A police chief responds to an ambitious detective’s desire for a promotion with the tale of a real smart piece of detection, explaining how Inspector Steve Trent (Ralph Bellamy) uncovered who killed wealthy Edward Arnold, and why. The murder takes place with Trent on the scene, summoned by Arnold because of his fear that he …
Read the full post →“<em>Before Midnight</em> (Columbia, 1933)”
Lon Chaney stars in this melodrama, based on a novel by James Oliver Curwood, set in northern Canada. He plays an earnest young man set up for prosecution for killing a man in a fight (he acted in self-defense) by the dishonest son of the local factor for the Hudson Bay Company; that son desires …
Read the full post →“<em>Nomads of the North</em> (First National, 1920)”
I’ve been slowly making my way through the several Loeb Classical Library volumes that contain the historical work Roman Antiquities, by the first-century B.C. author Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and I recently finished up the fifth volume, covering Books 8 and 9 (through section 9.24). The volume is largely devoted to the career of, and the …
Read the full post →“<em>Roman Antiquities</em>, Books 8-9.24, by Dionysius of Halicarnassus”
Snow takes the place of sand — at least for most of the movie — in this variation on the beach movie theme, with Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman as college kids who join a ski club outing in order to be near the girls they hope to romance (Deborah Walley and Yvonne Craig). The …
Read the full post →“<em>Ski Party</em> (American International, 1965)”
About 90 years ago, the July 25th weekly issue of the crime and detection pulp magazine Detective Fiction Weekly offered up a fair amount of entertaining stories, some purportedly true. T. T. Flynn’s The Garroters of Ghost Cove, the issue’s novelette, is a fast-paced story in which protagonist Bob Riley, breaking into an apartment, discovers …
Read the full post →“<em>Detective Fiction Weekly</em>, July 25, 1931”
Buster Keaton at the height of his powers as a physical comedian delivers the goods in Steamboat Bill, Jr., the story of a soft young man from the East joining his rough but good-natured riverboat captain father (Ernest Torrence) and trying to make good. The comedy is terrific, both in understated ways — in his …
Read the full post →“<em>Steamboat Bill, Jr.</em> (UA, 1928)”
A traveling theatrical troupe that skipped out on its last hotel bill is forced by a storm to take refuge at an isolated castle, despite being warned against it, and there’s soon cause for them to regret their choice. Something strange is going on in the castle, and it means peril, but possibly also romance, …
Read the full post →“<em>The Playgirls and the Vampire</em> (1960)”
In Dance of Death (original title: Wu quan), a young woman (Angela Mao) convinces two rival martial arts masters to teach her their evenly matched techniques, so that she can use them to gain vengeance on the gang that murdered her friends. When even those techniques prove insufficient, the masters are able to develop a …
