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This thriller from the 60s has an incredible cast, starring Jeffrey Hunter, Anne Francis, Dana Andrews, and Viveca Lindfors. Directed by William Conrad.
A young scientist saves an attractive married woman from a suicide attempt, becomes romantically involved with her, plots to kill her husband, and then fakes insanity to escape the murder charge.
The first Five minutes of Brainstorm 1965 set the slick and sinister vibe in motion on a dark and desolate noir highway against George Duning’s snazzy score, where Jim Graham (Hunter) stumbles upon Lorrie Benson (Francis) trying to commit suicide by train! He manages to get into the car and move it moments before the train comes hurling itself right behind them. The moment is dark and frenetic and possesses so much of what makes some of the best Noir/Psychological thrillers of the 60s so enigmatic…!
Swedish-born actress Lindfors (Whom I consider to be one of the most underrated actresses, and one of my favorites as well.)plays Dr. Elizabeth Larstadt whose testimony keeps Grayam out of jail and sent to a sanitarium instead. Andrews plays Cort Benson, Lorrie’s Beverly Hills millionaire husband. With Michael Pate and Strother Martin, it is always a treat to see both character actors in anything trashy or classy.
Here’s a clip from Brainstorm 1965
There are thousands of films in my little collection, this is just one of them! Say, I just had a brainstorm… see it for yourself!-MonsterGirl
Directed by Andrew L. Stone, this noir thriller stars, Doris Day who plays Julie Benton, whose unstable musician husband Lyle Benton played by Louis Jourdan confesses that he killed Julie’s first husband. Lyle is incredibly possessive and wouldn’t rather see her dead than be in the arms of another man. Julie seeks out the help of friend Cliff Henderson (Barry Sullivan) This is a woman in peril thriller, that has the police closing in on Lyle, but not before the climatic ending, where Julie boards a plane, returning to her work as a stewardess, not realizing that Lyle is also on board!
The film also co-stars veteran noir actor Frank Lovejoy as Det. Lt. Pringle.
There are thousands of films in my collection, this is just one of them!-See it for yourself-MonsterGirl
If you’ve been following my blog for a while you might have picked up on the fact that I adore Claude Rains, and any film his wonderful presence has graced. Masterpiece or B-grade picture, he brings an inimitable style to any movie! Here: Claude Rains plays a mild-mannered clerk named Kees Popinga who discovers that his boss Julius de Koster, Jr. (Herbert Lom) has wiped out the company funds, while under the influence of a beautiful Parisian girl, Michele Rozier played by Marta Toren.
Popinga takes the money and goes on the lam after killing de Koster, while the police are in hot pursuit.
Also starring the lovely Anouk Aimee as Jeanne the prostitute.
This obscure thriller is directed and co-scripted by Harold French based on the novel by George Simenon.
There are thousands of films in my collection, this is just one of them! See it for yourself-MonsterGirl
“A lone female on the beach is a kind of a target – a bait, you might say.”
The immortal Joan Crawford is Lynn Markham, a widow who longs to be left alone at her beach house, where the previous tenant, Eloise Crandall (Judith Evelyn), had fallen to her death. Lynn’s neighbor turns out to be the gorgeous male specimen in the form of Jeff Chandler, playing Drummond Hall (Drummy), who might have had something to do with Eloise’s fatal fall off the porch. Of course, Drummy starts to move in on Lynn. Along for the ride are the marvelous duo of Natalie Schafer and Cecil Kellaway, who play Drummy’s crafty aunt and uncle, Osbert and Queenie Sorenson. And then there are the frequent visitations by realtor Amy Rawlinson, played by the always effervescent Jan Sterling, who is, of course, gaga over Drummy, the slick and sleazy gigolo with a rough past. Directed by Joseph Pevney (prolific in great television series spanning the 1960s-80s, not to mention the taut psycho-sexual drama THE STRANGE DOOR 1951, and PLAYGIRL 1956 starring the bigger than life – Shelley Winters.
The film is filled with the right amount of 50s kitsch and camp and delicious vulgarity under the sensationalized surface. It is an obscure Crawford goodie that enthusiasts of the actress and genre should add to their ‘must-see’ list! ![]() Lynn: “You must go with the house… like plumbing.”![]() ![]() There are thousands of films in my collection. This is just one of them! See it for yourself!-MonsterGirl |
Michael Higgins plays a very disturbed young man named Richard Barrie who after being released from an institution, insinuates himself into the Hackett family. Edge of Fury is a very taut and disturbing thriller based on the book “Wisteria Cottage” by Robert Coates. Higgins plays a remorseless young beachcomber with psychopathic tendencies who assumes the guise of a friend to a mother and her two daughters who reside in their summer cottage.
