1951's Bedtime for Bonzo became a pop-culture reference 30 years later when its star Ronald Reagan became President of the United States. Reagan had a somewhat brief acting career before becoming president of the Screen Actors Guild and then pursing real politics as the governor of California and ultimate President. This lightweight, silly comedy was brought out as an embarrassing part of his past, sometimes calling him "Bonzo" as an insult. I remember it being shown a few times on independent TV stations shortly after Reagan took office, MCA also released it on tape that year but I never managed to see it until this Blu-Ray was put out.

The premise is entertaining enough, with Reagan becoming a surrogate father to a "monkey" (actually a chimpanzee, while he's always called a mo...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

There are some thrillers that remain effective even if viewers know many of their secrets. Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects is such a film. Even though I cannot recreate my first-viewing surprise when the film laid its cards on the table, the clever screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie; able direction by Singer in his second feature; and knockout performances from the diverse cast cement the film as one of the best thrillers of the 1990s. Who is Keyser Soze? The Los Angeles Police Department and FBI try to find out after they discover dozens of bodies on a ship in San Pedro Bay in what appears to be a drug heist gone wrong. Roger "Verbal" Kint (Kevin Spacey) is one of only two survivors and recounts the events leading up to the massacre. Several weeks earlier, Kint and fellow criminals Michael McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Fred Fenster (Benicio del Toro) and T...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The fifth and final collaboration between director Don Siegel and leading man Clint Eastwood was 1979's Escape From Alcatraz, based on the book of the same name from J. Campbell Bruce that takes on a real life escape from the titular island prison that took place in 1962.

Set in 1960, the film follows a man named Frank Morris (played by Eastwood) who, after busting out of a few other facilities, is locked away at Alcatraz, the prison island off the coast of San Francisco. Upon his arrival, The Warden (Patrick McGoohan) lets him know in no uncertain terms that no one has ever successfully escape from Alcatraz and that he doesn't except anyone ever well as the security is just that type. While The Warden talks to Morris in his office, the prison's latest addition sneaks a pair of nail clippers from his desk.

As time passes, Morris meets a few of his ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Emilio Miraglia's 1967 film Assassination (not to be confused with the Charles Bronson vehicle of the same name from 1987!) stars the late, great Henry Silva as a man named John Chandler. When we first meet John, he's in prison, visited by his lovely wife Barbara (Evelyn Stewart), when they learn that a last minute pardon they were hoping to receive has not been approved and that he's to be put to death in the electric chair. Moments later, that's exactly what happens.

A few day later, Barbara meets up with her lawyer and goes over John's will. She doesn't inherit much in the way of cash and is upset to learn that the home she shared with her late husband has been, quite puzzlingly, left to his brother, Philip, who Barbara didn't even know existed. Even more confusing is the fact that Philip doesn't live anywhere near them and currently resides in Africa....Read the entire review

The Movie:

Brian De Palma's Hitchcockian thriller starts off with a middle aged woman named Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) in the shower. She lathers up and shows off the goods, heads out into the bedroom, and then feigns her enjoyment as her husband mounts her. Her marriage is dead and she knows it, but at least she got a cool kid out of the deal in the form of science geek Peter (Keith Gordon). Later that day she heads to her shrink's office for her regular session with Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine). She does her best into trying to talk him into bed, but it's not going to happen, he tells her it's not worth risking his marriage over even if he does find her very attractive. Kate needs something though, so she heads to the art museum where she winds up hooking up with a guy, screwing around with him in a cab and then heading back to his place for some quality time in the bedroom. When s...Read the entire review

Season One of The Outer Limits was first released to Blu-ray by Kino in March 2018 with an SRP of $99.95. The set was reissued in September, though not significantly reduced in price, to $89.95. Usually when TV shows are reissued on DVD or Blu-ray their price drops dramatically and the packaging often changes, so it's not clear what Kino's reasoning is here. Regardless, it has been reissued and thus worth reviewing.

