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Four Noirs for Free I may have mentioned this around these parts before, but there are few things more frustrating to a classic film lover than to read a glowing recommendation about a movie that they’re unable to find. Well, the Noir Nook doesn’t go for frustration, so this month, I’m serving read more

In a quaint English village, people are sitting in a parlor by the fire doing what proper Brits do: elegantly smoking and drinking tea. It’s all so genteel inside, yet outside the situation is dire as “The Earth Dies Screaming.” That’s the excellent name of a 1964 film that is much quieter read more

Silver Screen Standards: The Big Clock (1948) Time looms over us all, but not as literally as it does over Ray Milland in director John Farrow’s fascinating noir, The Big Clock (1948), which features Milland as a magazine editor framed for murder by his powerful tycoon boss. With its emphasis on read more

Classic Movie Travels June: Helen Chandler Helen Chandler Helen Chandler was born on February 1, 1909, in New York, New York, to Leland and Frances Chandler. Across different census records and documents, her year of birth, however, has been widely disputed, documented as 1906, 1909, and 1911 read more

Pioneertown As longtime readers of this column will be aware, one of my favorite pastimes is to visit Western film locations. I recently had the opportunity to visit Pioneertown, located in California’s Yucca Valley, roughly 16 miles from Joshua Tree National Park. Pioneertown is read more

Silent Superstars: The Enigmatic Greta Garbo Greta Garbo Of the many talented and charismatic 1920s female stars, there were perhaps few who inspired such rapturous fan magazine articles as Greta Garbo. Motion Picture Magazine once declared: “Everyone feels, without being able to explain read more

13 Things You May Not Know About The Killers (1946) Ask any noir fan for a list of their favorite films from the classic era, and The Killers (1946) is likely to appear. It’s a stellar example of this shadowy period of filmmaking, featuring such noir tropes as the femme fatale, the hapless fallen read more

Thoughts of flying saucers and alien invasions make me nervous. Though intrigued by the concept enough as a kid to watch movies and read books on the topic, the fact that flying saucers could be real freak me out. (I remember reading War of the Worlds when I was about 10 and pulling the shade dow read more

Dr. Morbius, Mr. Hyde, and “Monsters from the Id” I happened to watch both the 1941 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the 1956 science fiction classic, Forbidden Planet, in the last few weeks, and the thematic overlap between the two movies inspired me to think about the ways in which read more

Classic Movie Travels: Marcia Mae Jones Marcia Mae Jones Marcia Mae Jones was born on August 1, 1924, in Los Angeles, California, to William and Margaret Freda Jones. She was the youngest of four children, with siblings Margaret, Macon, and Marvin. When Jones was two years old, she made he read more

Western RoundUp: Apache Rifles (1964) Over the last few years I’ve periodically reviewed new-to-me Westerns with one of my favorite Western stars, Audie Murphy. Previous Murphy Westerns reviewed in this column are Destry (1954), Seven Ways From Sundown (1960), Hell Bent for Leather (1960 read more

Ten Things You May Not Know About Sunset Blvd There are numerous noirs that I could among my favorites, and countless features from the era that I watch over and over again. Sunset Blvd. (1950) fits both of these descriptors. As one of the film’s reviewers raved, it’s “undoubtedly the best read more

One of nature’s most powerful killing machines is loose. Not only is it the deadliest in its class, but the fastest, too. Beyond its physical abilities are its lethal personality traits: it is unpredictable, paranoid and deadly aggressive. That’s the key to the 1981 British horror thriller Venom read more

Silver Screen Standards: Them! Capitalizing on nuclear anxiety, Them! (1954) helped to usher in a new era of monster movies guaranteed to give post-WWII Americans nightmares about the possible consequences of the Atomic Age. In Japan, this metaphorical threat took the colossal form of Godzilla, read more

7 Early “Passion Plays” And Other Religious Silent Films The Christian tradition of the “Passion Play,” a stage production depicting scenes from the last days of Jesus Christ, dates back hundreds of years. Originating in medieval Europe, these carefully staged spectacles helped educate read more

Classic Movie Travels: Robert Harron Robert Emmett Harron Robert Emmett Harron was born on April 12, 1893, to John and Anne Harron in New York, New York. He was the second oldest of nine children growing up in this Irish Catholic family. Over the years, his father worked several different jobs read more

2025 Western News RoundUp I was surprised to realize it’s been a couple of years since my last “Western News RoundUp,” and with lots of interesting new developments on the Western movie front, this is a particularly good month to share news! In this column I’ll be shari read more

A Closer Look At: Lois Weber’s Shoes (1916) Some of the most powerful silent films were crafted with surprising realism, especially in the early years that we often assume are full of “stagey” acting and hokey melodrama. The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), The Italian (1915), Regeneration read more

Minor But Memorable There are characters in film noir that are bigger than life, that are in nearly every scene and who tower over the movie itself like the eponymous inferno. And then there are those that you hardly see at all – characters so minor that they often don’t even warrant a last read more

Witness for the Prosecution (1957) On my most recent visit to London, I went to see a stage production of Agatha Christie’s 1953 play, Witness for the Prosecution, and of course I had to rewatch the 1957 film adaptation again as soon as I got home so that I could see how they compared to one anot read more