By David in TN
friday, october 17, 2025 at 5:41:00 p.m. edt
TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Hugo Fregonese's Black Tuesday (1955) with Edward G. Robinson, Peter Graves, Jean Parker, Milburn Stone, Warren Stevens, Jack Kelly, Sylvia Findley, Vic Perrin and Hal Baylor.
Film Noir Guide: "Convicted Murderer Robinson, with help from his moll (Parker) and gang member (Stevens), escapes from death row minutes before his scheduled execution, taking along fellow inmate (Graves), who has two hundred Gs stashed away from a bank heist."
"They take hostages--the prison chaplain (Stone), a newspaper reporter (Kelly), a guard (Baylor), a prison guard's daughter (Findley) and a doctor (Perrin) to treat the wounded Graves--and hole up in a warehouse, where they try to fend off cops."
"A throwback to the 1930s gangster genre, Black Tuesday is fast-moving and exciting, with Robinson giving a volatile performance as the psychopathic rackets czar with seventeen murders to his credit."
TCM has one rarely shown Saturday evening at 6:15 p.m. ET, The Last Run (1971), with George C. Scott as a former mob driver living in exile in Portugal who decides to do one more job. It was Scott's first film after Patton.
That's two movies in 1955, in which Peter Graves played a robber with a huge stash of money hidden away. The other was the James Agee-Charles Laughton-Davis Grubb masterpiece, The Night of the Hunter.
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5 comments:
A good one. I disliked seeing Eddie in milksop roles in things like WOMAN IN THE WINDOW and SCARLET STREET (Claude Rains got stuck with a lot of those type of parts as well), and it was nice to see him back as a tough guy. Director Hugo Fregonese was married (for a while, anyway) to one of my favorite ladies, Faith Domergue. Lucky bastard!
-RM
(ZH)There has been a 28% drop in theatrical releases since 2019 and a 25% drop in scripted TV projects.
The vast majority of film and TV media are shot in the greater Los Angeles area due to proximity to studios, editing facilities, effects houses and actor pools. A drop in Hollywood and LA production indicates decline in the film industry as a whole. The plunge in activity coincides with the overall drop in box office receipts since 2019.
GRA:What's gone wrong:
Young people(under 30)haven't seen five good movies in the last 15 years.
No great(White)actors--replaced.
Soundtracks--composers and lyricists went extinct(due to lack of interest by the movie bigwigs)
No all White movies anymore. To see blacks co-starring with Whites is a turnoff for audiences. Hollywood is trapped by their new rules about black quotas in movies.
Why spend money on films that will lose money?
Thirty years ago,if you went to a movie,I would never see a black in the theater--it was safe. NOW,with integrated films--or more likely,a 2:1 black over White actor ratio,a theater might have black thugs(with guns)in the crowd. You don't know.
Westerns,comedies and war movies disappeared--they starred Whites.
Expensive to go to. Why spend $20-$40 at a theater to not be entertained?
Celebrities have been replaced by everyday tiktokkers--who THINK they're talented--but are not.
That's what we're stuck with in October 2025.
--GRA
Well, the last new movie I saw in a theatre was BATMAN in 1989 (I know I've probably said this before, but where DOES the time go?). Even then I was getting fed up with people talking (or laughing inappropriately) during the movies, and I almost got into a fight once with some people who came late and sat right in front of me- in an empty theatre! I'd hate to imagine what it would be like now with people on their phones. Besides that, I can't begin to conceive of sitting through COMMERCIALS on the big screen- with our current garbage culture of blasting mechanical drumming, freakishly ugly people, distorted images, gays and minorities, and despicable useless products. And besides THAT, the movie soundtracks must be deafening, with booming bass and random noises mixed in for their own sake, and besides THAT, repulsive actors who may not even be identifiable as men or women, and besides THAT, they're not even "movies" anymore- they're digital videos!
Yeah, it should all come to an end.
-RM
I know I saw Bruce Willis' last "Die Hard" movie. Also,"War of the Worlds"(Tom Cruise)and the Indiana Jones flick(not last year's,but the previous one). Before those,I went fairly often,pre-2005. I saw (2003's)"Something's Gotta Give" with Nicholson and Keaton.Back in the 80s and 90s,it seemed I went once a month.
--GRA
TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Boris Ingster's Southside 1-1000 with Don DeFore, Andrea King, George Tobias, Morris Ankrum, Robert Osterloh.
Film Noir Guide: "T-man DeFore goes undercover to break up a counterfeiting ring led by King and her underlings (Tobias and Osterloh). Ankrum plays the gang's master engraver, 'a model prisoner whose mainstay is his bible,' who works on counterfeit plates in his San Quentin cell and smuggles them out with an unwitting minister."
"The overly long (but wonderfully camp) prologue takes the viewer from World War I to the Korean War, before finally making the point that the American dollar is our most important product and that 'a counterfeiter is more than a criminal--he's a saboteur.'"
"The title refers to the telephone number of the Secret Service ('the watchdogs of the American dollar'). Despite the hokey narration, Southside is surprisingly entertaining, thanks in large part to a first-rate performance by King as the icy femme fatale who makes the deadly mistake of falling for a good-looking fed."
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