“Edge of Fury” (1958) is a crime /noir film that takes viewers on a twisted journey into the mind of a psychopathic young man named Richard, brilliantly portrayed by Michael Higgins. who is a beachcomber with a troubled past, cunningly befriends a mother and her two daughters who are enjoying their summer at a picturesque seaside home.
Under the guise of friendship, Richard insinuates himself into their lives, gradually revealing his sinister intentions. As his true nature begins to surface, tensions rise, and a deadly game of manipulation ensues. The once-idyllic summer home becomes a battleground where survival is at stake.
Driven by a chilling performance from Michael Higgins, “Edge of Fury” delves into the dark recesses of the human psyche, exploring the depths of Richard’s psychopathy and the unsuspecting family’s fight for survival. With each twist and turn, the film keeps audiences on the edge of their seats, weaving a thrilling tale of suspense, deception, and the terrifying consequences of crossing paths with a disturbed mind.
Directed by Irving Lerner, “Edge of Fury” stands as a classic noir thriller, offering a gripping exploration of the disturbing complexities of human behavior and the destructive power of a psychopath’s manipulation.
Directed by Irving Lerner & Robert J Gurney Jr. Also stars Lois Holmes as Florence Hackett, Jean Allison as Eleanor Hackett, and Doris Fesette as Louisa Hackett.
“If anything should happen tonight, if anything should happen, don’t blame me…if anything should happen, darling.”
See it for yourself, MonsterGirl!
This little mystery gem Directed by George B. Seitz and based on the play by Bayard Veiller, takes place in Colonial India where the great Dame May Whitty (My Name is Julia Ross 1945, Green Dolphin Street 1947 and Night Must Fall 1937) plays Mme. Rosalie La Grange
a medium who arranges a seance to try and prove her daughter Nell O’Neill’s (Madge Evans)
innocence in a murder investigation. La Grange proceeds to help Inspector Marney (played by Lewis Stone) solve the crime.
The cast also includes Elissa Landi, Henry Daniell, and Charles Trowbridge.
Trivia from IMDb: The play opened on Broadway in New York City, New York, USA on 20 November 1916 and had 328 performances. Margaret Wycherly played the role of Rosalie La Grange, as she also did in the 1929 film version.
Versatile actor of film and stage Stacy Keach plays the poetic everyman Pat Quid who is driving a semi across Australia carting a truckload of meat, pig carcasses specifically, due to the high demand as there is a meat strike going on. As in any good traveler mystery, he encounters a variety of odd characters who periodically pop up time and again, as if they are all trapped in some kind of desert purgatory.
Along the way, there are also the occasional hitchhikers who are traveling on the same highway. Pat and his trusted companion Boswell, a dingo, like to occupy his time playing word games to make the journey more stimulating.
He likes to imagine the identities of other people on the road, guessing what they do for a living.
Stopping over to sleep at a motel one night, he loses his room to a mysterious guy in a dark green van who has picked up a foxy young hitchhiker. A girl Quid had decided to pass up along the way, as it is not his practice to pick up hitchhikers because it is against regulations.
That night he sleeps in the back of his cab but is aroused at 4 am by the garbage trucks who have come to pick up the motel trash. Boswell is sniffing around the plastic rubbish bags, chewing at whatever smells tempting on the inside.
Strangely up too, is the guy from the dark green van, who is watching out the window to see that the collectors are picking up the garbage.
The night before, we witness him murdering the young girl passenger that he brings to the motel. Most likely he has disposed of her body in the bags set out on the curb.
After seeing Green Van Man on the road, burying another garbage bag, and once Quid sees a cooler or ‘lunch box’ on the guys front seat, which is big enough to hold a human head, Quid puts a few things together and decides that this guy is probably the serial killer that the news has been talking about.
Jamie Lee Curtis plays Pamela ‘Hitch’ Rushworth a hitchhiker Quid finally picks up after the third time seeing her on the side of the same road.’Third time lucky!’
The two form an amateur detective team, playing cat and mouse with the elusive Green Van Man as they begin to try and track the serial killer on their own. The chemistry between the two does not have the hallmark romanticism of a typically immortal Hitchcock pairing, Keach and Curtis are more working-class guts and grit and less polish and panache.
But in Quid’s pursuit of the Green Van Man, it brings him to the attention of the police, who then suspect him of being the killer. Throughout the film, Quid plays the alienated nice guy, who is misunderstood, and under suspicion.
Directed by Richard Franklin (Patrick 1978, Psycho II 1983)Based on an original story by Richard Franklin and adapted for the screen by Everett De Roche. Also starring Marion Edward as Madeleine ‘Frita’ Day and Grant Page as Smith or Jones the Green Van killer.