For the unacquainted, The Outer Limits was a one-hour (primarily) science fiction anthology series that ran on ABC for a season-and-a-half, from September 1963 to January 1965. At the time ABC was by far the least-watched of the major TV networks; its shows rarely won their time slots and only two ABC programs, The Patty Duke Show (at #18) and The Donna Reed Show (at #16) made the Top 20, ratings-wise. Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone had ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Vernon Sewell for Tigon in 1968, The Blood Beast Terror (also known under the even more salacious title of Blood Beast From Hell) features a lot of highly regarded members of the vintage British horror scene of the day but fails to hit the heights of other more highly regarded efforts from Hammer, Amicus and even Tigon's own output like Witchfinder General. It does, however, have enough going for it that fans of British horror will want to check it out, if only to decide for themselves.

The storyline is set in Victorian times where a killer is afoot on the streets of London, leaving young men dead and drained of all of their blood. Obviously the powers that be want to put a stop to this and so Inspector Quennell (Peter Cushing) is called in to investigate the murders and see if he can put together the pieces of this bizarre puzzle. A few cl...Read the entire review

rn

Although much of the industry hoped that home 3D viewing would be popular from the likes of modern superhero and animated movies, us real film buffs were more excited by the prospect of classic 3D films from the 1950s being seen at home for the first time. More than ten years later, the industry has largely written home 3D off as a "failure" while die-hards like myself press on with whatever we can get. A bright spot has been that a good number of 50s titles have indeed been issued on 3D Blu-Ray, some with limited availability, and most of them made possible by Bob Furmanek and 3-D Film Archive. They restored the three Paramount movies included here, which have previously been issued individually but went out of print rather quickly. This new "Paravision Dreams" set gives those who missed th...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Blind Fury is as close as Hollywood got to make their own version of the Zatoichi legend. The smooth and calm charisma of the blind samurai who is a meager and humble warrior, who helps those in need by making his adversaries drop their defenses upon the sight of a seemingly harmless and weak blind man is translated with an eye for style and efficiency.

For a late 1980s production of such a project, Rutger Hauer ends up being the perfect choice to bring this archetype to the western audience, explored in the form of Nick Parker, a Vietnam vet who was blinded after an attack during the war and was conveniently trained by the local swordsmen to fight using his non-sight senses.

Hauer could certainly be a stoic presence who could communicate a vast array of emotions with a simple look. But he could also easily bring out a mischievous and dark side. That's why ...Read the entire review

The Counterfeit Traitor (1962), a World War II espionage film written and directed by George Seaton and starring William Holden is, at 140 minutes, overlong and rather stodgy in its direction, but the film has unusual, almost unique qualities for a film of this kind. Instead of a glorified, high-tension escapist adventure story like The Guns of Navarone (1961) it personalizes the terrible cost of war as a series of intimate tragedies only partly offset by likewise small but meaningful moments of compassion and empathy. Superficially it resembles dozens of other espionage films but, for those paying attention, the film surprises by digging much deeper than the usual studio picture.

Based on the 1958 biography of the same name by Alexander Klein, Th...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Kino Lorber Studio Classics presents three more unique film noir entries from the Universal Studios vault in the tenth boxed set of their Film Noir: The Dark Side Of Cinema collections. Here's what's inside…

Flesh And Fury:

Director Joseph Pevney, with a story from William Alland and Bernard Gordon, was behind this 1952 Universal production which headlines Tony Curtis as Paul Callan. Paul makes a living for himself as a prize fighter, but there's something unique about him in that he's deaf. Regardless, Paul is really good at what he does and his star is certainly on the rise. He trains with ‘Pop' Richardson (Wallace Ford).

One of Paul's biggest fans is the lovely Sonia Bartow (Jan Sterling), a woman who is always in the audience whenever she can be. She decides she likes what she sees in Paul and that if she gets in with hi...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Kino Lorber Studio Classics presents three more unique film noir entries from the Universal Studios vault in the ninth boxed set of their Film Noir: The Dark Side Of Cinema collections. Here's what's inside…

Lady On A Train:

Directed by Charles David and released by Universal Pictures in 1945, Lady On A Train stars the beautiful Deanna Durbin as a young woman named Nikki Collins who travels by train from San Francisco to New York City for the Christmas holidays, along the way, witnesses a murder as she looks up from her book (a murder mystery novel, of course!) and gazes out the window of her train compartment. The killing took place in a building across the street from Manhattan's Grand Central Station, and she saw it happen just as the train was pulling in.

