Third Eye Cinema / Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine podcast

Week 111 (11/30/23): Take a Bite of the Rotten Apple - NYC cop/crime films of the 70s

Tonight, we’ll be talking a set of films that almost form a genre of their own.  

These films were often, though not always, “respected” by critics and the general public at large, but all bore that dark, almost despairing claustrophobia and realistic feel of what I and others were living every day out on the streets locally, far from the dayglo nonsense of the 60’s reruns or the sunnier Hollywood based fare of the day.  

The streets were crowded, filthy, filled with the detritus of the post-hippie era – the junkies, the odd artsy types, the gangs, the whores.  The days where you were damn glad to see Curtis Sliwa’s Guardian Angels on a subway…if you were crazy enough to use them at all. Everything covered in graffiti, buildings collapsing into tenements, crack houses, illicit hookup spots for rough trade cruising types.  Garbage in the streets, and decay in every sense of the word.  

These are films that wallow in what in later years would be referred to as urban blight, but not so much “celebrating” as providing a window into all the palpable danger and decline of an impoverished post-blackout Manhattan in the days after the Watts and Newark riots, not long past Ford telling the mayor and city to go screw ourselves when asking for Federal relief.  

These were the days of Studio 54, CBGBs and the original Saturday Night Live – but filled with menace. Hard drug use was rampant.  Muggings were so commonplace as to be a shrug of the shoulders.  Nobody in their right mind stepped into Central Park after sunset.  Washington Square was known for decades as Needle Park.  And the East Village?  Forget about Alphabet City, the Bronx or Brooklyn.  

This was a special breed of film, that focused on crooked, flawed cops working outside a busted system…but not with the heroic vibe of Reaganite action heroes.  These guys paid for painting outside the lines.  The denouments were never triumphant, all victories were pyrrhic.  Vigilante justice and community action were about as fantastic as these films got, and as close to actual comeuppance as anyone got.  

This is the story, in a way, of our childhood and early youth to young adulthood, as told in some very memorable films.

So join us as we go dumpster diving in the back alleys of most dangerous of neighborhoods, only here on Weird Scenes!

Week 111 (11/30/23): Take a Bite of the Rotten Apple - NYC cop/crime films of the 70s

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Take a Bite of the Rotten Apple - NYC cop/crime films of the 70s

 

Week 110 (11/16/23): Cary Grant

Archibald Alec Leach was born in Bristol, England at the turn of the century, January 18, 1904 to a tailor and a seamstress.

A theatrical tour of NYC led him to emigrate at the ripe old age of 16, where he became a vaudeville song and dance man on the same circuit as the likes of the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello and Ted Healy and his Stooges.

Moving to Hollywood at the height of the Depression, he wound up cast as handsome young men and rich playboys in a handful of Marlene Dietrich and Mae West films, the latter of which elevated him to leading man status.  

But it wasn't until the rise of the screwball comedy that he truly made his mark, starring in several of the best known entries thereof.  A long run of similar if, by the late forties, increasingly inferior efforts was salvaged by four well regarded films for the great Alfred Hitchcock, which subverted his image in favor of a darker, more realistic persona.

These quartet of roles almost led to his casting as the first James Bond in Doctor No, but he would only commit to one film in what was always intended as an ongoing series...and the rest is history.

After a handful of interesting if decidedly flawed oddities, he finally retired from film in the mid 60s, leaving behind more of a unique character and persona than there ever was a consistent body of work to be remembered by...those Hitchcock films aside.

So join us as we take on the inimitable Cary Grant, only here on Weird Scenes!

Week 110 (11/16/23): Cary Grant

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Week 109 (11/2/23): Crimenaux ala Francais - Crime The French Way

The French crime film is different from those of other countries for several reasons.  While some, certainly Jean Dellanoy's Soleil Des Voyeux (aka Action Man) draw elements from the German Krimi and the George Nader Jerry Cotton films and even the serial (particularly those of Feuillade, whose Fantomas and Les Vampires remain surprisingly gripping and modern in feel and approach), the overarching vibe is less that of contemporaneous American crime films or Italian poliziotteschi than it is, as you might expect from the nation that coined the term, the American film noir and gangster pictures of the late 30s and 1940s.

And as with the idiosyncratic and often groundbreaking critics turned directors of the Nouvelle Vague, the French crime film less pays strict homage to than integrates the driving elements and visual aesthetic of American noir in a more contemporary sense, improving and updating them to something more suited and appealing to a modern audience: think much venerated names like Jean Pierre Melville, Rene Clement, Georges Lautner, Jean Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon.