Not least of which are the few obvious touts to Hitch himself: The casting of Janet Leigh’s  (1960 Psycho’s Marion Crane) daughter with actor Tony Curtis, the wonderfully androgynous Jamie Lee Curtis.
Curtis’s character Pamela has a nickname in the film which is ‘Hitch’ and Franklin actually directed Psycho II in 1983 which starred Anthony Perkins revisiting his iconic role as Norman Bates. Franklin obviously had an appreciation for the story and Hitchcock’s contribution to the mystery/suspense genre.
At one point in the film, Pamela in the back of Quid’s cab picks up a vintage Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine from the 60s.
The more significant allusions that can be drawn from the film are Keach’s role as Patrick Anthony Quid, using a Hitchcockian formula, ‘The Wrong Man.’
The police not only suspect him of the murders, but Quid becomes alienated by the rest of the hostile players in the film, even going as far as being set up by the real killer, not unlike Hitchcock’s later and quite starkly disturbing Frenzy 1972.
Starring Barry Foster as the criminally insane misogynist Robert Rusk, the necktie killer who rapes and strangles his female victims in what I feel Hitchcock lensed with an utter brutal realism that stays with you.
In Frenzy it is Jon Finch who plays Richard Ian Blaney the misunderstood working-class man who is falsely blamed for a series of murdered women. Blaney also becomes set up as a patsy by the killer, like Quid for the murders.
Unlike Frenzy’s lustful sex maniac who we get to see up close and personal, remember the hideous line… ‘lovely.’
Green Van Man maintains anonymity, a distance from us and the camera, so the intimacy of the plot is stifled and a line is drawn in the sand as far as understanding the killer’s identity any closer than his gloves, his guitar wire, and the dark green van.Which might be the point. Although, Robert Rusk was a fertile character that repulsed yet fascinates.
Missing is the profoundly evocative score from Bernard Herrmann. Road Games doesn’t utilize music as much to underscore its narrative. Although it’s sound editing is very key in various spots of the film to accentuate the sense of alienation that is pervasive in the film. Where Herrmann’s romantic scoring might guide the viewer along the way to either an empathetic moment or a suspenseful point in a film, the use of sound in Road Games is incorporated in a much more holistic way. And the film starts out quietly, bleakly, allowing Keach’s Pat Quid to stretch his characterization of a solitary man on a journey.
Another interesting motif of the film that utilizes some of the traditional stylizations of a Hitchcock film is the use of The MacGuffin– The cooler or ‘lunch box’ that is frequently shown framed in one scene or another which is the possession of the Green Van Man, might or might not hold something of interest or relevance or could just be a big red herring. We wonder as does Quid, whether it holds the severed head of the foxy hitchhiker we see being murdered in the beginning of the film.
I found it interesting that our first awareness of the murders takes place in a motel, not unlike 1960s Psycho.
Also of interesting note is the use of the ‘Open Road’, expansive at times indicative of alienation and desolation, lending to ‘the traveler’ theme. Like Tippi Hedren in The Birds 1963.
I’m also reminded of the cinematic open landscapes as seen in North by Northwest 1959, with its desert environment. While not a single-engine plane as the nefarious mode of transportation in pursuit, Quid is often swallowed up by the vast Australian expanse, being taunted by a maniac in a dark green van that is playing cat and mouse with the protagonist!
And again with the character of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) traveling from Arizona attempting to escape the mundane ticking of her working-class existence. Running away after having stolen a large sum of money from one of the Bank’s clients. Hoping to be together with her lover Sam Loomis ( John Gavin.)Unfortunately stumbling onto yet another desolate hostile environment that is hidden underneath quiet American family values and a nice mama’s boy named Norman Bates.
Hitchcock often used actors who could be perceived as an ‘everyman’ Quid reiterates this line several times in the film, “Just because I drive a truck doesn’t mean I”m a truck driver.” He’s fair and ethical and is just looking to do his job, but won’t be defined by anyone else’s standards.
The Lighting has the certain feel of a Hitchcock thriller, the Neo-Noirish ambient colors, highlighting only the ‘object’ the director wants us to see, with everything else framed within shadow. The obscuring of a purposefully arranged set with an emphasis on the specific players being lit in close up. And colors used specifically to accentuate a mood. The use of color in Road Games helps develop the feeling of a surreal type of desolation.
Right from the beginning of the film, Quid the protagonist, starts out in conflict with this mysterious stranger in the dark green van. The game of cat and mouse begins.
“First he steals my girl and then he steals my bed"¦ ”
“I hope she steals his wallet. I bet she doesn’t even wait to take her socks off.
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