After disembarking from the train, she goes straight to the n...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Please note that the following movie review was originally written in 2010 for the film's Blu-ray release. My comments still represent my take on the film but I have adjusted the replay value upward a half star.

If Marlon Brando had known the day he would die, he might have found the perfect film to embody his incredible career and serve as his final gift to the silver screen. This was not the case, and Brando appeared on film for the final time nearly a decade ago (now two decades ago) in The Score, director Frank Oz's slow-burn heist flick about the last job of a career thief. The film is not the eulogy Brando deserved, but it is commendable for its unique, if not altogether successful, take on the genre.

Professional thief and nightclub owner Nick Wells (Robert De Niro) is ready to settle down with his girlfriend (Angela Bassett) ...Read the entire review

It took 44 years, but here I've finally gotten around to seeing Irvin Kirshner's Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), whose creepy poster and effective coming attractions trailer long intrigued me. Though often described as a neo-noir, the movie is really a slick, big-budget Hollywood stab at the giallo genre, the visually stylish, intricately-plotted Italian thrillers, often-gory whodunits, that flourished earlier in the decade. The story was John Carpenter's first major studio credit, though it was altered by others so whether he, later writer David Zelag Goodman (Straw Dogs) or others were consciously drawing from Italian giallo is unclear.

Visually, Eyes of Laura Mars is enormously effective, though let down profoundly, house-of-cards style, by its ruinous ending. Where the best giallo are puzzles that neatly and cleverly come together at the end, Eyes o...Read the entire review

The Movie:

NOTE: The images accompanying this review are promo stills that do not reflect the quality of the discs under review.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the miraculous film that perfectly merges the complimentary conceptual, intellectual, and emotional strengths of writer Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry. These two had teamed up before for the intriguing but not-quite-there comedy Human Nature in 2001. Eternal Sunshine treads slightly similar thematic ground, by having scientists attempt to solve the mysteries of human relationships, but maintains an emotional grounding within its high concept.

The set-up is deceptively simp...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by none other than J. Lee Thompson in 1981, Happy Birthday To Me is centered around the The Crawford Academy, an ivy league-esque private school. Here, the various students attend classes and socialize, just as you'd expect them to. The so-called 'Top Ten' are the popular kid. Some find love, some don't, it's fairly typical school 'stuff' until someone starts killing people off.

The cops do what they can to try and find out who the killer is and why he or she is doing what they're doing. Meanwhile, a student named Virginia Wainright (Melissa Sue Anderson), one of the 'Top Ten,' starts to suffer a series of panic attacks and flashbacks that not only tie into her past, but also the school's present predicament.

Happy Birthday To Me is as entertaining as it is predictable. It won't take an especially seasoned slasher movie fanatic t...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Martin McDonagh's In Bruges is certainly not the typical film about hitmen. This dark comedy/drama features some very hilarious, very un-PC dialogue, but under its rowdy exterior are some affecting, emotional scenes and themes of absolution and atonement. Hired guns Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) are sent by their handler Harry (Ralph Fiennes) to Bruges, Belgium, after a botched job. Although Harry insists it is a "fairytale fucking place," Ray thinks it is a "shit hole" and cannot wait to return home. While awaiting marching orders, Ken attempts to keep Ray out of trouble and appease Harry. Ray takes a liking to a local drug dealer cum movie production assistant, Chloe (Clemence Poesy), and struggles with the guilt of his previous sins. The city is its own character, serving as both a charming background and active participant in the lives o...Read the entire review

The Movie:

At the time of the trailers hyping its release, I could honestly say that when it came to Tropic Thunder, I can't remember being so enthusiastic to see a Ben Stiller-directed film. I mean look, the guy's modestly funny, but anything I had seen him helm at that point was ok at best. The elevator pitch of the movie checked a few boxes for me; making of a war movie? Includes a couple of actors from fake films looking at this like a springboard? To say nothing of one of the co-stars' back story for his character? Count me in. I was planning to see it, then I went to Comic-Con, which was hitting the crest of the Twilight publicity, and a few days before release, I got to see it in a crowded theater, laughed the whole time. Good times, those days.

