Postcard of the Week #13

Poster of the Week #13

Click on the poster if you're interested in
purchasing a copy or to check out our gallery on

On the Newsstand - December 1954

Postcard of the Week #12

Poster of the Week #12

Click on the poster if you're interested in
purchasing a copy or to check out our gallery on

Chris Connor Sings Gentle Bossa Nova

One favorite album I never thought would see the light of day on CD was Chris Connor's Bossa Nova album from 1965. But it's recently been released and available on Amazon, albeit from a label I'm not familiar with, but the sound is great. Click on the image for more info.

On the Newsstand - November 1954

Postcard of the Week #11

Mad Women

Mad Men with a gender twist, you could call the new offerings this Fall from NBC and ABC, which attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the AMC series. Whereas Mad Men focuses on the male-dominated world of advertising in the 1960s, Pan Am (ABC) and The Playboy Club (NBC), give the women more play. Like Mad Men, both shows are set in the early Sixties, but seem to be more focused on the exclusively female world of stewardess and Playboy bunnies.

I haven't seen the networks jump on period pieces like this since 1974 when they were all scrambling to get out shows set in the 1950s after the success of movies such as American Graffiti, The Lords of Flatbush, Let the Good Times Roll and the Broadway show, Grease. If looking back to what happened in the mid-70s is any indication of what's to come, we can expect a whole lot more. Although most of the TV shows set in the 1950s were short-lived, there were quite a few including Happy Days, Sons and Daughters, Laverne and Shirley, M*A*S*H, The Cheerleaders, The California Kid (TV movie) and James Dean (TV movie), not to mention all the 50s-set theatrical releases that followed.

The Playboy Club debuts Monday, Sep 19, 10 pm, NBC
Pan Am debuts Sunday, Sep 25, 10 pm, ABC

Poster of the Week #11

Click on the poster if you're interested in
purchasing a copy or to check out our gallery on

On the Newsstand - October 1954

Postcard of the Week #10

—And the Girl Screamed

—And the Girl Screamed by Gil Brewer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had very low expectations of this one going in, what with a two star rating on GoodReads and all, but was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't that bad after all. Hell, I'll take bad Brewer over the best of some authors from the same time period.

Like most Brewer novels this one is short (144 pages) and fast-paced. The timeline of —And the Girl Screamed (1956) is a mere 36 hours or so following the dismissal of a police officer as unfit for duty, the result of gunshot wound that left his right arm crippled. What follows is a series of misadventures that result from the ex-police officer being consistently in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person, namely the wife of the police department's resident counsel who was one of the men who decided his future with the department.

View all my reviews

Leave Her to Heaven (What is Noir?)

When I read the book Leave Her to Heaven by Ben Ames Williams, which I picked up at the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco a few years ago, I thought it would be kind of a cross between Laura and Bedelia, two books by Vera Caspary. In fact it came out in 1944, the year between those two books and was the seventh best-selling novel of that year and although it shares a lot of the same plot elements as those novels, I thought it superior to both, but those books I would consider noir fiction where as Leave Her to Heaven was pure melodrama. The only crime in the book would be called manslaughter at best and there is a lot of the Freudian psychology popular at the time, though the femme fatale was a cold-hearted bitch very reminiscent of Caspary's Bedelia and as ruthless as any in hardboiled crime fiction.

Then I saw the movie that was made the following year (1945). It would be nearly impossible to classify it as noir. Just the simple fact of its being in color disqualifies it from being noir, I believe. Which left me pondering the definition of noir fiction and film noir, so I decided to take a Freakonomics-style statistical approach to answering the question of what noir is.

First we need look at what most aficionados and film critics think of as noir--it's urban in setting, has crime as a subject or backdrop, it's shot in black and white and it was made in the 1940s or 50s. Using the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), we can get data on two of these categories for all the movies tagged as "film-noir"--the release date and whether the movie was shot in black & white or color. By eliminating results more than twice the standard deviation from the norm or in this case the peak of film noir popularity you pretty much end up with a group of films that everybody would consider noir. In fact, you come up with some intriguing results

Doing a search on IMDB for films tagged with "film-noir" you come up with 485 feature films, of which only 13 are in color. That means that 97% of the films tagged as noir are black and white and if you've seen some of the color films such as Leave Her to Heaven and A Kiss Before Dying you know instinctively that they aren't noir, so the percentage is even higher if you were to weed out results based on the other factors such as crime or the urban setting.

Now let's look at the distribution of films over the years that noir was popular and you find that the peak years for the genre was 1947 to 1950 in which 38% of all noir films were released and that 97% of all films tagged noir were released between 1940 and 1958. It's also interesting to note that 98% or these films were produced by the US or Britain and that the most popular tags for these movies were "beautiful woman" (364) and "murder" (277).

I've not actually seen a color film pre-1958 that I thought stylistically fits the genre. But not being color is the least of the disqualifying aspects of the movie Leave Her to Heaven, though. It's not urban. It's shot mostly in the daylight, outdoors and--the most disqualifying point of all--it's not really a crime film. The screenwriter seemed to overlook the fact that the crime for which one of the characters goes to jail for at the end or the movie was actually written out of the script leaving many a viewer, I'm sure, scratching his or her head at the end.

Poster of the Week #10

Click on the poster if you're interested in
purchasing a copy or to check out our gallery on

On the Newsstand - September 1954

Black Wings Has My Angel

The cult classic Black Wings Has My Angel (1953) by Elliot Chaze is now available in an inexpensive hardbound edition from a company called Bruin Books. For those fans of pulp fiction who haven't read it because they've been unwilling to shell out hundreds of dollars for a rare Gold Medal original or limited edition reprint, this book is welcome.

Haven't heard much about it lately, but there is or was a movie of this book in the works, produced by Elijah Wood. If that actuall happens we can probably expect a movie-tie in paperback, which is the only way a big publisher would be interested in this title, since it's in the public domain. Licensing a tie-in from the film producers would give a publisher some exclusivity it wouldn't otherwise have.

If your interested in purchasing a copy from Amazon, just click on the image or the tile above.

Postcard of the Week #9

Mel Tormé on Capitol

Fans of Mel Tormé might not know that his two Capitol Albums from 1969, Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head and A Time for Us, though they never appeared on CD, are available for digital download at on-line retailers such as Amazon and iTunes for less than $10.

If you're a fan of Capitol's Ultra Lounge series, you might recall that three cuts from these albums were featured on the On the Rocks CDs. But the irony of the On the Rocks CDs was not lost on us. For those of you who aren't familiar with them, they were kind of "golden throats" compilations that culled music from the "now sound" albums of stars such as Peggy Lee, Julie London, Wayne Newton, The Letterman and the execrable Mrs. Miller singing sixties pop in order to appeal to younger audiences. We'll take it however Capitol wants to package it, just don't be disrespecting Mel.

For a quick link to these albums on Amazon, just click on the album art above.