Kick-Back Friday: July 2008 Archives
Reportedly one of Dustin Hoffman's favorites, Straight Time (1978) also features newbies Gary Busey (before he went absolutely meshuga), Kathy Bates, and Theresa Russell, along with M. Emmet Walsh. Rock on, casting director Dianne Crittenden.
Hoffman, playing lifelong con and current parolee Max Dembo, tries to make it—as the film title indicates—legitimately.
A wonderful girl's movie: I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) with Wendy Hiller. Any heroine whose lifetime mantra is the movie title is bound to be sidetracked on the way to her wedding in the Hebrides. Enjoy the lilt of the occasional, impenetrable Gaelic and look for a brief appearance by 12-year-old Petula Clark.
Poster image from Wikipedia and reproduced under fair use law.
Big man Laird Cregar is The Lodger (1944), a weird and weirdly sympathetic Victorian boarder, who may or may not be Jack the Ripper. The film's merits rest largely on Cregar's layered performance, along with the dramatic black-and-white photography of Lucien Ballard and the set design of a perpetually foggy London town.
Poster image from Wikipedia and reproduced under fair use law.
What else? Yankee Doodle Dandy starring New York boy, James Cagney, with songs by (who else?) George M. Cohan (along with Rodgers and Hart [see below]). The backstage story of the theatrical Cohan family, told in flashback by George M. to FDR, is directed by one of the great, immigrant, studio-contract directors, Michael Curtiz (The Adventures of Robin Hood, Mildred Pierce, Casablanca).
When we finally see Cagney's Cohan play FDR in "Off the Record," the President not only walks, he dances:
When I was courting Eleanor, I told her Uncle Teddy,
I wouldn't run for President, unless the job was steady.
Don't print it. Strictly off the record.
