I'm going to talk about this movie in the podcast this weekend, but here's a preview of this weird and wonderful musical directed by Jacques Demy and with music by Michel Legrand. Chanson des Jumelles.
Berlino - Appuntamento per le spie - a.k.a. Spy In Your Eye. This one has it all, bionic eyes, chicks, knife-throwing assassins. What more can you want?
Kiss The Girls And Make Them Die a.k.a. Se tutte le donne del mondo (1966) Starring Mike Connors who went on to make the cool private eye TV series Mannix a year later. The banana symbolism in the trailer seems a bit overt...
Operation Kid Brother a.k.a. O.K Connery was a spy movie starring Sean Connery's brother Neil and a number of actors from James Bond films. Adolfo Celi, Bernard Lee, Lois Maxwell and Daniella Bianchi. Neil was an okay looking guy, but not as charismatic on screen as Sean...
The Venetian Affair was a solid spy thriller starring a post-Man From Uncle Robert Vaughn, Boris Karloff, Felicia Farr and that delicious addition to many eurospy movies, Elke Sommer.
Mission Bloody Mary was a 1965 spy movie starring American actor Ken Clark as Dick Malloy Agent 077. I have two of the Dick Malloy movies, and they're interesting in a low budget way.
Try some Eurospy movies if you can find them. They're an interesting moment in cinema history, an offshoot of Bondmania which has literally hundreds of examples to explore. I'd also recommend buying the Eurospy Guide from Amazon.com as a great reference for this subgenre of exploitation films.
In this podcast I look at soundtracks including the works of John Barry, Monty Norman, Lalo Schifrin, Piero Umiliani and Curtis Mayfield. I also bring in the fourth of my alternative Magnificent Seven Action film stars of the 1950s-1960s.
Dolores Gray from "It's Always Fair Weather" singing "Thanks A Lot But No Thanks". Her fake-sincere and smarmy Madeline Bradville is one of the highlights of this sometimes forgotten but interesting musical. Dolores was also one of the inspirations for the drag artist John Epperson aka Lysinka who was in the Paul Schrader directed fantasy telemovie Witch Hunt.
Here's Dolores Gray in Kismet Baghdad has changed a little since those days...
Bob Fosse as the Serpent in The Little Prince. See where Michael Jackson got some of his moves?
One of the ABC Mystery Movies of the early 1970s, Banacek starred George Peppard as Thomas Banacek, a freelance insurance investigator based in Boston. Along with his chauffeur Jay Drury (Ralph Manza) and his bookstore owner friend Felix Mulholland (Australian born Murray Matheson)he investigated 17 mysteries which seemed impossible. From a football player who vanishes in the middle of a game to an experimental car that was stolen from a moving train. This show was witty, the plots ingenious and Peppard's dead-pan playing of the title character makes the show much more amusing than a lot of contemporary tv fare.
Here it is, a little late but better than never. In this webcast I look at the recent deaths of Richard Widmark, Jules Dassin and Charlton Heston, take a look at the Michael Powell/ Emeric Pressburger propaganda flick 49th Parallel and revisit some childhood nostalgia thanks to Ray Harryhausen and a trip to The Valley of Gwangi.
One of the great women of 20th Century cinema would be celebrating her 100th birthday if she hadn't, to quote Al Pacino in Dick Tracy, said goodbye to oxygen. Here's a little youtube goodness to celebrate a real chick with attitude and style... who inspired a million drag queens.
I'll be talking about these two guys in the podcast this weekend. Above, is Richard Widmark's landmark psychopath Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death. Below is a youtube tribute to Jules Dassin, director of Rififi, Topkapi, Night and the City, Never On Sunday et al.
Don't get scared, I'm not dumping this blog or the podcast, but there are movies I like that don't fit into the format for Paleo-Cinema, so during a couple of idle hours I created Skiffy Films Blog, a blog dedicated to science fiction and fantasy films. One of the reasons is that over at Skiffy I can talk about recent movies whereas here I'm deeply doing deeply retro nostalgia.
So go over there, bookmark the link or subscribe to the RSS feed. Enjoy!
