Kick-Back Friday: November 2009 Archives
Murder, My Sweet (1944): Hungry for clients, private dick Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) gets tangled up in two seemingly disconnected investigations. Based on Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely.
You won't find harder-boiled flashback narration. To wit:
I just found out all over again how big this city is. My feet hurt. And my mind felt like a plumber's handkerchief.
I don't get the simile either; but the phrase sounds oh-so-noirishly right.
HT: KTG
The Wages of Fear
, or Le salaire de la peur (1953): One of 2 signature movies from Henri-Georges Clouzot. (The other is Diabolique.)Stuck in a South American shit-hole, 4 ex-pats vie for a highly lucrative job of trucking nitroglycerin for an exploitive American oil company. After a very leisurely European start, the pace intensifies as the freelance truckers haul the explosive over roads that are actually worse than the Illinois Tollway system. With Yves Montand.
N.B. William Friedkin directed the not-so-iconic 1977 remake, Sorcerer.
Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 (2008): A simplistic, but still engaging, account of a(n) historic football game between the unbeaten teams of Harvard and Yale in 1968.
Spearheaded almost exclusively (or at least apparently almost exclusively) by Harvard grad Kevin Rafferty (The Atomic Cafe), the documentary cuts simply between quaint archival game footage and current head-shot interviews of the seminal players—nearly all of whom are sufficiently articulate and suitably reflective. They are Ivy League grads, after all. Moreover, they attended school when proper emphasis could be placed on the components of "student-athlete."
A surprising exception is actor Tommy Lee Jones, former Harvard offensive tackle, who is something short of reticent in his interviews. But one of the most entertaining participants, perhaps inadvertently so, is former Yale linebacker Mike Bouscaren, who evidently likes to remember himself as the team enforcer. Bouscaren's amusing attempt to take credit for inuring Ray Hornblower, Harvard's star halfback, reminds us: Before you brag, know what's on film.
