Behind the scenes!

Additionally, Peter embarrasses himself in a podcast: Breaking Bad Insider Podcast Episode 203.

Don't Look Now (1973)

Peter's Nite

Roger Ebert on Don't Look Now:

Venice, that haunted city, has never been more melancholy than in "Don't Look Now." It is like a vast necropolis, its stones damp and crumbling, its canals alive with rats. The cinematography, by Anthony B. Richmond and an uncredited Roeg, drains it of people. There are a few shots, on busy streets or near the Grand Canal, when we see residents and tourists, but during the two sustained scenes where John and Laura are lost (first together, later separately) there is no one else about, and the streets, bridges, canals, dead ends and wrong turns fold in upon themselves. Walking in Venice, especially on a foggy winter light, is like walking in a dream.
The city is old and ominous. John struggles to raise a statue to its perch on a church wall, and then uncovers it to reveal a hideous gargoyle, sticking its tongue out at him. A church scaffold collapses beneath him. The hotel where the Baxters are staying is eager to close at the end of season; the lobby furniture is already shrouded. The canals yield drowned bodies. And John's concern mounts as his wife listens to the two strange sisters, and becomes convinced their daughter is sending them messages. "She's dead, Laura," John says. "Our daughter is dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead."

But it is John who has second sight. "He has the gift, even if he doesn't know it, even if he's resisting it," the sisters tell one another. And after Laura is called home to be with their son, who has had a minor accident at boarding school, John sees her and the sisters standing at the front of a motorboat passing him on the Grand Canal. How can she be here and there? Those who have been to Venice will recognize it as a funeral boat.

The plot of "Don't Look Now," if it were summarized in a realistic way, would be fairly standard horror stuff. The identification of the red-hooded figure is arbitrary and perhaps even unnecessary. It is the film's visual style, acting, and mood that evoke its uncanny power. Like the recent films of M. Night Shyamalan, it works through apprehension, not plot or action. The "explanation": is perfunctory but the dread is palpable.

Another Country (1984)

Pamela's nite.

Wikipedia on Guy Burgess:
Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess was born at 2 Albemarle Villas, Devonport, Plymouth, England the elder son of Commander Malcolm Kingsford de Moncy Burgess RN and his wife, Evelyn Mary, daughter of William Gillman. He attended Lockers Park Prep School and then a period at Eton College. Burgess spent two years at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, but poor eyesight ended his naval prospects and he returned to Eton. He won an open scholarship to read modern history at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1930, gained a first in part one of the history tripos (1932) and an aegrotat in part two (1933), and held a two-year postgraduate teaching fellowship. Whilst at Cambridge, where he was recruited into the Cambridge Apostles, a secret, elite debating society, whose members at the time included Anthony Blunt. Like Blunt, Burgess was a homosexual.

Notorious for his bad behaviour and overt alcoholism, Burgess initially worked for The Times and, briefly, the BBC, as the Producer of The Week in Westminster, covering Parliamentary activity - wherein he was able to further his acquaintance with important politicians. He spent some time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. At Cambridge, he had been a friend of Julian Bell, the English poet who was killed while driving an ambulance in that conflict. Burgess and the other members of the "Five" were divided with regard to the impact of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which compromised their hard left ideals.

Burgess was most useful to the Soviets in his position as secretary to the British Deputy Foreign Minister, Hector McNeil. As McNeil's secretary, Burgess was able to transmit top secret Foreign Office documents to the KGB on a regular basis, secreting them out at night to be photographed by his controller and returning them to McNeil's desk in the morning. When assigned to Washington, D.C., Hector McNeil cautioned him to avoid three things: "the race thing", contact with the radical element, and homosexual adventuring. "Oh," quipped Burgess, "you mean I shouldn't make a pass at Paul Robeson?"

Assigned to the British embassy in Washington, Burgess continued his life as an unpredictable heavy drinker and indiscreet homosexual. He lived with Kim Philby in a basement flat, perhaps so that Philby could keep an eye on him. Nonetheless, Burgess was irrepressible, once insulting the wife of a high-ranking CIA official at one of Philby's dinner parties.

