CineSavant
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break
If Larsen E. Whipsnade ever laid eyes on Harold Bissonette, his mouth would water. Bissonette, a mild-mannered grocer for whom no good…
Articles by Charlie Largent
CineSavant
Al Adamson: The Masterpiece Collection
The titles grab you by the collar like a desperate carny barker – Psycho A Go-Go, Blood of Ghastly Horror, Satan’s Sadists…
CineSavant
Alice in Wonderland
Written by Harvey Kurtzman with art by Jack Davis, Mad‘s 1954 parody of Alice in Wonderland stands as a succinct critique of…
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Destry Rides Again
America’s favorite boy next door meets the Weimar Republic’s preeminent vamp in George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again. James Stewart plays Tom Destry,…
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The Bat
Released during the dog days of summer in August of 1959, The Bat was an air-conditioned summer treat for the eight year-old unprepared…
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Reflections in a Golden Eye
“There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed.” That’s an oddly detached way to…
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Alastair Sim’s School for Laughter
Ronald Searle published his first St. Trinian’s cartoon in a 1941 issue of the English humor magazine, Lilliput. The sketches, done in…
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The Head
A scientist who operates out of a starkly Modernist laboratory of glass and steel, Dr. Ood comes from a long line of…
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The Great Gildersleeve Movie Collection
Like the transition from silent movies to the talkies, the progression from radio to film was a rocky road for some performers.…
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The Uninvited
The story of a lonely young woman and the ghosts in her life, Dorothy Macardle’s Uneasy Freehold was published in 1941 and…
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Murder, He Says
The Snopes family were a collection of Southern-fried scoundrels introduced by William Faulkner in 1940’s The Hamlet—over the course of three novels…
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The Mad Magician
For Vincent Price, revenge was a dish served cold and in 3-D. In 1954, just a year after his three-dimensional rampage in…
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Hammer Volume Five – Death and Deceit
Indicator delivers another in their long line of fan-friendly box sets with Hammer Volume Five - Death and Deceit (a subhead that could be…
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Whisky Galore!/The Maggie
Film Movement, a self-described “film service” that traffics in esoteric theatrical and home video product has released two notable examples of post-war…
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The Great McGinty
If the story of a unscrupulous crook who rises to great political power hits a little too close to home these days,…
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Two on a Guillotine
Imagine shock-meister William Castle directing a Disney movie and the result might be something like Two on a Guillotine. William Conrad, narrator of…
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The Oscar
Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success is a great movie with two career-best performances from Burt Lancaster as a malignant gossip columnist…
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Night Tide
During the early fifties, an anxious era that leaned on fanciful songs like Faraway Places, Beyond the Sea and Robert Maxwell’s Ebb Tide, Curtis…
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Viy
Anything can happen in a horror movie and that was one of the reasons despots from Stalin to Khrushchev banned the genre…
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Cobra Woman
In the early 40’s Universal Pictures was still best known for its shadowy black and white horror shows. That all changed in…
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The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh
One part Walt Disney, one part Patrick McGoohan – a bittersweet recipe if ever there was one. The notoriously brusque Irishman was…
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The Pumpkin Eater
In the fall of ‘64, while Hollywood was gently satirizing the battle of the sexes with Send Me No Flowers and What…
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Abbott & Costello – The Complete Universal Pictures Collection
Two footloose Jersey boys with no particular place to go, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello finally found themselves – literally and figuratively…
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The Magic Sword
Fresh off producing and directing Tormented, a mildly lurid psychological shocker released in 1960, Bert I. Gordon pointed his next film in…
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Konga
Like any actor worth their salt, Michael Gough contained multitudes. And so did his fans – from the West End to 42nd…
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Spirited Away
The story of a lonely child lost in a beautiful and bizarre dreamscape, Spirited Away naturally begs comparison to Alice in Wonderland…