifically for Calloway's Cotton Club show and performed here in his fictitious Cotton Club Show. They illustrate one of the things I've always found so much fun about Calloway's songs--characters appear in several of them, like Smokey Joe and Minnie--so they can combined to sort of tell larger stories. And then there's always the endless variation on the call "hi-de-ho."

Aside from the gag ending, this film is interesting from the point of view that it shows a black patron at the Cotton Club, a Harlem nightclub that was notoriously racist in its policy of only admitting white customers, despite specializing in black performers and black jazz music. By 1934, however, the policies had been been somewhat relaxed at the insistence of Duke Ellington, whose band and music had been a major part in building the club's high reputation. None the less, the black patron is shown separated from the rest behind a low wall.

Those were different times.

On the other hand, the film also shows that Cab Calloway would fit right into today's entertainment scene if he were a young musician and performer today. With the grasp of cutting-edge technology and tendency toward sex scandal on display in this film, Calloway might even be a politician Tweeting pictures of his penis for the world to see.




Sunday, June 5, 2011

Blake should have stayed lost in the fog

Blake of Scotland Yard (1937)
Starring: Ralph Byrd, Herbert Rawlinson, and Joan Barclay
Director: Robert F. Hill
Rating: One of Ten Stars

Sir James Blake (Rawlinson) retires from Scotland Yard so he can help a pair of young inventors (Byrd and Barlcay) complete their death-ray machine and get it safely to the League of Nations so they can use it to end all wars. But spies opposed to world-peace are lurking in every shadow....


"Blake of Scotland Yard" is a movie that was created by editing down a serial... and it shows. Basically, it consists of a lot of characters running around and throwing punches at each other for unclear reasons, repeated establishing shots of the same strange French dive-bar, and sequences with a hunchbacked villain and his minions who seem to constantly change their minds about what their plans are in midstream.

This show was made in the late 1930s as a kids' program. I wonder how much kids liked it back in those days, but I'm certain they wouldn't like it today. Adults might get the occasional chuckle from some of the unintended comedy in the show, as well as some of the "topical references" which are just plain funny with 75 years of history between when they were made and now, but even they should be able to find better ways to spend their time... or at least something better to watch.


Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Monday, May 30, 2011

'Stoker's Dracula': A faithful adaptation
in a classy format

Stoker's Dracua (Marvel Comics, 2005)
Writer: Roy Thomas, based on Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula"
Artist: Dick Giordano
Rating: Ten of Ten Stars

In the early 1970s, Marvel Comics augmented their flagging superhero comics by doing horror "The Marvel Way."

Th Marvel horror boom was kicked off by a series that saw Dracula return to 1970s England in "Tomb of Dracula", and the King of Vampires remained a corner stone of the Marvel horror boom until it it became a bust during the early 1980s. At the height of his popularity with Marvel readers, Dracula headlined three different comic magazines ("Tomb of Dracula", "Giant-Sized Dracula", and "Dracula Lives") serving simultaneously as the hero and villain of some of the darkest tales Marvel Comics ever published, while making guest appearances not only in some of the other horror titles (including an outright cross-over with "Werewolf By Night"), but even facing off with Spider-Man and Dr. Strange.

One of the most interesting and classy initiatives that Marvel Comics undertook with Dracula as an ambitious adaptation of the novel that gave birth to the character their creative staff had so adeptly taken over and made their own, Bram Stoker's "Dracula".


With Roy Thomas adapting the novel and Dick Giordano handling the art, the series was an anchor serial in the "Dracula Lives" magazine, and its perhaps the most faithful comic adaptation of the novel ever published. The creators stay true to both the intent and storyline of Bram Stoker while successfully highlighting those parts of the book that lend themselves to a graphic media. The result are comics that truly were mature more than a decade before the industry decided to market comic books as such.

Unfortunately, Thomas and Giordano were not able to finish their adaption. The height of the popularity of Marvel's horror titles began to wane, and "Dracula Lives" was cancelled. A few more installments appeared in "Vampire Tales", which was then cancelled, and then "Legion of Monsters". But the adaptation remained unfinished.

But Thomas and Giordano, both of whom had great affection for Stoker's original novel, talked together many times of finding a way to finish their work, including buying the original material produced for Marvel and self-publishing. The busy careers of successful writers and artists being what they are, these idle speculations never became anything but that... until Marvel Comics approached the men about finishing what they had started.

Thirty years after it had been begun, Thomas and Giordano reunited and completed the "Dracula" adaptation. In 2004, Marvel Comics reprinted the original chapters and followed them by the roughly 100 pages of new material in a four issue mini-series, keeping all of it glorious black-and-white--or, rather, shades of gray, because Giordano makes skillful use of ink-washes and occasional subtle application of zip-a-tone throughout.

Since Thomas and Giordano had originally envisioned their adaptation as being collected in a single volume once it had been completed, the hardcover collection that Marvel published in 2005 reads far more smoothly than most other volumes made up of stories originally presented in smaller chunks. There's no recapping of what just happened two pages ago, and the pacing from the original novel is retained. In every way, the hardcover of "Stoker's Dracula" is a perfect translation of the novel to comic book form. And the hardcover book, complete with a simple, tasteful dust-jacket and bookmark, gives it the classy packaging it deserves.

It's actually hard to tell that Thomas and Giordano didn't create the material specifically for this book format. It's almost as hard to tell that three decades passed between Giordano's first and last brush strokes. If you look carefully, you can tell--some pages have slightly thicker black borders at the bottom (where there once were "to be continued"-type tags, while the lettering on the last 100 pages is slightly larger and more legible than on the first 100 because it was produced for the comic-book-sized page rather than a magazine-sized one. Another tell-tale sign of the span between start and finish is that Giordano's inking style changed subtly and he is more prone to let his art spill beyond the panels into the margins--knowing that modern printing processes are more forgiving to that than in the old days--so simply looking at the edge of the pages with the book closed will give you an idea of where the modern content starts.

All that amounts to nitpicking, however, and if you're just reading the book instead of looking for things to point to, you will not experience any shifts or disconnects at any time while reading. It's a great way to re-experience Bram Stoker's "Dracula" novel, as opposed to other works that take his name in vain as part of the title instead of honoring it as they do here.

Sadly, the book is officially out of print as of this writing. Copies are still available second-hand from Amazon.com and elsewhere. I recommend getting your hands on one.