Anyway, Stiller (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) co-wrote...Read the entire review

The Movie:

In Hudson Hawk, 1991 film directed by Michael Lehmann from a screenplay by Steven E. de Souza (based on a story by Bruce Willis and Robert Kraft), Bruce Willis stars as Eddie "The Hawk" Hawkins. He was once the world's most famous cat burglar but then he got caught and, well, he did a decade or so of hard time to pay for his crimes. Now that he's a free man once again, Eddie says he's going to stay on the straight and narrow. No more crime for him! But you know where this is going, right?

Eddie's partner and pal, Tommy Five-Tone (Danny Aiello), is in trouble. He's being blackmailed by the mob and the F.B.I. both of whom have got some pretty heavy dirt on him that he'd prefer not be exposed. What do they want in return? The theft of three paintings done by Leonardo DaVinci, currently held in the world's most prestigious art museum. And who does Tommy need ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

English director Adrian Lyne is no stranger to erotic thrillers, having directed Fatal Attraction and 9 1/2 Weeks. He took a detour into more straightforward material with Jacob's Ladder before returning to the genre with Indecent Proposal, which "won" the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture in 1993. Based on Jack Engelhard's 1988 novel and written for the screen by Amy Holden Jones, Indecent Proposal may have a lurid premise, but it never really lives up to its potential. Despite the buzzy tender at the heart of the film, Indecent Proposal is often dull, despite strong performances from Woody Harrelson, Demi Moore and Robert Redford. While it may hav...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Gordon Hessler, who re-wrote portions of the script with Christopher Wicking when he took over after Michael Reeves (originally intended to direct) passed away, 1969's The Oblong Box was yet another adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's work made for American International Pictures starring Vincent Price.

The film begins in Africa where Sir Edward Markham (Alistair Williamson), a plantation owner, is abducted and mutilated by a tribe of natives in a voodoo ceremony. When he returns to his native England, his brother Julian (Vincent Price) decides it would be best to keep him out of view, and so he has him shackled in the basement of the massive family home. This allows Julian to spend more time with his pretty fiancé, Elizabeth (Hilary Dwyer), and less time worrying about his disfigured brother who is quite quickly losing his mind down below.

I'm not sure what I expected of He Who Must Die (Celui qui doit mourir, 1957), a French film directed by Connecticut-born Jules Dassin. Something like Dassin's other signature films, movies like Rififi (1955) or Topkapi (1965), perhaps? Or maybe I was expecting a plot along the lines of Stanley Kramer's later The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969), about a remote village in Nazi-occupied Italy hiding its valuable cache of wine. The hardly apt plot synopsis on Wikipedia describes He Who Must Die in similar terms, as being about a post-World War I Turkish-occupied Greek village staging a Passion Play, inspiring a rebellion, which misses entirely what the movie is really about.

Instead, the picture is one of the best explorations of Christian hypocrisy and corruption I've ever encountered. The opposite is also true: far better than Christian epics like T...Read the entire review

The Movie:

When the movie opens, we see a close up shot of Tigr, her bleach blonde mullet clearly anchoring this movie in the era in which it was made Tigr speaks to the camera quite enthusiastically about her first impressions of Mitchell, at which point we cut to Mitchell herself in the back of a taxi cab on her way to the set of her latest adult film production. Cut back to Tigr talking about how her relationship with Mitchell changed her as a person and how she wanted...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Made more than a decade after comedian Bob Einstein's character, Super Dave Osborne, was a stable of late night TV talk shows and cable TV specials, The Extreme Adventures Of Super Dave, directed by Peter McDonald (the man who gave us Rambo III and Legionnaire) struggles to take what was a series of typically very funny short sketches and turn them into a feature length movie.

The story opens with Dave getting ready to perform his latest feat of daring do just as New Year's Eve turns 1999 into the year 2000. Of course, this being Super Dave and all, it goes horribly wrong, much to the dismay of celebrities in the crowd like The Pope and Queen Elizabeth II. Understandably, after his latest failure to pull of an Evel Knievel style stunt proves a flop, Dave decides to hang up his hat and retire.

