Month: August 2022

New Jersey trucking magnate Danny DeVito arrives in Hollywood determined to make it big writing scripts for television. Despite being turned away by almost all the major networks, he manages to sell a series and make it big with the help of his girlfriend Rhea Perlman, an underappreciated employee at the biggest ratings company. As director, DeVito plays to his strengths here and he works delightfully with wife Perlman. It offers plenty to amuse with its occasionally scathing view into the television industry, especially when the networks had more power. 

At her father’s diner in the Arizona desert, Bette Davis falls in love with intellectual drifter Leslie Howard, but their romance is short lived when Humphrey Bogart uses the diner to hide from the police with his gang. I liked the setting, but Howard comes across as so spineless that it’s hard to see him as a love interest even when stuck in Nowheresville Arizona. The usually formidable Davis is similarly soft which leaves Bogart to carry the bulk of the film in a rather small role though Genevieve Tobin offers a moment or two of poignancy in her roles as one of the additional hostages. 

During the murder investigation of the titular character, a pregnant, mixed race woman who was passing herself as white, a number of suspects come to the forefront, including her white fiancé Paul Massie and his disapproving family. After seeing him in They Gotta Have Us and The Message, I had been looking at the filmography of Earl Cameron, who plays the woman’s darker skinned brother, and was intrigued by its exploration of race relations that weren’t American-centric. Cameron is strong in a rather small role, but the film remains interesting as a way to see racism that is very different but also quite the same as the American variety. The character of Sapphire is only seen as a corpse or in pictures but she lives and breaths in the reactions of her death by everyone who knew her.   

A meteor lands on earth containing an amoebous alien substance that consumes humans whole, growing larger and more aggressive with each meal. The only witnesses to this creature are a group of teenagers who struggle to convince their town of the danger. I adore these 1950s sci-fi horror films and this one is definitely a classic. Who cares if the ‘teenagers’, including Steve McQueen in one of his earliest roles, are in their late 20s and that the snail-paced villain, at least in its earliest stages, is hard to find scary? It’s got a bopping intro song and a scarily prescient final lesson. I only wish that there was even more scenes with the Blob.