Burgess accompanied Donald Maclean in an escape to Moscow after Maclean fell under suspicion for espionage, even though Burgess himself was not under suspicion. The escape was arranged by their controller, Yuri Modin. There is some debate as to why Burgess was asked to accompany Maclean, and whether he was misled about the prospect for him returning to England. Unlike Maclean, who became a respected Soviet citizen in exile and lived until 1983, Burgess did not take to life in the USSR very well. Homosexuality was far less acceptable in the Soviet Union, and this may have been a problem, even though he had a state-sanctioned lover. Also, unlike Maclean, he never bothered to learn Russian, and even continued to order his clothes from his Savile Row tailor.

Becoming ever more dependent on drink, he appears to have been killed by his alcoholism, aged 52.

New season almost here!

Black Rain (1989)

Nora's Nite

Tom Mes on Yusaku Matsuda:

To gauge the impact and enduring popularity of Yusaku Matsuda in Japan, one need only walk into a Tokyo bookstore. In the cinema section, at least half a shelf will be taken up by photo books, essays, tributes and biographies of the late actor. Toyshops stock action figures and dolls, both vintage and new, based on his best-loved characters. In the numerous second-hand video stores of the Jimbocho area, it's easy to pick out Matsuda's films among the thousands of brightly coloured boxes: his are the ones that are twice as expensive as everything else.

Yusaku Matsuda is a phenomenon. His early death in 1989 at the age of forty has given him the kind of idolised immortality that the rest of the world bestows upon the likes of James Dean, Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee. The comparison with these giants is valid in more ways than one. Matsuda had a bit of all three: looks, acting range, cool machismo and a flair for action.

Yet, Matsuda remains a virtual unknown outside his home country. His misfortune was to have shot to fame at a time when the rest of the world had virtually forgotten that Japan even had a film industry: Matsuda reached his peak in the 80s, the most maligned decade in the annals of Japanese film history as seen through western eyes. Whereas stars of previous eras - Mifune, Takakura, Sugawara, Kaji - deservedly enjoy adulation beyond their own borders, Matsuda - who should be mentioned in the same breath - remains hidden from Western eyes, his work relegated to the dusty basement of Japanese cinema where few white men ever venture.

His obscurity is a paradox however, since millions around the world have seen Matsuda's final screen performance as the slippery villain Sato in Ridley Scott's Nihon-noir cop thriller Black Rain. An atypical role in many ways, it is the proverbial exception to the rule. In the part of his career that has come to define him, Matsuda played brash, cool, rebellious heroes, his tall figure and chiselled features furthermore lending him a virility and sex appeal that none of his forebears could match. As indisputably charismatic as Toshiro Mifune, Ken Takakura, Koji Tsuruta and Bunta Sugawara were, there was very little about them that would make women swoon or that would make scriptwriters decide that they should get the girl before fade-out.

Shameless promotion

Great teaser trailers for season two:

No Way Out (1987)

Stuart's nite. Finally.

Roger Donaldson via Popcorn Reel:

Roger Donaldson, an easygoing persona who looked relaxed and well-rested at a local hotel suite here in town, typically fills his films with energy, passion, sexiness and charm -- take "No Way Out" (1987) for example -- which he said he saw on cable television on a recent late night. He confessed to taping it and then watching it early the following morning. "Once I started watching it, I couldn't stop watching it! I suddenly saw it for what it was . . . I see why it succeeded as it did. The movie has got a great sort of cynical quality to it. It's sexy and it's funny and it's a good thriller. You're not sure how it's gonna turn out. And I think I saw in "The Bank Job" a movie with a similar sort of appeal to me." While the stories in both films are completely different, the director said that in tone the two films probably shared quite a lot in common.

Marathon Man (1976)

Stuart's nite -- but... he doesn't show up. Peter rescues the evening by transforming this into his nite.Conrad Hall obit via The Independent

One of Hall's teachers at USC was the Yugoslavian montage expert Slavko Vorkapich. After Hall's short film Sea Theme won first prize for photography in a USC amateur contest, he formed a small production company, Canyon Films, with some fellow students, and, after adapting a short story My Brother Down There into a screenplay, they raised money to make a movie version. Hall said:

When it came time to decide who would do what, we all wanted to be the director. We couldn't do it by committee, of course. So we thought about what other jobs would need to be done to make the movie: producer, editor, cinematographer. We wrote them all down and put them in a hat. I happened to draw "cinematographer" . . . Eventually I learned what a great opportunity it is to be able to tell a story visually. I've found that I can be a storyteller, like my father, by using visuals and not be in competition with him.