Hoping to live a nice, quiet life away ...Read the entire review

One of the very few Hollywood movies made during the Spanish Civil War about the Spanish Civil War, The Last Train from Madrid (1937) is a real curio. Cribbing elements from Grand Hotel (1932) while anticipating other story aspects later incorporated into Casablanca (1942), it's both a good and bad movie, though even the worst aspects of the picture are fascinating in their own way.

American opinion was deeply divided about the war. FDR-New Deal liberals, American communists, and many of those concerned about the rise of fascism in Europe generally supported the Republicans in Spain, while American conservatives, particularly Catholics, including the Vatican leadership, supported the Nationalists led by Francisco Franco. The Republicans received military support from Mexico but also the Soviet Union, while the Nationalists had Italy and Nazi Germany on their side. ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Yves Boisset in 1970, Un condé (or, simply, The Cop in English), starts with the killing of a man named Roger Dassa (Pierre Massimi) who, after not agreeing to sell drugs in his bar, is beaten to death by the thugs in the employ of a mobster named Tavernier, also known as ‘The Mandarin.' The main thug responsible for the murder is Georgy Beausourire (Henri Garcin) and he and his crew aren't content to just kill Roger. Once they're done with him, they track down his sister Hélène (Françoise Fabian) and beat her to death as well.

Unfortunately, for Georgy and his gang, Roger had some pretty bad-ass friends who aren't anything but furious about his murder. Enter Dan Rover (Gianni Garko) and Raymond Aulnay (Rufus), two army friends from Roger's stint in the military in Africa. They set up a plan to hire a hitman named Viletti (Michel...Read the entire review

A good, not great film noir-crime drama directed by William Dieterle and starring William Holden, Edmond O'Brien, and Alexis Smith, The Turning Point (1952) is handsomely made if overly familiar. Its story revolves around an independent investigation and hearings concerning organized crime in an unnamed American city, a premise so popular in the 1950s that it became a kind of sub-genre all its own. Because such films were not expensive to produce, they became fodder of myriad B-pictures (notably by Columbia and Allied Artists), especially later in the decade, and even turned up on TV shows like Deadline and M Squad.

The Turning Point is pretty good but not on the level of the best such films, such as Robert Wise's The Captive City (also 1952) and The Enforcer, a superior Humphrey Bogart vehicle released the year before with a similar plot and concerns...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Sidney Salkow in 1963, Twice-Told Tales is a three part horror anthology film that adapts a trio of suspenseful short stories originally written by Nathanial Hawthorne.

The first of the three stories is Dr. Heidegger\'s Experiment, tells the tale of Doctor Carl Heidegger (Sebastian Cabot) and his lifelong friend Alex Medbourne (Vincent Price) as they celebrate his birthday. As the rain comes down, the two men wind up in the crypt of the woman who Carl was to marry, Sylvia Ward (Mari Blanchard), but she passed away from a sudden illness thirty-eight years prior. Heidegger has never loved again, his loss was too great. While in the crypt, Sylvia's coffin is opened and the two aged men are shocked to discover that her corpse is perfectly preserved. Heidegger deduces that the only thing that would have done this would be the unique water that has been...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Previously released on Blu-ray in 2012 by HD Cinema Classics, Lewis Milestone's 1946 film The Strange Loves Of Martha Ivers, a film that's been packaged and repackaged plenty of times over the years and which is fairly well known for featuring a young Kirk Douglas in a prominent role, gets reissued in an improved edition from Kino Lorber.

The story follows the titular woman (played by the lovely Barbara Stanwyck), who we meet as young girl where we learn she was raised by her rather unfriendly aunt (Judith Anderson). The victim of a ridiculously strict and sometimes even cruel upbringing, she eventually kills her aunt by sending her careening down a staircase after she attacked young Martha's pet kitten. Martha's two friends, young boys Sam and Walter, witness the death.

This winds up putting Martha into some money as she inherits a steel mill w...Read the entire review

Catch The Heat:

Catch The Heat (1987 AKA Feel The Heat) finds Kino Lorber hitting bedrock with their choices for Studio Classics. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there are no more old movies to release on Blu-ray, if the quality and stature of this action-comedy is any indication. Featuring an entirely too easy-going Tiana Alexander as an undercover FBI agent, Catch The Heat succeeds mostly in killing 87 minutes. Viewers expecting to find a good time in this drug-smuggling programmer will need to mentally incapacitate themselves beforehand.

