Word: villains
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...Majestic Theatre at Pomona (pop. 900), 30 km inland from the Sunshine Coast. And on most of those nights, Ron West has provided the silent movie's voice on his Wurlitzer pipe organ, playing swirly harp sounds when the heroine swoons, shifting to a sinister key when the villain appears, and pulling up short when the hero reins his horse...
...Mann villain didn't need glassware to express his animosity, not when crockery was available. In a famous scene in Railroaded!, Burr is in a nightclub when he gets some bad news; just then, a woman happens to graze him and spill her drink. A low-angle shot shows Burr smoldering for a moment; impulsively, he picks up a flamb? dish and throws it at her. She screams in shock and agony. As a sudden spasm of scalding viciousness, this scene is up there with the hot-coffee clash in The Big Heat...
...villain holds our interest, and some sympathy, in He Walked by Night, it's the heroes who reclaim the limelight in Border Incident, the first film Mann made for MGM after his very productive stint at Eagle-Lion. It's essentially a remake of T-Men: two agents go undercover in the underworld; one dies. Pablo Rodriguez (Ricardo Montalban) has come from Mexico to join U.S. Immigration official Jack Bearnes (George Murphy) with the intent - get this - of stanching the flow and exploitation of illegal farm workers coming up from Mexico. Pablo will pretend to be a bracero looking...
...Hammer, Collins argues, was "perhaps the first widely popular antihero: a good guy who used the methods of the bad guy in pursuit of frontier justice, a vigilante who spared the courts the trouble of a trial by executing the villain himself." The jolt this character gave to literature, by being both so brutal and so popular, was immediate and lasting. "We were a very puritan nation right up through the 1950s," says novelist Loren Estleman. "I think it was people like Mickey Spillane, getting out there and effectively butting his head against the wall that made those walls collapse...
...Some things Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides kept from the book: a secret message from a dead woman; a scene where Mike slams a desk drawer shut on the fingers of a suspect; the slapping around of an Athletic Club guard; and the ultimate villain (who goes up in flames). But they changed the Mafia to an, I don't know, atomic-weapons gang. It's as if the Rosenbergs didn't give the Russians the plans for a bomb but the bomb itself. They also perverted the relationship of Hammer and his police buddy, Pat Chambers. Wesley Addy...