They Drive By Night (1940), Raoul Walsh.

Get off me, you road slobs! 

What a flawed movie!  With the choice of George Raft or Humphrey Bogart, they go with expressionless George Raft as the lead.  The plot is about thirty minutes late to show up to the party, as is larger-than-life character actor Alan Hale.  Then to top it off, the entire last hour is a rip off of  Bordertown (1935).  

Raft and Bogart are brothers driving transport trucks (34,000 lbs max capacity!) hauling fruit up and down the California coast.  They are trying to scratch out a living independently, too proud to work for their major competitor Carlson (Alan Hale). But when Bogart is injured, Raft is forced to work for Carlson.  He finds it a much easier lifestyle except for Mrs Carlson (Ida Lupino), who will do anything to get into disinterested Raft's pants.   Mrs Carlson seems to crack up when she realizes Raft is about to marry his fiancee, played by Ann Sheridan.

As well as lifting its story directly from Bordertown, this film feels like an uninspired effort from an otherwise top-notch team (director Walsh, and a great cast).  But wait, many of the same folks were going to crank out another one with Manpower (1941), also very similar in tone (although I actually prefer Manpower - more fist fighting and weirder romance).  It's refreshing to see the celebration of blue-collar guys with regular jobs in film, but at this point Warner seems like it was stuck in a rut!

Tall, Dark and Gruesome (1999), Christopher Lee.

Estelle Marie Carandini and Geoffrey Trollope Lee

This is Christopher Lee's parents, in the only photo he ever knew of wherein they were photographed together.  It was taken before the First World War.  Incredible!  As are bits of this little book, but I thoroughly enjoyed it nonetheless.  Now having read Lee's autobiography, things make a little more sense to me.  Lee's mother was an Italian countess, his father a military man and athlete.  Public-school educated (if not top-rate public school), Lee's father disappeared out of his life relatively early and the family fell on increasingly hard times.  His mother married a banker, but his fortunes faltered.  Yet Lee seems to have been buoyed through life by wealthy connections and by the skills he cultivated that today seem lost and forgotten: social golfing, an appreciation of live classical music performances, the art of conversation.

And Lee readily admits:  he's a bit of a chatterbox.  He enjoys a good story and has plenty to tell.  Paragraph after paragraph has a punchline.  Whose life is a series of events that end in punchlines?  If not consistently light-hearted, Lee's anecdotes are fascinating.  As a child he was roused from sleep to meet the assassins of Rasputin.  He was the first Allied soldier to enter the Vatican during the war, allowed to browse the masterpieces in solitude.  He got a lot of good advice on how to manage passionate female fans from Errol Flynn.

Tall, Dark and Gruesome is heavy on the British slang (the American edition I read would hard bracket translations for all the obscure lingo).  Plenty of this is army slang, as in "jankers" (punishment) and, even better, "Egyptian PT" translated here as "forces slang for sleep, because they saw the Egyptians as having a rather relaxed view of life"!  Hammer fans will only get a slight glimpse behind the curtain of Hammer movie-making as in his telling, these experiences are not those that figure most prominently in his life.  He didn't mind a good remake, which Hammer did twice very well, but very much disliked making endless sequels.  Fair enough!  He does have the kindest words for Peter Cushing, calling him "the gentlest and most generous of men."

Lee has lived so long he had to write a second edition in 1999 (the book was first published in 1977).  And so we don't even make it to The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars II:  Attack of the Clones (both 2002) (during which when I saw it, a friend prayed as we watched him zipping around on some kind of ridiculous hover bike, "Please Lord, don't let this be the magnificent Christopher Lee's last role").  He's currently filming more Hobbits.  Astounding!

Christopher Lee with wife Gitte on their wedding day.  To the left is Sir Richard Jackson, then President of Interpol whose words to the groom were:  "Look after this girl, or it's 50 lashes!"

The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983), Michael Weldon.

Having devoured the New Yorker's excellent sci-fi issue (June 4, 2012), I had to run out and buy the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.  In his highly enjoyable Personal History segment "A Psychotronic Childhood: Learning from B-movies," Colson Whitehead describes the book as "proof that even the most unlikely idea had a chance," inspiring him to write his own fiction.  Colson, raised on Z-grade movies aired on TV (pre-VHS, people!) by parents who refused to filter their son's viewing experiences, recalls writing a book report on the novelization of Videodrome for an eighth grade assignment.  He described "Debbie Harry's character jabbing a cigarette into her boob as foreplay" and got an A!  Awesome!  Such exuberant dedication to dreck inspired me to check out his sources.

