Miker,
Re your comment below:
> I'm sorry to say that Bannion, in THE BIG HEAT,
has
> lost his wife. I'm
> happy to say that he has quit his job in order
to
> devote himself fulltime to
> some serious ass-kicking. Really excellent
writing.
> It's one of those
> books
> that's hard to put down.
If you like the book, allow me to recommend the film version.
Very faithful to the novel (except that the city is changed
from Philadelphia to the fictional metropolis of "Kenport,"
and for some reason the second-in-command mobster, Max Stone,
becomes "Vince" Stone). Glenn Ford, in his best performance,
plays Bannion. Jocelyn Brando (Marlon's sis) is his wife.
Gloria Grahame is Stone's mistress, Debby. Stone is expertly
played by Lee Marvin (his first big movie role). And
Alexander Scourby plays mob kingpin Lagana, whose pretence to
culture and breeding always seemed to me to prefigure Marlon
Brando's (who undoubtedly saw the film since his sister was
in it) characterization of Don Corleone in THE
GODFATHER.
Noir pioneer Fritz Lang directed from a script by former
police reporter Sidney Boehm. Tops in all respects.
JIM DOHERTY
__________________________________________________ Do you
Yahoo!? Yahoo! Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live
on your desktop! http://platinum.yahoo.com
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 29 Mar 2003 EST