Canyon Films proved short-lived, and Hall then worked in several capacities in the industry, including photography, editing and production, contributing to commercials, industrial films and features, including providing 16mm footage for Disney's acclaimed "True-Life Adventure" The Living Desert (1953).

He was given his first screen credit as one of three photographers on a low-budget black-and-white thriller, Edge of Fury (1958), but he continued to serve as camera assistant and camera operator with such noted cinematographers as Ted McCord, Ernest Haller, Floyd Crosby and Hal Mohr. For Robert Surtees, he was camera operator on the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando.

Also in 1962, he worked with Ted McCord on the television series Stoney Burke for the producer Leslie Stevens. Stevens admired Hall's work, and retained him to photograph episodes of the science- fiction series The Outer Limits (1963-65), after which Hall was the cinematographer on Stevens's feature film about the occult Incubus (1966). Starring William Shatner, it was notable for having its dialogue spoken entirely in Esperanto (a would-be universal language developed in 1887) and though considered stilted and pretentious at the time the film now has a cult following.

One of the first major films on which Hall received sole credit was Morituri (1965) starring Marlon Brando as an anti-Nazi German. Directed by Bernhard Wicki, a German director working for the first time in Hollywood, the black-and-white film was poorly received, with only the cast (Yul Brynner and Trevor Howard co-starred) and Hall's strikingly vivid camerawork winning praise. The film won Hall his first Oscar nomination.

Another black-and-white film lauded for Hall's photography was Richard Brooks's true crime story In Cold Blood (1967), based on Truman Capote's book about two psychopathic killers. "I started off my career in a sort of naturalistic style, as opposed to an operatic style," said Hall, "and I've refined that over the years to fit the stories."

Hall preferred to work in black-and-white, but by the mid-Sixties most of Hollywood's films were being made in colour, and Hall's work on Harper (1966), The Professionals (1966) and Cool Hand Luke displayed his mastery of the form. Disliking the artificial style of Hollywood lighting, he favoured a naturalistic or impressionist approach. His superb, dream-like rendering of the Old West in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid won him the Academy Award, and he also won the film's leading lady Katharine Ross, to whom he was married from 1969 to 1975.

Able to be selective in his assignments, he liked to work on projects about "moral and ethical dilemmas". "I look for stories about humanity," he said,about choices a person has to make. I don't like thrillers. They're not made about the human condition. They exist to torture you. I'd rather do something like Day of the Locust about the losers who don't make it in film, but make their lives worthwhile by pretending.

After shooting Marathon Man (1976) Hall spent a decade running a production company making commercials with his fellow photographer Haskell Wexler, though he shot Bette Midler's concert scenes for The Rose (1979). He returned to feature-film making with the thriller Black Widow (1987), and subsequent films included Love Affair (1994) and A Civil Action (1998).

Hall was to receive nine Oscar nominations during his 50-year career (and may well receive another for Road to Perdition). He won his second award for his surreal evocation of the world of a dysfunctional family in American Beauty. "This was Sam Mendes's first film," he said,

but it never felt like his first film. He's actually a kind of control freak. I mean that in a good way. It's one thing to be directing. It's another to be directing and to have a vision and communicate that. Sam has vision. I helped contribute to that vision and to that wonderful screenplay.

The dream-like shot of cascading rose petals featured in the film has already become an iconic image of Nineties cinema, but Hall confessed to some initial trepidation with the project. "I kept asking Sam, 'How are we going to light these people? They're all so unlikeable.' " He was also perturbed to discover how much was cut from the film in its final editing. Though he came around to the final version ("When he showed it to me on the big screen, it was a revelation") Hall hoped that some of the cut material would be put back for the film's DVD release.

In 1994 Hall, whose son, Conrad W. Hall, took up the same profession and shot The Panic Room (2002), received a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Cinematography. "Every film that he worked on was something beautiful to the eye, and very imaginative," said Zanuck. "Connie was not known for his speed, but neither was Rembrandt. He was known for incredible genius."

