First, I must confess to a long history of abandoned blogs under various names. I mean, it's fantastic to be into typewriters and want to talk about them, but how long can that last? Sure, I have dozens of them...but after a few pictures and samples of type, where do you go? Nowheresville, that's where...and that's not even a place. So it was a while before I thought about doing another blog. I still have the typewriters and still enjoy them, but my interests widened. I developed a taste for old pulp magazines. They're great, but they're quite expensive and they fall apart in your hands. Besides, I stopped buying stuff from Ebay and Etsy completely, so there's really not much chance I'll be acquiring more of them any time soon. Where does that leave me? What else are my interests?
Well, there's one.
Look, I grew up on movies and TV. I was a huge comics fan and I was crazy about Star Wars and the '70s Incredible Hulk show. It was great. Then. I became an adult, and Marvel movies became a thing and Star Wars made a huge comeback. Geeks everywhere celebrated, but I didn't. I realized that I'm not a geek. Or at least not that kind. I don't care about The Big Bang Theory or any sci-fi or comics fan culture. I'm way past all that. It means nothing to me anymore. I haven't watched any of the TV shows that people tell me to. In fact, my wall-mounted flat screen TV gets very little use unless I turn to Turner Classic Movies. More often than not, unless there's some crappy Italian horror movie or incomprehensible Bergman film on, TCM is my cable channel of choice. They have the movies I like. The 1930s Warner Brothers titles.
Now, I don't just limit myself to just Warner Brothers. I love the Marx Brothers, Wheeler and Woolsey, Abbott and Costello, and the Three Stooges also. I love the Universal monster flicks and the poverty-row cheapo ripoffs with Karloff and Lugosi and Atwill as well. I love them all...but I always go back to the Warner films, because that's where my friends are.
In the studio system days, contract players worked constantly, and they showed up in almost every configuration. Paul Muni and Glenda Farrell starred in the tense crime drama I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang one year and the featherweight newspaper comedy Hi Nellie! the next. Some actors (like Allen Jenkins or Joan Blondell) made ten pictures a year. We'll get into all of that later, though.
Years ago, I got to the point where everyone was talking about the latest junk coming out of Hollywood and rushing to it like it mattered. I haven't even been in a movie theater in seven years because there's nothing coming out I want to see. Do I care to see the latest Marvel movie? No thanks. How about Star Wars? Like there's a difference. Not for me, not anymore. Am I bitter and cynical? I try not to be. But Hollywood has gotten that way. Maybe it always has been, but I haven't always been aware of it.
Currently, I have about 500 movies on my hard drive. With a few exceptions, none of them are newer than 1955. I remember a time when TV stations played movies all night. Some were crappy, mind you, but there was no internet to distract you. There were no infomercials, no satellite radio, no smartphones, just you and the night. I miss that time. It can't return, really, or can it? If you have 500 movies in a folder, can't you just get VLC player to play them in random order and have movies all night long? You can. I can. And I do.
My friends never let me down or disappoint me, because they're all long dead. Paul Muni died in 1967, the year I was born. Glenda Farrell died in 1971. Joan Blondell died in 1979. Allen Jenkins died in 1974. You know what Allen's last role was? He was the old telegraph operator in the final scene of the 1974 Lemon/Matthau remake of The Front Page, and he died months before it was released. I know Joan Blondell was in Grease in 1978, but I don't want to see my friends get old and sick. I'm not focusing on that at all.
In my view, the 1930s were the best decade for movies, and that will be the bulk of what I discuss here. We'll definitely dip into the 1940s for sure, and touch on the 1950s, but that's about as far as it goes. We're not at all limited to Warner Brothers, either, as many of their stars broke away and went elsewhere. And there were some great films made by other studios who had their own stable of contract players. It's a rich tapestry. I don't consider any of this ironic, by the way, and I'm not a hipster looking to make fun of bad movies. I may not love every one of the films I talk about, but I do love old movies. Besides, a true hipster would never admit it.
We have to start somewhere, so the first three films I talk about will encompass the classic 1930s era of film, roughly 1931-1941. Oddly, they're all the same movie...sort of. First, I'll discuss the original 1931 film version of The Maltese Falcon, with Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels. Second, I'll look at the 1936 remake of that film, Satan Met a Lady, with Warren William and Bette Davis. Third, I'll peer into the 1941 re-remake of the very same film, The Maltese Falcon, with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor. And, while I am reviewing a very famous film here, I will assure you that I'll not look at any color or technicolor films, and certainly not Gone With the Wind or The Wizard of Oz. That's not what we do here.
Now, once I view these films again, I will begin. Expect posts no more than a few times a week, by the way. I also have a full-time job in the food-service industry and a part-time job pretending to be a writer. At the rate I procrastinate and put things off, it could take years to watch all these movies, but I'll get to them sooner or later. And that's a guaranteed promise...whatever that means.
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