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.   

Newly appointed sheriff Pat Garrett, portrayed by James Coburn, is forced to bring down his old friend Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson). Circumstances lead me to watching both the preview and special editions of the film, which is definitely an interesting way to compare a director’s vision with that of people less connected to the production. While the cast is strong and I enjoyed Bob Dylan’s soundtrack here, I realized that I find myself more disconnected from revisionist Westerns than the classic Hollywood versions. The revisionists are definitely more gritty with no real good characters, but they don’t feel any more realistic to history than the glossy, moralistic stories of the past.