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Pamela's movie. Dinner was a delicious roast beef, amazing kale/bacon/potatoes (Nora had 2 servings), and slightly over-roasted sweet potatoes. Dessert was a fantastic apple tart (Nora had 2 servings). Special guest: Rebecca. This night was memorable because it was the last EVER telling of the 9/11 Stony Lake Peter's Birthday Cake gluttony story.

Boxofficemojo interviews Sydney Pollock:

Box Office Mojo: Let's talk about Three Days of the Condor. Why did you prominently feature the World Trade Center?

Sydney Pollack: I was looking for the logic of where the [Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)] might be [located]. I didn't want to have a building that said CIA on it because I didn't think that would exist. I figured they would want some kind of anonymity and that the best kind of anonymity are these two massive buildings with thousands of offices and you wouldn't know who's where. [Production Designer] Stephen Grimes was great—he had a nose for locations—and he found the Twin Towers. He found the alley, which was spooky and eerie and weird, for the [climactic] meeting in Three Days of the Condor.

Box Office Mojo: Did you shoot inside the Twin Towers?

Sydney Pollack: Yes. We shot the lobby, the second floor mezzanine lobby, the hallways, the elevators, down the hallway to the office. I loved them. I used to go [there] with my kids. My youngest daughter and her new husband came to visit me in New York and it was the first place I took them—the World Trade Center—up to the top. I loved those buildings. I used to occasionally use a helicopter to come in from [John F.] Kennedy [International Airport] or wherever and, coming in at sunset, looking at Manhattan, it was the view of the city—it made the composition of the shot—the skyline—perfect.

Box Office Mojo: What is the theme of Three Days of the Condor?

Sydney Pollack: Suspicion. From a behavioral point of view, in terms of defining and writing the characters, of directing the picture, it's about a man in a paranoid business who trusts everyone—and he turns from that to a man who's suspicious of everyone because of what happens to him. In the process, he meets a girl who trusts no one, who has her worst nightmare happen—a guy kidnaps her at gunpoint—and she finds that she blossoms. So, at the end of this movie, when they say goodbye, he's the suspicious one, suspecting that she may tell on him. That was the way we wrote it, trying to imagine these two separate arcs going in opposite directions.

Box Office Mojo: Isn't it based on a book?

Sydney Pollack: Yes. The book [Six Days of the Condor by James Grady] was about a bad group of guys inside the CIA who wanted to smuggle heroin. It was a potboiler. They hollowed out books and put heroin in the books.

Box Office Mojo: You excised the heroin from the motion picture version.

Sydney Pollack: I wasn't interested in heroin. It was boring. There were a million pictures about dope and, also, I wasn't interested in bad guys and good guys. I was interested in something much more complex. The Sixties were just over and I was remembering what happened when all cops were referred to as "pigs." I thought it must be a bitch if you're a really good cop—suppose you're a really good cop—and you know there's a bomb in that trunk but you do not have the legal right to search the trunk. What would you do? So the metaphor was: suppose there were a group of people inside the CIA that know about an impending crisis but also know they can't do anything above board about it. That they know for a fact that the oil supply, if it was choked off, could bring this country to a standstill.

Box Office Mojo: This was following the 1973 Arab oil embargo?

Sydney Pollack: Yes. But it was before the lines at the [gasoline stations]. We were prescient on this picture by accident, not by design. We were saying, let's find a crisis where these aren't a bunch of bad guys trying to make money for themselves; these are guys that honestly think they're saving America—that's why Cliff Robertson['s character] says: "what do you think [Americans are] going to want us to do when the cars don't start or when there's no food on the table? Are they going to want us to be moral or are they just going to want to get the oil? You know damn well what they're going to want. They're going to want the oil."

Box Office Mojo: Robertson's character also makes a point about what would happen when one of those hostile states gets plutonium—?


Sydney Pollack: That's right. I'm much more interested in the CIA guys who are trying to help us and do something [widely considered] immoral than I am about guys who are just immoral because they want to sell dope and make money. That's boring to me. It's much more complicated to say, here's a bunch of guys whose job it is to protect us and they're saying there's no way we're going to sell the fact that the Middle East [states] control the oil and if we don't get control of the oil and they [seize its production], we're going to end up with what we have now.

Box Office Mojo: That's what happened in reality—what the Three Days of the Condor conspirators predicted.