So join us as we discuss one of the most notable and influential genres of its type, the French Crime film, only here on Weird Scenes!

Week 109 (11/2/23): Crimenaux ala Francais - Crime The French Way

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Week 108 (10/19/23): Hide in Plain Sight: the Life and Career of Rock Hudson

Roy Harold Scherer Jr. was born smack dab in the middle of both the Roaring 20’s and the country in Illinois, Thanksgiving of 1925.

Of all the gay and bisexual actors and actresses we’ve covered, Hudson was easily the most elusive and convincing in his career long presentation as a very straight screen idol and leading man. While known to many in Hollywood circles, his private life only came to public light over three decades into his career, when he was one of the earliest celebrities to openly discuss his being stricken with AIDS.

A naval veteran and strangely enough, a lifelong Republican and de facto Goldwater Girl (!) he pursued his dream of acting despite a pronounced and career long difficulty in remembering lines, being rejected from drama school and wasting no less than 38 takes to deliver a single line in his first onscreen role – a testament to his All American good looks and winning personality, to be sure.

After being signed to Universal, he was cast in several forgettable and forgotten cheesy period westerns, pirate and supposed adventure films before landing industry attention with his Oscar for the execrable James Dean/Elizabeth Taylor melodrama Giant.  But it was with his oddly fortuitous pairing with Doris Day and neurotic comic relief sideman Tony Randall in a series of fluffy and decidedly conservative romantic comedies at the end of the 1950s that he truly attained marquee leading man status.

Going on to star with Italian sex symbols Gina Lollobrigida and Claudia Cardinale, as well as other attempts to replicate the Hudson/Day formula with lesser lights like Leslie Caron and Paula Prentiss, Hudson began to tire of these sort of light comedy roles, moving to television for the highly enjoyable and well remembered McMillan and Wife alongside the equally loveable Susan Saint James and gay icon (and Rosie the paper towel lady!) Nancy Walker 
for a several season, nigh-decade spanning run.  

His latter roles tended towards the decidedly idiosyncratic: John 
Frankenheimer’s existential paranoia opus Seconds, Alastair MacLean’s flawed if enjoyable Cold War spy film Ice Station Zebra, Roger Vadim’s sexploitation slasher/comedy Pretty Maids All In a Row, entertaining disaster epic Avalanche and the pensive meditation of a miniseries that was The Martian Chronicles.

So join us as we take on the All-American leading man who hid a surprising edge behind the surface veneer, the one and only Rock Hudson, only here on Weird Scenes!

Week 108 (10/19/23): Hide in Plain Sight: the Life and Career of Rock Hudson

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https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/09456286-8956-4b80-a158-f750f525f246/Third-Eye-Cinema-Weird-Scenes-Inside-the-Goldmine-podcast

Week 107 (10/5/23): Still a Bit of a Lad: The Bumpy Career of Hugh Grant

Hugh John Mungo Grant was born at the start of September, 1960, Live at Hammersmith, London to a Highlander turned carpet salesman and a music and multilingual language teacher.

A  1st XV division rugby player with a background in English literature who turned down an offer for a PhD in art history at London University, he instead took up drama at Oxford.  Kicking off his career in Merchant Ivory stinker Maurice, he got his first major role in Ken Russell's Lair of the White Worm, followed by a headlining turn in Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon before striking 
international box office with Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Splitting his career between twee faux-arthouse fare like Sirens, Sense and Sensibility and The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain and more populist roles in comedies like Notting Hill, Small Time Crooks, Love Actually and the Bridget Jones films, Grant would often strike gold with rom com fare like Two Weeks Notice and Music and Lyrics before a lengthy hiatus 
from film peppered with occasional guest roles ranging from the highly entertaining The Man From Uncle and the pandering Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

A noted curmudgeon and on-set perfectionist, Grant has a notedly embattled relationship with the tabloid press, and was a major player in stopping the detestable Rupert Murdoch and the practice of celebrity phone tapping.  And who can forget the whole Divine Brown affair?

Join us as we take on the loveable and eternally youthful in spirit Hugh Grant, only here on Weird Scenes!

Week 107 (10/5/23): Still a Bit of a Lad: The Bumpy Career of Hugh Grant

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https:// (open.spotify.com) /show/4s8QkoE6PnAfh65C5on5ZS?nd=1

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/09456286-8956-4b80-a158-f750f525f246/Third-Eye-Cinema-Weird-Scenes-Inside-the-Goldmine-podcast