Nathan Juran's Law and Order, a 1953 remake of the extraordinarily dark 1932 western of the same name, based on the  W.R. Burnett novel Saint Johnson.

With Ronald Reagan in the role played by Walter Huston in the '32 film. The '53 version is OK but nowhere near as good as the original.

You should never remake a truly great movie.

Here's my review.
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It might seem like I've vanished from LJ but that's not entirely true. I'm still making at least a token effort to keep my various communities alive. I'm still posting on

cult_movie

movie_greats

vintage_crime

I'm still spending way too much money on books and DVDs. Apart from that, well there's not much else one can do these days.

And the cat is still trying to kill me.

I'm trying to revive my Blogger Strange Tears blog. I'm adding a bit more text as well as the images and trying to vary the content a bit more (including things like photography and fashion). I have no idea whether this will prove to be a worthwhile exercise but I'm going to attempt it anyway.

Here's the link to my recent post on art, photography ( Read more... )

Continuing my obsession with Chinese ghost stories:

The Bride from Hell is a Shaw Brothers movie from the period when the Hong Kong studio was making tentative forays into horror movie territory. It's not a complete success but it has its spooky moments and it's worth seeing as an example of how sharply Chinese ghost stories differ from their ( Read more... )

Since I’ve started rambling on about 60s spy movies I might as well talk about another of my passions, eurospy movies. These were of course attempts to cash in on the Bond movie craze but they had a vibe all their own. Here are some of my favourites.

The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl (1968) is perhaps a bit similar in tone to Mario Bava’s Danger: ( Read more... )

The subject of Ralph Thomas’s 1960s spy movies came up in a reply to my previous post. I have to say that I really really enjoyed his two Bulldog Drummond spy movies, Deadlier Than the Male and Some Girls Do. The latter has glamorous girl robots! Not quite out-and-out spoofs but great lighthearted fun romps ( Read more... )

So apart from being stalked by killer pussy cats what have I been up to recently? Nothing terribly exciting but I've seen a few good movie and read a few good books so I'll share them with you, with links to my full reviews.

Probably the best movie I've seen recently is The Wicker Man (1973), which co-star Christopher Lee regarded as the best ( Read more... )

I had to get a new hard drive put in my computer. The old one wasn't dead but it was clearly on the way out - it's usually not a good sign when your computer takes twenty minutes to reboot. So that all went fine and the new hard drive is pleasingly fast. The only problem is that the computer guy managed to put a bloody great scratch on the screen. ( Read more... )

Graham Greene’s The Comedians was published in 1966. It's a love story/political thriller set against the backdrop of the rule of the infamous Papa Doc in Haiti. Maybe it's not quite top-tier Greene but it's still very much worth reading.

Here's the link to my review.


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Kuroneko (or Black Cat) is a 1968 Japanese ghost movie. I love Japanese ghost movies and even though this isn';t one of the greats it's worth a look just for the visuals.

Here the link to my review.


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