Sydney Pollack: Exactly. You've got every Middle Eastern country now trying to get an atomic weapon—or they already have them. Our point [in Three Days of the Condor] was that [the oil crisis] is not a simple problem.

The Big Clock (1948)

Peter's movie, but Nora made a superb meatloaf with roasted veggies. Peter made his signature gluten-free brownies for dessert.

Robert M. Ryley on the life of poet and novelist Kenneth Fearing:

Consolation, however, came almost immediately at Yaddo, where he met Nan Lurie, a handsome thirty-two-year-old artist. She had grown up speaking Yiddish in New Jersey, gone to Paris on her own after high school, and won a scholarship to study under Yasuo Kunioshi at the Art Students League. She and Fearing met within a week of their arrival at Yaddo and stayed on together during the winter after most of the other residents had left. On Christmas day, with less than a dollar between them, they ate their first meal alone together at a restaurant in the Black district of Saratoga Springs. By the spring, when they were both back in NewYork, Fearing was wildly, deliriously, giddily in love and writing notes and letters of astonishing sentimentality, even falling into such clichés as "I am not good enough for you." He cherished what he called Nan's "sheer lunacy"--her "vitamins," her "stray cats," her "religious quarter hour," the "confessions" she wrote in the dark, blindfolded. (In his poem "Irene Has a Mind of Her Own," published four years later when his ardor had cooled, he looked on similar flakiness with a less benevolent eye.) In the winter of 1944-45, he moved into Nan's loft on East 10th Street, and, his divorce having become final the year before, they were married in Greenwich, Connecticut, on June 18, 1945.

While still at Yaddo in March 1943, Fearing had been having trouble mapping out a new novel. Inspiration had to wait for two events: the sensational murder in October 1943 of the New York heiress Mrs. Wayne Lonergan, and the publication in 1944 of Samuel Michael Fuller's little-known thriller The Dark Page. Transformed and refined, details from the Lonergan case and Fuller's novel would coalesce in Fearing's imagination to produce the plot of his most famous book, which he wrote between August 1944 and October 1945.

Published in the fall of 1946, The Big Clock made Fearing temporarily rich. Altogether he took in about $60,000 (roughly $360,000 in 1992 dollars): about $ 10,000 in royalties and from the sale of republication rights (including a condensation in The American Magazine), and $50,000 from the sale of film rights to Paramount. In 1947, Nan won $2,000 in an art competition, a sum they dismissed as negligible but that only two years earlier would have seemed a fortune. But Fearing's successes always contained the germ of disaster. Overestimating his business acumen, he had negotiated his own contract with Paramount, permanently and irrevocably signing away his film rights, and relinquishing his television rights till 1952, by which time, he discovered to his rage and frustration, Paramount was showing late-night reruns and had thus cornered the market.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)

Nora's movie. Nora was at a MoveOn congressional action training event till very late, so had to rush to LaLa's for takeout, and was late to her own MovieNite. Serviceable lemon tartlets for dessert.

BFI on Seance on a Wet Afternoon:

Séance On A Wet Afternoon (d. Bryan Forbes, 1964) is easily the darkest, and maybe the finest, of the five films which Richard Attenborough and Bryan Forbes co-produced. Forbes adapted it from a 1961 novel by Mark McShane, a British-based crime writer whose penchant for odd titles resulted in such books as The Crimson Madness of Little Doom (1966), Ill Met by a Fish Shop in George Street (1968) and Lashed But Not Leashed (1976). Although the story's protagonist, Myra Savage, later returned in McShane's sequel Séance for Two (1972), the film turned out to be the last, and least financially successful, of the Attenborough/Forbes collaborations.

Despite the critical and commercial success of Attenborough and Forbes' Whistle Down the Wind (d. Forbes, 1961) and The L-Shaped Room (d. Forbes, 1962), financing for Séance was hard to secure. In addition, although Attenborough agreed to co-star as the hen-pecked husband, Bill, the main role of Myra, the clairvoyant wife, proved very hard to cast, with actresses like Margaret Lockwood, Anne Bancroft and Simone Signoret proving to be either unavailable or uninterested, or simply not considered sufficiently commercial. At one point, Forbes even toyed with changing the role to that of a man, hoping to get Alec Guinness and Tom Courtenay for both leads, before finally settling on American stage actress Kim Stanley.

