The Art of The Big Sleep: French Style

The U.S. posters for the original release of this noir classic were surprisingly ugly, mostly big splashes of pink with black letters and poorly chosen photographs. But several other countries got it right. Here's an especially cool one from the French release.

Nick Charles Meets Philo Vance

A very cool 1934 trailer for The Thin Man.

Davy Meets The Thin Man

I’ve seen this movie too many times to count, but Davy caught it for the first time the other night, and hoo-boy was he impressed! He saw Nick Charles as a sort of 20th Century version of himself, a good-natured, wise-cracking hero in a fedora instead of a coonskin and packing a .38 instead of a longrifle. And he claims Myrna Loy is the spitting image of his Polly. If he second wife Elizabeth had looked like Myrna, says he, he might never have run off to the Alamo. Now I’ll have to show him the whole series.
Not that I mind, of course. Unlike most films, where once is plenty (or sometimes too much), these are movies I never tire of. It’s like listening to some of my favorite songs. They just seem to get richer and better with each playing, until every note is ingrained in my brain. There comes a time, of course, when I never have to play those songs again, because I can play them in my head whenever I want. But that hasn’t happened yet with the Thin Man movies, and ain’t likely to.
This serves as a reminder it’s time to read the book again, which I admire at least as much as the movie. As I haven’t had a case of Hammettmania in several years, I only recently heard there’s a previously unpublished, earlier draft of the story now in print. That certainly merits investigation. And there’s all those great Continental Op stories waiting for me in my old Dell Mapbacks. And all that stuff by Jonathan Latimer, Frederick Nebel, Norbert Davis, Carroll John Daly, Cleve F. Adams, Robert Reeves, Howard Browne, Richard Sale, Robert Leslie Bellem and others I have in storage. Could be it’s time for hardboiled revival in general. I have a feeling Davy will enjoy it.

The herald below has some fun stuff in the fine print. Click on the photo to see the BIG version.

John Wayne Westerns Pt. 3: Texas Cyclone

Texas Cyclone (1932) was hardly John Wayne’s finest hour. But at least he didn’t have to play a corpse as in The Deceiver, or spend much of the movie in jail as in The Range Feud (both 1931). In the months since The Range Feud he’d had another small part in a football drama, appeared in two short subjects and starred as a carnival stunt pilot in the 12-chapter serial The Shadow of the Eagle. Now here he was back in a minor role in a B-Western, backing up Col. Tim McCoy. After snagging second billing behind Buck Jones in The Range Feud, he’s knocked down to fourth, and instead of playing the hero’s stepbrother, he’s merely one of several pals from Texas.

As the posters proclaim, Texas Cyclone belonged solely to McCoy. On the 1-sheet McCoy’s face is as big as King Kong’s, and on the 3-sheet he towers over the landscape like Paul Bunyan. John Wayne is just a name in the fine print. Wayne finally got his revenge in a foreign DVD release, where he’s the star.

As the story opens, McCoy wanders into a town where everyone seems to know him, mistaking him for a man five-years dead. Even the dead guy’s wife is fooled. The widow, of course, is losing her cattle to rustlers, so Tim calls in Wayne and his other Texas pards to help. Violence ensues, and there’s a big twist at the end to make everyone warm inside. Walter Brennan is on hand as the sheriff. Wayne reportedly didn’t like Tim McCoy, but I like him just fine. He always has a twinkle in his eye, and the way he shoots a pistol--by pointing the gun barrel straight up, then snapping his wrist forward as he fires--just has to make the bullets go faster.