Festivity, Revels, and Nocturnal Dalliances
In the 1950s, film began to move away from romantic or bombastic orchestral scores and toward a more varied landscape. One of the styles that started making its mark on cinematic soundtracks during this period was jazz.
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A pioneering work of “space age pop,” Music out of the Moon was a collaboration between arranger Les Baxter, composer Harry Revel, and theremin player Samuel Hoffman.
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Langston Hughes’ autobiography, The Big Sea, deserves to be counted among the great works of travel literature. Also, there is Jocko the monkey.
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World Without End is an action-packed, low-budget blend of HG Wells’ The Time Machine and Planet of the Apes, which it predates by many a year. That’s time travel for ya.
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When people imitate hardboiled fiction, they’re imitating Mickey Spillane. Every sentence is boiling over with hate and disgust. Every thought is of violence.
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Kim is the sort of hardboiled detective story that the pulp paperback industry could produce in its sleep, peppered with enough fist-fights, shoot-outs, and sex to keep the slim volume well-packed.
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Indiana Jones and the Peril at Delphi is the first in a series of Indiana Jones novels, published after the movies and relaying the adventures of Indy as a young man during the 1920s.
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On the Cultural Gutter, Gil Gerard wakes up in the future and teaches its inhabitants how to get down in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
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In October of 1938, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Amid this air of paranoia, Orson Welles stepped behind the microphone for another broadcast of a radio drama, CBS’ The Mercury Theatre on the Air.
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Donald E. Westlake, best known for his “Parker” series of thrillers, was hired to write a James Bond movie. In the end, the script was not used, but Westlake reworked the story into an original novel.
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For every Martin Denny , there were dozens of other, independent musicians plying their trade in exotica, with strange, stunning, and spooky results. It is these musicians that Technicolor Paradise celebrates.
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These days, Bullitt‘s reputation is built almost entirely on the exhilarating eleven-minute car chase. Even people who have never seen the movie have seen or heard about that scene.
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A day spent puttering around the coast and canals of Key Largo on board the actual boat from one of my favorite films, John Huston’s The African Queen.
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Power pop fans sometimes try to swell the ranks of their chosen obsession by widening their nets to include within it acts that are not necessarily deserving of the label. Take for example, The Quick.
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A washed-up, alcoholic superhero must pull himself out of depression to defeat Christopher Lee in one of cinema’s first deconstructions of comic book superheroes. It also happens to be a musical.
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