The film's opening is slowly and deliberately paced, as we see Myra and Bill exchange increasingly strained and sinister dialogue while making rather mysterious and methodical preparations around their house. Strong character scenes between the submissive husband and the increasingly unbalanced wife play effectively alongside the suspenseful kidnap and ransom sequences. This approach is seen at its best in the film's central twelve minute section, in which Bill's frantic collection of the ransom at Piccadilly Circus underground station is intercut with a sedate policeman's interview with Myra back home. The scene effectively juxtaposes big city anonymity with suburban familiarity.

Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, Les (1953)

Ebert on Hulot:

It is not a comedy of hilarity but a comedy of memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer. There are some real laughs in it, but ``Mr. Hulot's Holiday'' gives us something rarer, an amused affection for human nature--so odd, so valuable, so particular.

The movie was released in 1953, and played for months, even years, in art cinemas. ``Mr. Hulot'' was as big a hit in its time as ``Like Water for Chocolate,'' ``The Gods Must Be Crazy'' and other small films that people recommend to each other. There was a time when any art theater could do a week's good business just by booking ``Hulot.'' Jacques Tati (1908-1982) made only four more features in the next 20 years, much labored over, much admired, but this is the film for which he'll be remembered.

The Jerk (1979)

The Man Who Never Was (1956)

Alan Bellows via Damn Interesting:

The idea to plant false military documents on a dead man and let them fall into the hands of the Germans was conceived by Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu at British naval intelligence. His was a variation of an earlier idea proposed by Flight Lt. Charles Cholmondeley of the counter-intelligence service MI5. Cholmondeley had suggested that a wireless radio could be placed on a dead soldier whose parachute was rigged to appear to have failed, which would provide the Allies with a channel to provide disinformation to the enemy. But his plan was deemed impractical, so Montagu's death-at-sea ruse was implemented instead, and dubbed Operation Mincemeat.

Montagu's team quietly procured the body of a 34-year-old man who had recently died with pneumonia, whose lungs already contained fluid as a drowned man's would. The family of the deceased granted permission to use the body for this mission on the condition that the man's identity never be revealed. As the body waited in cold storage, the fictional life of Major William Martin was fabricated in great detail by the Twenty Committee (often referred to by the roman numeral XX or "double-cross"). The corpse was given identification, keys, personal letters, and other possessions. In order to explain why the man would be found chained to his briefcase, Montagu's team planted evidence suggesting that Major Martin was an absent-minded but responsible chap, including overdue bills and a replacement ID card. Such a man might chain himself to a briefcase full of sensitive documents in order to prevent its loss during the flight.

On 28 April 1943, Major Martin was placed aboard the submarine HMS Seraph in a special steel canister packed with dry ice. The crew set off for the coast of Spain, where it was likely that a citizen of the Axis-aligned country would locate the body and report it to authorities. After two days at sea, the submarine surfaced about a mile off the coast of Spain at 4:30 in the morning. Believing that the heavy canister contained top secret meteorological equipment, members of the crew carried it on deck, after which point everyone aside from the officers was ordered below deck. There in the dark, Lt. Norman L.A. (Bill) Jewell, the commander of Seraph, explained the mission and swore the men to secrecy. Major Martin's body was then removed from the canister onto the deck, where he was fitted with his life jacket and chained to his briefcase. The men read the 39th Psalm and committed the body to the sea, where the tide gradually drew it ashore.

Once the body was discovered, Britain's requests for the return of the briefcase helped complete the illusion that there was sensitive information contained therein. To further the hoax, Montagu arranged to have Major Martin's name included on the next British casualty list in The Times. When the documents were finally returned to the British two weeks later, microscopic examination revealed that the Germans had indeed opened and resealed the letters. Additionally, German transmissions decrypted by Ultra indicated that the Nazis were moving forces to defend Sardinia, Corsica, and Greece. This news prompted a brief cable to Winston Churchill to inform him of the success: "Mincemeat Swallowed Whole."