Like Colson, I hope to check-mark my way through Psychotronic Encyclopedia.  The title comes from Weldon's attempt to fuse weird horror and sci-fi but he later learned the term had already been used as the title to a film about a psychic barber (The Psychotronic Man, 1980).  The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film might really be something best appreciated by a certain generation of film lovers.  I was too young to remember TV pre-VHS.  This was back when TV aired a grab bag of movies and if you were lucky enough, you might catch something unique but then again you might never see it again.  In a strange way, Weldon reminds me of someone entrusted to carry a torch, bringing knowledge from a place of darkness.

I also think maybe I am from the wrong generation to give a crap about some of the type of movies covered in Psychotronic, such as the Elvis and Gidget flicks.  Sure, I'll read about them but there's something that just feels so sealed off and "done" about these gimmicky vehicles.  Maybe I'm just treasure hunting after the weird.  I'd never heard of this made-for-TV movie called The People (1972), even though it stars William Shatner:  "A teacher in a small California town (Kim Darby) discovers the locals are peaceful aliens with powers of ESP and levitation."  Whoa!  Where can I find that?  Oh.  On Amazon, apparently.

This book was sent to me in record time by www.awesomebooks.com - good job, guys.  Is the UK mail system ever better than ours.  Even better, it came with the previous owner's bookmark:

Front

Back

This looks like a little high school love note, and just feels like the right thing to arrive with my new-to-me Psychotronic Encyclopedia.

The Flying Serpent (1946), Sam Newfield.

The Flying Serpent

The screenshot above is quite a bit like a blurry Nessie snapshot, but this was never Producer Releasing Corporation's intention.  This is simply what a a terrible print of a grade-Z 40s flick looks like.  The Flying Serpent is a remake of The Devil Bat which was a huge hit for PRC.  George Zucco, who starred in countless poverty row movies but also had a brief career in serious theatre, takes the lead here (Bela Lugosi had it in Devil Bat) as mad-scientist and controller-of-beasts.  The Flying Serpent has zero budget so get ready for the same old painted backdrop over and over and over and a dull cast punctuated with embarrassing efforts at humour.  For your viewing pleasure:  the acting achievements of all those who have gazed on the Flying Serpent!

Not gazing at The Flying Serpent.  Smug reporter pulling superior, semi-interested face for his interview subject.

The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964), Don Sharp.

Christopher Lee as Captain Robeles, soldier of fortune, shooting one of King Philip's men.

The Devil-Ship Pirates has a great premise:  as the Spanish Armada's strength weakens in its attack on England, a Spanish ship washes up on England's shores in battered condition.  To save their skins and buy time to repair the ship the Spanish lie to the inhabitants of the little coastal village, telling them Spain has triumphed and that they are obligated to feed and house the Spanish and rebuild their ship.  This little scenario, dreamed up by Hammer writer Jimmy Sangster, provides enough tension and action to propel the cast through the film's 86 minutes.  As Christopher Lee stalks into the village with his misfit crew (all slathered in brown face paint, a particularly uninspired decision by wardrobe) the village quickly divides itself into camps:  those who wish to please their new masters at any cost (village squire), those who will do anything to avoid a violent confrontation (village pastor) and the rest of the folks who remain skeptical of the Spaniards' message. 

Ernest Clark as Sir Basil Smeeton (with feathered hat), the village turncoat. I particularly like the little kid in the red fez, who, in a bid to get into the shot leans against child actor Michael Newport who actually has a few lines. Nicely done, anonymous extra.

Although the costumes, sets and props all look as though they were borrowed from the local high-school drama club Hammer Films did spring for a full-scale model of a ship which was plunked into a boggy creek for the whole shoot.  This allows for some good cannon action but also becomes a concrete reminder that the pirates are stranded and vulnerable.  Christopher Lee is acceptable if a bit monotone as Captain Robeles but the red tights he wears certainly emphasize his stork-like legs as he leaps about in sword-fighting scenes.  Not a bad effort for a cheapie.

Suzan Farmer, as Angela Smeeton, has decided to join the resistance.