Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Friday Watch Party: This Gun For Hire (a Noirvember/ Veronica Lake 100th B-Day Celebration 2-fer)


POSTPONED TO Friday 11/18/2022

Noirvember is underway!  We'll have our first Noirvember screening by pairing it with a celebration of Veronica Lake, who would have turned 100 on November 14th of this year.  

This is sort of proto-noir, but plays with a lot of the ideas that would inform characters and movies after the war.  It also has so many great talents, from Lake to Ladd to Cregar.  Also, a cat.  You'll be glad, I tell you.  GLAD!

So join us for some WWII-era moralizing, bare witness to the first pairing of Lake and Ladd, and see what the fuss was about Lake.*  And what a hundred movies and pulp novels would borrow when it comes to loner hit-man types in the years to come.

Day:  Friday 11/18/2022
Time:  8:30 Central/ 6:30 PM Pacific
Service:  Amazon
Price:  $4

(link live 10 minutes before showtime)



*she is very, very, very good looking

Noir Watch: Tension (1949)




Watched:  11/15/2022
Format:  TCM Noir Alley
Viewing:  4th?
Director:  John Berry

I've already seen this and written it up a few times, including in 2021.  

So here's several pictures of Audrey Totter in the film.









Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Holmes Watch: Enola Holmes 2 (2022)





Watched:  11/14/2022
Format:  Netflix
Viewing:  First
Director:  Harry Bradbeer


One of the side-effects of streaming 99% of what I see is that movies are far less of an event.  There is no comparison between what I would do and think about en route to see Avengers: Endgame and choosing Enola Holmes 2 (2022) as prime time viewing on a Monday night.  

It is unlikely I would see a spin-off Sherlock Holmes movie on my own dime, but I did watch the first Enola Holmes, enjoyed it enough, and was game for the sequel.  Had I returned to the original and were my memories of it particularly intact?  Absolutely not.

But it is interesting to have a 2-hour option with a considerable budget, a solid cast and whatnot when the movie was never released theatrically.  It's not merely content - it is a movie into which care and love was poured.  It could have been released to screens and drawn some small box office (and I wonder sometimes if Netflix will one day partner with AMC or something and just make releases like this a thing they do as a matter of course to earn a few extra bucks).  It has actual stars.  Henry Cavill probably should have been a bigger big screen star than the DC movies and pandemic allowed, and it's time for Millie Bobby Brown to be tested as a young woman on screen. 

But those theatrical models may now be completely exploded and irrelevant.  So this is sort of the face of what movies are now.

Monday, November 14, 2022

Veronica Lake at 100



Today marks the 100th Birthday of Veronica Lake, actor, singer and performer.  

Though her career in Hollywood was brief, and - by all accounts - something she was never all that interested in, Lake starred in and helped make a handful of films that are considered among the canon of Hollywood classics, including Sullivan's Travels, I Married a Witch, This Gun for Hire, The Blue Dahlia, The Glass Key and others.  

It's highly likely that even if you never saw any of those movies, you've seen Veronica Lake's picture included in some constellation of 1940's-era Hollywood stars or mentioned here or there.  Or recall that Kim Basinger was supposed to resemble her closely in the film LA Confidential (ymmv whether this is accurate).  You may only know the swooping blonde wave that was her trademark, partially obscuring her face, which has become a curious and continuing symbol of sexiness that's endured well past Lake as household name.  I mean, of the Voltron-like assemblage of 1940's sex and glam ideas that informed Jessica Rabbit, that swoop was there.  

In the films in which I've seen Lake (all of those lifted above) you immediately understand how she became a star.  Physically, she's the combination of beautiful and striking that the camera tends to love and, the moment they enter the frame, you know something about the character.  There's not really a thread for you to say "oh, that's a real Veronica Lake-type role", but the sly smarts she brings to each character, and wise-to-the-world knowingness works exceedingly well in her noir appearances.  In the two comedies, she's absolutely game for some heavy lifting to get the job done.  

For a brief time, Lake was very popular.  So much so that the government asked her to change her hairstyle to encourage young women to follow suit as - and as far as I know this is true - they were getting their hair caught in the machinery they were now working as part of the WWII industrial machine.  


Lake's life was deeply complicated by virtue of a controlling mother and the studio trying to run her life.  The best way to hear about it is via the You Must Remember This episode on the the topic.  After leaving Hollywood, she disappeared into obscurity only to be re-discovered by an intrepid reporter who found her working as a cocktail waitress.  Following this, she did see an uptick in public sentiment and was promoting her memoirs when she was diagnosed with issues stemming from her years of alcoholism and passed in 1973, at about 51 years of age.  

Some talent want the Hollywood life and stardom, some want to work as much and hard as they can, and some wind up in front of the camera seemingly by mistake and indifferent to the whole affair.  And all of them can be amazing on screen, and all of them can vanish on different timelines and a variety of reasons.  I don't think there's any particular motivation or background that matters much once the klieg lights are thrown on and the camera is in focus.  In the case of Lake, everyone but her may have wanted to see her on screen.  But once there, she had the charisma to make up for anything she lacked in theatrical training and the natural energy that the audiences adored.  

Anyway, we'll be watching one of her first big roles on Friday with The Gun For Hire, her first of several pairings with Alan Ladd, and a great crime film.