Bell Book and Candle (1958)

Village of the Damned (1960)

Stirling Silliphant interview via Go Into The Story:

"I never intended to be a screenwriter; since childhood I had aspired to become a novelist and/or a poet. But I found films interesting, since I made my living publicizing them. When I met Joe Louis and learned that I could acquire the rights to his life story, it never occurred to me to write the film, only to produce it [The Joe Louis Story], I hired Robert Sylvester, a friend of mine who was a columnist for the New York Daily News and a big fight buff, to write the screenplay. Only when Bob failed to give me some of the scenes I felt were essential to the film, did I step in and write them myself. Later, when I watched the completed movie, I saw that the several scenes I had written were far and away the best ones in the flick--at least to my considerably prejudiced opinion. But, even more, I had discovered the pain of having to sit there and WAIT--as a producer--for the writer to deliver. What the hell, it struck me, why not be the guy everybody's waiting for, rather than the guy who's going crazy waiting?"

"Things in TV were immeasurably different than they are today. In the sixties and seventies, for one thing--and this is KEY--the network commitment to a producer was for a far greater number of episodes than the networks now allot. Half-hour shows usually scored a thirty-six-episodes season. Hour shows seldom less than twenty-four episodes. For this reason, when a producer turned up a writer with whom he resonated, he was more likely than not to ask, even beg, that writer for multiple commitments. Apparently, I was such a writer when I was freelancing.

"I have always felt that the most original writing I have done in the filmed medium was done in the period of 1960 to 1964 when I wrote the majority of the one-hour Route 66 filmed-on-location shows for CBS. These shows caught the American psyche of that period about as accurately as it could be caught. I wrote all of them out of an intense personal motivation; each was a work of passion, conviction, and, occasionally, of anguish."

"My single meeting with Hitch: Joan (series producer) told me the master was actually going to direct one of his TV shows--this one his very favorite story--"The Voice in the Night," to be the flagship episode for his one-hour Suspicion series. Joan drove me to his home up Bellagio Road, one of those canyon streets off Sunset Boulevard where you drive in through a gate.

"Hitch was charming. Congratulated me on the scripts I'd done for the half-hour Alfred Hitchcock Presents shows, personally made me a scotch and soda and sat me down with my yellow pad.

"I wouldn't trade the hour that followed for anything I can think of at the moment... The man was BRILLIANT. He fucking dictated the script to me--shot by shot, including camera movements and opticals. He actually had already SEEN the finished film. He'd say, for example, 'The camera's in the boat with the boy and the girl. The move in is very, very slow--while we see the mossy side of the wrecked schooner. Bump. Now the boy climbs the ladder. I tilt up. i see him look at his hand. Something strange seems to have attached itself. He disappears on deck. I'm shooting through this foreground of--of stuff--and I'm panning him to the cabin door. Something there makes him freeze. He waits. Now the camera's over here, and I see the girl come to him. Give me about this much dialogue, Stirling.' He holds up his hand, thumb and forefinger two inches apart. I jot down--'Dialogue, two inches.' As I say, the whole goddamned film--shot by shot, no dialogue--just the measurements of how much dialogue in the entire short story. It's all introspection and the memory of horror, and the writer didn't want to spoil it with dialogue. Lotsa luck, screenwriter. 'Give me two inches of dialogue right here.'"

Wolf Rilla obit from The Independent:

Piccadilly Third Stop (1960) was a disappointment, a routine tale of an embassy heist, but it was followed by his finest film (the first of two for MGM), Village of the Damned, with Rilla extracting every chill to be found in Wyndham's eerie tale of a country village where 12 of the women are impregnated while asleep - it is theorised that the aliens deposited the children in the women's wombs, the way cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of host birds. Although the children are lovingly raised by the women, it gradually becomes apparent that they are wicked beings with plans to take over the planet. Rilla said,

What interested me was not to make a fantastic film but a film that was very real. To take an ordinary situation and inject extraordinary events into it.

The children's power is first indicated when one of the babies compels his mother to put her hand repeatedly into boiling water because she has given him a bottle that is too warm. Costing only $82,000 to make, the film grossed $1.5m in the US and Canada alone. "That film has become a classic," said its star Barbara Shelley a few years ago: It's shown - I've never been invited - in places like Brazil; I know that Wolf Rilla goes off, all expenses paid, as the director.

