True/False 2025: True Crime

Director Charlie Shackelton was careful to note that The Zodiac Killer Project (2025) isn't really about the Zodiac Killer when he took the stage at True/False. He's not wrong. Zodiac is a bit of a straw man here. Instead, the film takes aim at True Crime as a genre, by detailing how a film about the Zodiac Killer might have been assembled if Shackleton had managed to secure the rights to the book he wanted to use as a framework. He failed at that, and instead skirts around the copyright as he points out how true crime is constructed for an audience even without any primary footage to boost his case.

Read more below the fold >>

Matchstick Women

Hollywood history is filled with bad takes. The most famous is probably the assessment of Fred Astaire after his first screen test at RKO: "Can't act. Can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little." That's so breathtakingly off the rails you just have to hang your head and laugh. It makes director Mervyn LeRoy's opinion of Bette Davis look positively even-handed. He didn't think she could act. His conviction in this was so strong that he actively marginalized her part in their only film together, Three On a Match (1932). In his defense, Davis was about ten or twelve films away from stardom at that point, with her roles in pre-Code films being almost entirely marginal. She was often grossly miscast. It's not for nothing that Robert Aldrich cribbed footage for Baby Jane Hudson's adult career in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? from Davis's pre-Code film, Ex-Lady and Parachute Jumper, both made after Three On a Match. Perhaps on the advice of Davis herself, Aldrich picked those two films as her very worst performances. How much of this is on Davis and how much of this is on her earliest directors is open to debate, but it's hard not to cringe at her Southern accent in Parachute Jumper. What is most surprising about Three On a Match, then, is not that it squanders Bette Davis. She was consistently being squandered in her early films. Rather it is surprising that it also squanders its ostensible star, Joan Blondell. Blondell was top billed, and the film is categorically slanted toward her character and her rise from streetwise reform-school kid to high society paramour and wife. But LeRoy had eyes for his third lead actress, Ann Dvorak, who seizes the film away from her costars with a twitchy descent into degradation of the sort that would eventually ignite Davis's own stardom in Of Human Bondage two years later. Dvorak devours her part, vacillating between amoral social climber to reluctant kidnapper to trapped gangster's accomplice to strung out coke fiend. LeRoy abets her performance by filming her in the style of a madwoman from some silent melodrama.

Read more below the fold >>

Favorite Stars in B Movies Blogathon: The Narrow Margin (1952)

The Narrow Margin (1952, directed by Richard Fleischer) was completed in 1950, but wasn't released by RKO Pictures for another two years. When a studio shelves a film for two years before releasing it, that ordinarily means that the powers that be have no faith in the project or that the studio is going through some kind of transition at the top. It's almost never a good thing for the picture and it is often an omen portending a financial or critical disaster. In the case of The Narrow Margin, however, RKO and its then-owner Howard Hughes felt that the film was too good to waste on non-bankable actors. Hughes wanted to remake the film with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell. At some point, he had the film delivered to his private screening room where according to legend, he promptly forgot about it. And there it sat for two years. When it finally saw release, it proved to be RKO's biggest money-maker of 1952, a turn of events enhanced by the film's minuscule $230,000 budget, which was small even by 1950 standards. Hughes's instinct about the film was correct. It was good. Damned good. While it might have worked just fine in color with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, it's hard to imagine such a film bettering Fleischer's film or improving on the hard-boiled performances of perennial B-movie actors Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor. This was born to be a pulpy B-feature, one of the best of its kind, and it needed those pulp actors to give it just the right flavor.

Read more below the fold >>

Cops and Robbers

James Cagney in G-Men (1935)

While I was discussing gangster films with my long suffering partner a couple of nights ago, I asked her to name a famous bank robber off the top of her head. Her response was "Bonnie and Clyde." She could have named John Dillinger, I suppose, or Pretty Boy Floyd, or maybe even D. B. Cooper, but the thing about all of these names is that they are in the past, and all of them have been subsumed into American folklore. There have been countless films about these characters. The lion's share of these people lived during the Great Depression, and one of the reasons that they became famous, became folk anti-heroes of a kind, is because the economic calamity following the Wall Street crash of 1929 undermined the faith in American capitalism. Banks were villains to most folks. For a brief period, the idea that the United States might follow Russia into communism was more than just a leftist fantasy. It's more difficult to name famous bank robbers who worked after the Great Depression, because America successfully engineered a stable capitalist society from the New Deal and demonized bank robbers in films. Apart from D. B. Cooper, who is mostly famous because he was never caught and who remains an enigma, I couldn't name you a bank robber who worked during the last fifty years. Willie Sutton is probably the last great bank robber of the public imagination, mostly because he was famously quoted as robbing banks "Because that's where the money is." It's harder to rob banks these days, and most transactions are electronic anymore, but the twilight of bank robbers as folk heroes happened long before the advent of digital money.

Read more below the fold >>

A Dragon and His Wrath

Thou hadst been better have been born a dog
Than answer my waked wrath! 

--Williams Shakespeare, Othello, Act III, Scene III

---

Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen was one of the last films I saw before the Covid pandemic closed the theaters. That film was pretty good, and on brand for Ritchie who has always been a deft hand at the achronological semi-comic crime thriller. The theaters are open again, finally, and I've been vaccinated against the virus, so I finally returned to in-person movies at a goddamn theater on Memorial Day, 2021, after the longest absence from moviegoing in my entire long life. As it so happens, the film I chose to see is another Guy Ritchie film: the doom-haunted Wrath of Man (2021), and it suggests that Ritchie could dispense with shit like live-action Disney remakes and King Arthur rehashes and spend the rest of his career playing variations on crime cinema. On the evidence, he would never exhaust the possibilities of the form. Wrath of Man is as different a film from The Gentlemen as you can imagine for being essentially the same damned thing. Like The Gentlemen, it pulls its central events apart and rewinds through multiple perspectives to view them from an cubistic perspective: every side all at once. Both of them are crime films. But where The Gentlemen is nimble and fairly light, with jokes aplenty, watching Wrath of Man is like watching a tornado approaching your house and you're in its path without a storm shelter. The gloom is only the precursor to the calamity. It's a stone-faced revenge tragedy that doesn't bother with niceties like humor or sympathetic characters. Its protagonist isn't a hero so much as he's an elemental force. He most reminds me of Clint Eastwood's revenant gunslinger in High Plains Drifter. But even that film cracked a smile once in a while.

Read more below the fold >>