On Mar 19, 2008, at 5:28 AM,
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com wrote:
> Yeah, but Spade was a cool dog! The character
Cortez
> plays couldn't get laid in a whorehouse with a
fist
> full of fifties.
Gee, I haven't heard that one for days. Where'd that come
from, anyway?
> And Houston had the good taste to
> drop out that opening scene when Archer catches
his
> wife playing tonsil hockey with Cortez. The scene
in
> which he forces Brigid to strip to prove she
didn't
> steal Gutman's grand! You'd swear the man never saw
a
> woman naked before. He rolls his eyes. It's a
riot.
Yeah, but as I said, that was an accepted method of film
acting in those days. Big, hyper-expressive, larger-than-life
exaggeration, to play to the back row. And they weren't far
out of the silent era in 1931, remember.
Subtlety and nuance existed, certainly -- check out some of
Chaplin, Lloyd or Keaton's work, fer instance, but scenery
chewing in the early years of the talkies was still the norm.
Daniel Day-Lewis could have drank his damn milkshake all over
the place in those days.
But I love some of those old B-flicks from the thirties, when
the P.I. format hadn't yet been formalized (Hello, Ray)
within an inch of its cinematic life.
Hokey acting, implausible plots, jaw-dropping coincidences,
awkward comedy "bits," laughably offensive stereotypes (now,
not then)... pass the popcorn, please.
And as an added bonus, most of them were adapted (mostly
loosely) from then-popular HB novels and stories. It's just
too bad so many of them are hard to find -- or worse, have
disappeared completely.
Kevin
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