Its minimal budget meant that special effects were few, but particularly unsettling was the way the children's eyes glowed when they were using their powers. "Beware the eyes that paralyse!" warned the advertisements. Tom Howard, a photographic effects specialist, created the effect by cutting a negative print in over the positive, turning the irises nearly white. The children's leader was effectively played by young Martin Stephens, now an architect and meditation teacher, who later described Rilla as "a very good director. A very clear director, and a patient one." Rilla said later, in conversation with his former child actors,

People always ask how did I get such good performances out of you lot. Simple - I asked you to do nothing except be still and stare. Children fidget and are never still, and I wanted you all to be absolutely still and steady and just stare. Very unchildlike, and, of course, very unsettling.

The Mating Season (1951)

Thelma Ritter:
Ritter did stock theater and radio shows early in her career, without much impact. Ritter's first movie role was in Miracle on 34th Street (1947). The 45-year-old made a memorable impression in a brief uncredited part, as a frustrated mother unable to find the toy that Kris Kringle has promised to her son. Her second role, in writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's A Letter to Three Wives (1949), also left a mark, although Ritter was again not listed in the credits.

Mankiewicz kept Ritter in mind, and cast her in his All About Eve the following year. An Oscar nomination led to popularity, and a second Oscar nomination followed for Mitchell Leisen's' classic screwball comedy The Mating Season (1951) starring Gene Tierney, John Lund and Miriam Hopkins. Ritter enjoyed steady film work for the next dozen years. She also appeared in many of the episodic drama TV series of the 1950s, such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, General Electric Theater, and The United States Steel Hour.

Throughout her career, Ritter was nominated for an Academy Award six times giving her the dubious honor of being nominated for the award the most times without a win (tied with Deborah Kerr). She co-hosted the Oscar ceremony in 1954, trading wisecracks with Bob Hope.

The diminutive, gravel-voiced Ritter gained great acclaim as a premier character actress, known for her comic timing and sassy one-liners. She was most typically cast as the sardonic, seen-it-all housekeeper who saw through her boss's vanity and frequently told him or her so. But she was also fiercely protective, and neither trusted nor tolerated fools or con men. Ritter would trade on this irascible screen persona for the rest of her life.

Her unsentimental, hard-boiled fatalism could be used in other ways. In occasional non-comedic turns, she projected an unglamorous world-weariness, notably in Pickup on South Street (1953). In this film, she gave a touching and believable performance in her climactic scene opposite a communist spy (played by Richard Kiley) who has come to kill her: she knows she cannot stop him, but she is determined to let him know her contempt for him and all his kind.


Some of her best-known roles include Bette Davis's devoted maid in All About Eve (1950), as Gene Tierney's maid/mother-in-law in The Mating Season (1951), James Stewart's nurse in Rear Window (1954), and as Doris Day's housekeeper in Pillow Talk (1959). Her turn in John Huston's The Misfits (1961), where she played opposite Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, also garnered favorable reviews.

Dangerous Beauty (1998)

Wikipedia on Veronica Franco:
In 1565, when she was about 20 years old, Veronica Franco was listed in Il Catalogo di tutte le principale e più honorate cortigiane di Venezia, which gave the names, addresses, and fees of Venice's most prominent prostitutes; her mother was listed as the person to whom the fee should be paid. From extant records, we know that by the time she was 18, Franco had been briefly married and had given birth to her first child; she would eventually have six children, three of whom died in infancy.

As one of the più honorate cortigiane in a wealthy and cosmopolitan city, Franco lived well for much of her working life, but without the automatic protection accorded to "respectable" women, she had to make her own way. She studied and sought patrons among the learned. By the 1570s, she belonged to one of the more prestigious literary circles in the city, participating in discussions and contributing to and editing anthologies of poetry.

In 1575, Franco's own volume of the poetry was published, her Terze rime, containing 18 capitoli (verse epistles) by her and 7 by men writing in her praise. That same year saw an outbreak of plague in Venice, one that lasted two years and caused Franco to leave the city and to lose many of her possessions. In 1577, she unsuccessfully proposed to the city council that it should establish a home for poor women, of which she would become the administrator. By then, she was raising not only her own children but also her nephews, who had been orphaned by the plague.

In 1580, Franco published her Lettere familiari a diversi, "Letters written in my youth," which included 50 letters, as well as two sonnets addressed to King Henry III of France, who had visited her six years earlier. We have little information for her life after 1580. Records suggest that she was less prosperous in her later years but was not living in poverty. However, she published no more writings.

Summertime (1955)

The Crimson Pirate (1952)