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Meanwhile, on Platform Two...

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Most of the action in The Narrow Margin (which we screened last week) takes place on a train, as hired killers try to locate and silence the widow of a mob boss before she can give testimony before a grand jury. Protecting her (more or less) is the tough, grizzled detective who is prepared to do anything to make sure she reaches the witness box in once piece. By the time the train reaches Union Station, the killers have been foiled, the witness is safe, and justice has prevailed. Ah, if life were only like this. But train stations are busy places. Lots of trains are arriving all the time, and there are many stories to be told. This week's film places the station itself at the centre of the story, but once again concerns itself with those who would keep us safe from the dark forces that threaten Freedom, Liberty and all that good stuff that was apparently so fragile in the early 1950s. Union Station concerns itself with Lieutenant William "Willy" Calhoun (William Holden)...
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The "Esther" Kerfuffle.

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A few months ago, a radio panel discussion (exploring issues of the moment) was nearly derailed when one of the panellists brought up the name Estes Kefauver as part of a larger point he was making. "Wait," said the interviewer. "Did you just say Esther Kerfuffle?" There followed a brief pause while the panellist in question had to pick himself up off the floor and regain some semblance of composure. Perhaps he was "Esther Kerfuffle" to his friends. We may never know... To anyone who had been a sentient life-form in the US in the early 1950s, Estes Kefauver would have been a household name; instantly recognisable. He was a Democratic politician (a Congressman, then a Senator) who ran for president several times, and was briefly a vice-presidential candidate when Adlai Stevenson ran against Dwight Eisenhower. (Spoiler alert: Eisenhower won the election, so instead of vice-president Kefauver, we got vice-president Richard Nixon. Good times.) But Kefauver wo...
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The Live-Action "Snow White"!

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Welcome back! I hope everyone had a pleasant and refreshing holiday break. As you will no doubt remember, we have been spending the past few months exploring what I called Post-Depression Tragedy ... by which I meant the "dark cinema" of the years that followed the Great Depression. As you may have figured out by now, this was an era when Hollywood was more than willing to get down and dirty, with the sex; with the violence; with the cha-cha-cha (always under the watchful eye of the censors, of course). But "noir" (whereof I am speaking) is notoriously hard to pin down - probably because it was never actually a genre . It was a consequence of a specific moment in history, and the convergence of a number of cultural threads that all came together in post-war Hollywood to create something distinctive, albeit difficult to define. Who's the Femme-est Fatale of all...? As we enter the "Spring season" I want to turn my attention to films that aren't quit...
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