Alexander plays Checkers Goldberg, a fiesty, sexy, wise-cracking federal agent whom nobody in the underworld takes seriously. That's her secret, she lets tough guys think they can manipulate her, before she flies up in the air to wrap her shapely legs around their necks. Goldberg goes from the mean streets of San Francisco down to an und...Read the entire review

High Desert Kill:

What horrors did the late-'80s bring? For one, made-for-TV movies that weren't really made-for-TV since they were made for cable networks like the USA Network. So, while High Desert Kill, (1989) directed by Harry Falk, certainly has a moment or two, and even managed some theatrical showings outside of America, it is neither fish nor fowl. This is one of those releases that might briefly scratch an itch if you saw it as a kid, and enjoy hazy memories of it, or if you have money to burn and need to see everything that Chuck Connors or Marc Singer ever starred in. For the rest of us, it's pretty dorky and poky and only comes to fitful life in the last 20 minutes.

High Desert Kill finds a trio of hunters, Jim, (Anthony Geary General Hospital) Brad, (Marc Beastmaster Singer) and Ray, (Micah Grant) out for a little fun weekend of shooting in the New ...Read the entire review

Mysterious Island Of Beautiful Women:

This movie should not be confused with either the original Jules Verne novel or any of the other cinematic Mysterious Island interpretations. No, as you'll note, this is the Mysterious Island Of Beautiful Women. Thanks, I suppose, go to Kino Lorber (kind of one of my favorite labels these days) for digging up another Made For TV Movie that would have adequately killed a Saturday evening in December 1979, when it was released on an unsuspecting public. Those were indeed the days.

Directed by stalwart TV master Joseph Pevney, (maybe best known for Star Trek) and starring Peter Lawford, Steven Keats and Jamie Lyn Bauer, Mysterious Island Of Beautiful Women tells the story of a mysterious island inhabited, in part, by a rather small 'tribe' of beautiful women, as well as a somewhat larger tribe of savage men known as 'headchopp...Read the entire review

Watching Rod Serling's Night Gallery's second season (1971-72), virtually all of the same plusses and minuses of the first season apply here, too. There are some qualified strong segments, with decent scripts and/or performances, but they're jumbled in with a greater number of weak and sometimes awful ones. To wit, this review to a large extent covers the same issues as my review of Season 1.

Back in the 1970s, when Serling's Twilight Zone was a substantial hit in syndication, like many others I watched its reruns obsessively. When Night Gallery joined Twilight Zone in syndication sometime later, initial excitement quickly turned to disappointment, even heartbreak. Randomly select any 10 episodes of Zone and chances are you'll end up with a couple of great ones, six pretty good episodes, and maybe one or two stinkers. By comparison, you were lucky to get one...Read the entire review

Now largely forgotten, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) is a very pleasant surprise. I was only vaguely aware of the film, and what I'd read about it suggested the film danced around Wilde's homosexuality (or bisexuality) to the point of absurdity, refraining from addressing directly the very premise of the story and its main character.

In fact, at a time when homosexual acts were still illegal in Great Britain (it would not be decriminalized in England and Wales until 1967), the film makes no bones about the charges levied against the celebrated Irish poet and playwright, or his feelings toward Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, the source of Wilde's downfall. Indeed, the film appears to be quite accurate historically (trial scenes are lifted directly from its transcript) and though star Peter Finch looks nothing like Wilde, his performance is exceptional.

Further, the movie itself is ha...Read the entire review

Richard Wright\'s \"Native Son\" was a book I read in high school English class, and has been made as a movie three times (once just three years ago, updated to modern times.) It deals largely with themes of race and class, although regardless of those it\'s hard to argue that the main character didn\'t just get himself into a really bad situation.

This first film adaptation was released in 1951 and produced in Argentina as the story and author Wright (who was already blacklisted) just wouldn\'t be touched by any US studio then, although a stage version produced by Orson Welles had been reasonably successful. Wright himself plays the main character- a poor black man in Chicago named Bigger Thomas. The book gives no explanation for his name, and here it\'s remarked tha...Read the entire review