StanleyWheeler

The photo is from  Cage of Evil , directed by Edward L. Cahn, starring Ronald Foster and Pat Blair. That's really just about the best take I could find of Pat Blair...which says something about the directing and over all quality of the picture. I think she was more impressive in this more familiar role: In this film noir, Blair plays the strong, criminally connected female. Her greed becomes the millstone that drags the decent but flawed detective to his doom beneath the sordid sea of lies, robbery, and murder. On a scale of one to ten, the film ranks as a solid disappointment. At just over an hour long, the story is fairly bare-bones; it felt rushed and incomplete. The characters possessed all the depth of...well...something really thin...without a lot of depth...like drawn-on eyebrows. The writing kept the characters and the story confined to the wading pool. Shallow. That's the word that comes to mind. It's as shallow as a cookie sheet, or that guy at work who can ...

From the 2003 French movie   He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not , starring Audrey Tautou, and Sam Le Bihan. It would be the former rather than the latter pictured above. Audrey Tautou plays a promising art student in love with a married doctor. Unfortunately for the artist, the doctor is unwilling to leave his pregnant wife. The movie begins with the girl's face among the red roses of a flower shop where she purchases a single rose for her love. This cute little stick-of-a-girl finds disappointment in all of her attempts to become the sole owner of the doctor's heart. When the burden of this heaping pile of unfulfilled expectations drags her to the brink of ending her relationship with the doctor (and everyone else), she has a full conversion to the dark side; her efforts to obtain her desire intensify to full Mumm Ra  mode. The film goes full noir from that moment. Neither her life, nor the doctor's life will ever be the same again. To borrow from the lyrics of Red Rider...

Although this picture of Faye Dunaway and Christopher Lee in  The 4th Musketeer: Milady's Revenge  would be from 1974, it causes me to think of the Bonnie and Clyde movie from 1967 in which she starred with Warren Beatty . The coach in this picture seems to have more headroom than the stolen Ford Deluxe in which Bonnie and Clyde met their demise in May 1934, but the shoulder room looks a little tight. Perhaps those two pistols behind the heads of Milady and Rochefort are what raised that memory of the two young bandits jerking like electrified frogs' legs under a relentless spray of lead which perforated both the Ford and its occupants. I saw that movie as a kid on television many years after its theatrical release; the memory of that scene is still quite vivid. Although I was allowed to watch Bonnie and Clyde on television, I did not get to go to the theater to watch  The Three Musketeers , or The 4th Musketeer ....because...Mom. I suppose the fact that I was less...

The above photo from IMDB of Humprey Bogart and Gloria Grahame was part of the publicity for the movie In a Lonely Place , directed by Nicholas Ray, 1950. Bogart and Grahame were film noir royalty. Grahame usually played a moll who took more hits than Sylvester Stallone's  Rocky . Bogey, or course, delivered a lot of hits. In one scene in this movie, Bogart's disturbed character, Dixon Steele, beats up a young man and nearly brains him with a rock. Grahame plays Laurel, the girl who can't decide whether her lover is a murderer. I haven't had the pleasure of seeing this entire film. I have seen several parts of it, and want to see all of it. Bogey's character is a writer; he is asked what position he works from. He replies that it's usually from the sitting position. The most memorable lines from the film are spoken, and written by Bogart's character: "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived for a few weeks while she loved m...

Here is a link, and an excerpt from chapter 4 of my newest book on Amazon,   Finding Jack Book One - The Orb The horn blasts startled Jack. It did occur to him that the series of notes would make a nice ringtone, or maybe an alarm. He thought it worked better as an alarm. That’s when he understood that it was an alarm . The centaur was sounding an alarm. Jack looked around to see two more centaurs galloping toward him, and he heard another horn signaling farther along the road. He knew that running down the roadway between the trees would only allow the centaurs to catch him quickly. He spun and ran to the east. He hoped to find bushes or trees or some other obstacles that would allow him to elude a pursuer. “I think we’ve got us a necromancer.” The centaur shouted. “I’m lucky to be alive. He made a light in his hand and his face went to glowing like some demon after blood. Shoot first and don’t let him throw magic, I say.” At that point Jack’s knee crashed int...

Lake was not like any of the people that I encountered at a recent hospital visit, but her name is similar to the name of a pulchritudinous character in my noir novel. Veronica was a different kind of beauty than the Monica of my novel, but she was still a beauty; although, the character named Pip from my book probably resembles Veronica Lake a little bit. Here is a picture of Veronica from This Gun for Hire , co-staring Alan Ladd. Enjoy the picture and then read about the hospital visit, given from the point of view of an unimportant character in an old crime movie. We walked into the joint through a torrential downpour. My forehead felt like it was Niagra Falls. My two associates, a man and a woman, went to confirm the appointment with one of the henchmen who keep out the riffraff, meaning those who can't pay to play. This particular henchman was a dame. She called me over from her seat behind a desk covered in a pale wood veneer. It was the desk that was covered, not the ...

A scene from one of my favorite movies, and in my opinion, Ridley Scott's best work. The Napoleonic wars provide the setting for this enigmatic story of a series of encounters between two officers of the hussars. It is based on Joseph Conrad's book The Duel, A Military Tale . My copy of the book was published in 1927; the copyright date is 1908. It is also my favorite of Conrad's works..but I've only read three or four of his books.  I wrote a short story or two set in the Napoleonic era (after reading Arthur Conan Doyle's The Glorious Hussar ), but they have all been lost...and weren't very good. The novel I had started years ago, set in the 1796 Italian Campaign, may be forever imprisoned on a defunct computer; I'm probably the only one who would have been interested in reading it.