Matinee Memories

One of the joys in checking out the availability of movies on YouTube and streaming sources is the stumbling on to something new to the viewer's experience. For this writer it was in discovering that AGGIE APPLEBY, MAKER OF MEN, a play by Joseph Otto Kesselring of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE fame, was made into a 1933 movie several years prior to the author's first draft of ARSENIC emerging from the typewriter. As Kesselring's other works that made it to the stage were nowhere nearly as successful as ARSENIC, this production of AGGIE APPLEBY, MAKER OF MEN, written by other hands, offers some insight into Kesselring's exploration of Great Depression social conditions in comedic terms. Not that AGGIE APPLEBY, MAKER OF MEN, is a lost film or even one overlooked in its day. It was in fact routinely reviewed by newspaper critics and has gained something of a reputation as an example of the freer examination of contemporary mores before the Production Code stifled more adul...

THE MOVIE MONSTERS OF UNIVERSAL STUDIOS, by James L. Neibaur. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017, 213 pages. $38 (hardcover), $36 (e-book). While the field of book-length studies of the iconic monster films produced by Universal Pictures between the 1930s and '50s is a crowded one, James L. Neibaur proves there's always room for one more with a fresh viewpoint and solid observations about what makes those flicks great and what doesn't. THE MONSTER MOVIES OF UNIVERSAL STUDIOS is written with the assurance of a devotee, but one who can view them dispassionately and be unafraid of calling them out on their defects -- not there are that many, in this reviewer's humble opinion. "The monster movies ... have extended beyond the context of the era of their release and have lived on over time and generations," Neibaur rightly contends in explaining the book's thesis when it comes to the Universal classics. "The iconic characters and enduring sto...

Much has been written about DETOUR, Edgar G. Ulmer's next production for Producers Releasing Corp., since its initial release. By then World War II was over and U.S. movies were again being exported to Europe. DETOUR was among the new releases the French moviegoing public and its critics saw, earning it an early reputation as a seminal film noir because of its closeness in spirit to French cinema's "poetic realism" that emerged in the '30s, considered by some examples of noir thinking in the years prior to the war. Indeed, the closing thoughts of DETOUR's central character, Al Roberts (Tom Neal), forever served as a direct example of the noir experience: "This I know -- at any time, fate can put the finger on you for no reason at all." Because of all of the critiques and literature about DETOUR, there will be no attempt here to dissect its meanings beyond the contention that it is Ulmer's masterpiece for the studio, a triumph of the minimalis...

Edgar G. Ulmer's next directorial effort and more overtly auteur production for Producers Releasing Corp., BLUEBEARD (released Nov. 11, 1944) remains a distinctive piece of cinema both for the contributions of the director and the studio. It was a clear indication of PRC's move toward quality while still releasing such projects as Sam Newfield's THE MONSTER MAKER and NABONGA that year, the kind of bread-and-butter pictures that paid the bills and allowed production chief Leon Fromkess to indulge the company's efforts to upgrade its image (however, THE MONSTER MAKER deserves its share of praise as a genuinely unsettling horror flick and an indication of Newfield's often-smothered directorial talent).  Although Ulmer had proven himself to be a quality filmmaker in tight circumstances with his mixed bag of output ranging from broad comedy to South Seas adventure, he was also getting a shot at projects that were more to his liking, with BLUEBEARD marking the beginni...