Hey, kid, just sing the songs that wake the dead
It upsets me for many reasons that science in this country is about to crash for a generation if we're lucky, but one more is the news which ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch just sent me that it is now possible to synchrotronically transmute lead into gold so long as you don't mind the gold being a transient and unstable radioisotope. Is there a productive application for this discovery? Do I care? I'd rather it take my tax money than anything advanced by RFK Jr. I like libraries and habeas corpus, too.
To every nimrod who still wants to claim that the women of noir are misogynistically divided between the milksop and the fatale, I commend the enchantingly left-field battle royale climax of Riffraff (1947) in which Anne Jeffreys launches herself like a pro wrestler onto Walter Slezak while Pat O'Brien is still fighting off his goons and then squashes him under a bookcase from which he has to disencumber himself like the victim of a Murphy bed. It's even goofier and braver because Slezak in this film has real menace, a summer-suited stone cold sketch artist who finishes up his latest street scene while his hired muscle is slugging the bejeezus out of O'Brien, whose amiable chiseler of a private eye has a nicely careless chemistry with Jeffreys' canary, herself the kind of platinum-tressed pulp ideal who can pick herself up from getting cold-cocked in someone else's tossed office with breezily tart sang-froid. The opening murder at 30,000 feet is breathtaking in its sharp-shot night rain and silence, but I may still consider the film stolen by Percy Kilbride as the sarcastically milk-tippling cabbie whose jalopy fires up like the 1812 Overture and whose gag of mending O'Brien's shirts runs all the way through a proposal into breach of promise. He's the cherry on this modest but satisfying sundae of RKO B-noir which balances its shortfalls in budget with buckets of style, incidentally the first non-short film I have managed to watch this month. "You got the piano player?"
Speaking of women in noir, the Brattle has announced this year's Noir City Boston and despite the presence of Foster Hirsch, I am not missing Caged (1950) on 35 mm, not to mention I have never seen the directorial debut of Mickey Rooney, My True Story (1951). I reserve the right to throw popcorn if he mischaracterizes any of the dark city dames I know anything about.
spatch just sent me that it is now possible to synchrotronically transmute lead into gold so long as you don't mind the gold being a transient and unstable radioisotope. Is there a productive application for this discovery? Do I care? I'd rather it take my tax money than anything advanced by RFK Jr. I like libraries and habeas corpus, too.To every nimrod who still wants to claim that the women of noir are misogynistically divided between the milksop and the fatale, I commend the enchantingly left-field battle royale climax of Riffraff (1947) in which Anne Jeffreys launches herself like a pro wrestler onto Walter Slezak while Pat O'Brien is still fighting off his goons and then squashes him under a bookcase from which he has to disencumber himself like the victim of a Murphy bed. It's even goofier and braver because Slezak in this film has real menace, a summer-suited stone cold sketch artist who finishes up his latest street scene while his hired muscle is slugging the bejeezus out of O'Brien, whose amiable chiseler of a private eye has a nicely careless chemistry with Jeffreys' canary, herself the kind of platinum-tressed pulp ideal who can pick herself up from getting cold-cocked in someone else's tossed office with breezily tart sang-froid. The opening murder at 30,000 feet is breathtaking in its sharp-shot night rain and silence, but I may still consider the film stolen by Percy Kilbride as the sarcastically milk-tippling cabbie whose jalopy fires up like the 1812 Overture and whose gag of mending O'Brien's shirts runs all the way through a proposal into breach of promise. He's the cherry on this modest but satisfying sundae of RKO B-noir which balances its shortfalls in budget with buckets of style, incidentally the first non-short film I have managed to watch this month. "You got the piano player?"
Speaking of women in noir, the Brattle has announced this year's Noir City Boston and despite the presence of Foster Hirsch, I am not missing Caged (1950) on 35 mm, not to mention I have never seen the directorial debut of Mickey Rooney, My True Story (1951). I reserve the right to throw popcorn if he mischaracterizes any of the dark city dames I know anything about.
no subject
You are a treasure.
Riffraff sounds good.
It was a delight! Smartly written, gorgeously shot, characters an inventive half-step off the usual, e.g. Pat O'Brien expecting to pocket the easiest $5000 in the world for locating a man he's just taken on as a client only to discover his pigeon dead in his bathtub and at least two factions trying to get their hands on a MacGuffin whose existence he wasn't even clued in on and even as he gets to grips with the upshot in violence in his normal work week, he looks deeply exasperated by having to work for his money after all. The local chief of police is clearly just trying to get through the day while suffering interruptions from a detective noir. There is no scene where Jeffreys as opposed to O'Brien is in need of rescue: I repeat, she doesn't scream on the sidelines of a fight, she flings herself right into the middle of it and incidentally finds the MacGuffin while hanging on to Slezak by his hair. If the film didn't end with her and O'Brien romantically clinched, he should at least have taken her on as a partner and probably still should. Riffraff was directed by Ted Tetzlaff who was better known as a cinematographer—he lensed some notable screwballs and one sterling Hitchcock—and I would totally class it with The Big Sleep (1946) as a rare screwball noir. The threat level is real, but the wisecracks are priceless.
no subject
The threat level is real, but the wisecracks are priceless. --Aaaaahhh, sounds so good. (I clicked on your clickable title and got to the TCM page, and Anne Jeffries definitely looks COMPETENT as well as female. Nice.)