A mark of a good proto-slasher is a big creepy 👁️ peering out of the darkness.

You've got the horrible 👁️ in Black Christmas, it's a common motif in Peeping Tom, and let Deep Red synecdochically represent gialli in general: there's an incredible one there too. It's a way of hiding the killer's identity until the end of the movie while also distilling him to predation and voyeurism. When Halloween and Friday the 13th spawned a torrent of imitators that…

Uncle Harry is Siodmak's follow-up to The Suspect. The two noirs are very similar but they have an inverted authorial focus. They're both about a gentle and mannered man driven to extremes, and in both cases you're meant to extend empathy to the poor wretch (Siodmak noirs are all about failed heroes). In The Suspect, we stay with Charles Laughton's character nearly the entire time; he is the object of focus. The wife he bumps off is not that interesting:…

Siodmak teases. He and Mank are both famous for their mazes of frame stories and flashbacks where they stingily parcel out mere glimpses of what the audience wants. In this case, the audience wanted Deanna Durbin. Durbin was an ultrafamous child actor, and Christmas Holiday marked her graduation into a serious adult role in a crime melodrama (they weren't called 'noirs' yet). Audiences were revved up to see her, and she's the main protagonist, but Siodmak doesn't reveal her until…

Man, this Technicolor exotica is some riotous stuff. It's a tiki bar explosion, with volcano sacrifices and chimps holding poleaxes and eyepopping background mattes. I get why so many filmmakers love it and cite it as an influence.

Robert Siodmak directed Phantom Lady and Christmas Holiday right after Cobra Woman, which sent him off to the races to invent the noir for Universal, but you can imagine a compelling alternate history... what if instead of elevating the crime movie by…

Replacing Bela Lugosi was obviously going to be a tough assignment, but why would you choose to cast Lon Chaney Jr. as your Dracula?? The man is a meaty oaf! That's why he's such a good Wolf Man! Trying to groom him into the mantle of Count Dracula (sorry, "Alucard") is like trying to make, say, Jesse Plemons or Bob Hoskins a suave vampire lord. It's especially rough here because this telling really leans into the "fear of immigrants" aspect…

This is one of the three B-movies Robert Siodmak made for Paramount that he called "Paramount shit." In 1939, the war made Siodmak leave behind a successful film career in , and he arrived in Hollywood as a nobody begging for a studio contract. Luckily, he met Preston Sturges, and Sturges was smitten by this tiny gnome waxing rhapsodic about European movies he'd never heard of. Out of a Sturgean sense of amusement and whimsy, he recommended that his studio…

Too rote for me, I'm afraid. The genre, the Hays code, and the naughty and conniving star persona of Barbara Stanwyck all activate bumpers on the sides of the lane: there's only so much this plot can deviate from its obvious conclusion. I hoped instead for some interesting cinematography or acting or thematic wrinkles, but I didn't find anything to write home—or here—about. Hey Robert Siodmak, where are all the striking compositions from The Killers or Phantom Lady? The movie's…

Mollenard is what Clarence the angel would show Popeye in the Popeye version of It's a Wonderful Life. In a world without Popeye, Bluto becomes the protagonist of his comic. He has wed Olive Oyl and she has hardened into a nattering high society type, living in fear of his short visits home from arms dealing on the high seas.

It's a rich picture of an anti-hero and it feels modern: it's hard to not compare this affable but thuggish…

🎶... that's my name... that name again is Mister Flow... 🎶

A zippy French romcom about con artists that gets too tangled in its double crosses to be fun to follow.

The playful tone but shadowy atmosphere gives Siodmak a safely padded arena where he can test out styles that would eventually contribute to the invention of the noir. One of the techniques Siodmak relies upon a lot in his Hollywood noirs is withholding visual information. We get that here…

The melodrama and love story don't have much to recommend, but the gambling scenes in this cautionary tale based on Dostoevsky's roulette addiction have a gory appeal. It's corny as hell, but I sort of loved the way Gregory Peck would grimace and wipe away sweat beads and growl "rrrrrrrrrred" through gritted teeth chomping a cigarette holder as he pushed in all his money.

I actually got a hollow pit in my stomach as he kept carving off bits of…

A little boy on vacation at a Swiss resort forms a little boy crush on a dashing race car driver but is then devastated to learn that his mom and the driver are having an affair.

It's nice. It's sad and gentle. The movie zooms in on the perspectives of all the figures involved with psychological sensitivity. It's hard to get too excited about because it's such a modest little story, but for that same reason it's hard to imagine…

Back when I first read Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, I thought to myself, "This is exactly like a Coen brothers movie. I can't believe they haven't made a movie out of this." And then look what happened! I had the same feeling on watching this movie: "This is exactly like a Coen brothers movie. I can't believe they haven't remade it." So if my track record is anything to go by... The Man in Search of His…