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Is Across the Bridge a Great Movie? Beats Me

May 29, 2026 7 Comments

I’m not sure if Across the Bridge is a great movie. I’m pretty sure it’s not. It might just be a good movie, not a great one. Then again, maybe it’s a so-so movie, and I haven’t noticed it. In any case, it’s a great story, I tell you what. Crackling tale. Sometimes that’s enough.

It’s a British production from 1957. Most reviewers would tell you it’s in glorious black and white, or luminous black and white, or gorgeous black and white, or something similar. I’m sure the producer would tell you the same thing he told the director: It’s in inexpensive black and white. Simple storytelling doesn’t really need color anyway. Why pay for it?

If it’s in black and white, and it’s got a crime in it, many would call it film noir. It’s got plenty of crimes in it, committed by all sorts of people, and it’s in black and white, but there’s barely a hint of noir in it. It’s a British production, so they didn’t call movies that anyway. Brits would have called it a Crime Drama, or something similar.

Film Noir is of course a French term, but the style really didn’t originate there. It got a workout in Hollywood for nearly 20 years. They used the dearth of light and the ton of dark in the movies to add suspense, or a feeling of danger. In a way, the shadows themselves became characters in the movies.

That’s good, because a lot of noir films were pretty bad, and the characters weren’t very interesting. They needed the assist that moping around in the dark added to their mystique. With the lights on, you might notice Alan Ladd was only four feet tall, for instance.

Across the Bridge isn’t like that. Rod Steiger plays Carl Shaffner, a wealthy, abrasive jerk, who made his money the old fashioned way: Two sets of books. For some reason or another, Steiger plays him with a German accent. I guess in 1957 England, that was enough to identify villainy to the audience. Or maybe Steiger couldn’t be relied upon to sound British to a British audience, and they didn’t want him to sound American.

The original (short) story is by Graham Greene, who is a very sneaky writer. If you’ve ever read any of his books, they wander along, simply telling you what happened, and then every once in a while, the lull is broken by some memorable turn of phrase, or a trenchant insight into the human condition. There’s a reason fireworks always look best after dark. Another Graham Greene story that is more closely aligned with American noir sensibilities is The Third Man. Got a femme fatale and everything.

Across the Bridge is no The Third Man. It’s smaller in scope, although it travels from London to New York to Mexico. Greene was very familiar with Mexico, having lived there for a time, and his greatest work, probably, was The Power and the Glory about the Cristero War in Mexico. Of course being a British production, London was London, New York was London with some cardboard skyscrapers outside the set’s windows, and Mexico was Spain, because the airfare was cheaper.

The director was Ken Annakin. Workmanlike director. He had none of the moviemaking dazzle in his haversack that someone like Carol Reed brought to The Third Man. Extreme closeups and the occasional Dutch Angle were about it. Annakin was well-liked and hard working. His filmography could be labeled “value for money,” including one movie actually called Value for Money. He worked for Disney, who was definitely a value for money kinda guy. He never hired hacks, but no one got rich working for Mauswitz, except Walt. Annakin did Swiss Family Robinson for Disney in 1960. It was a big hit, and made a pile of money. It’s one of those movies the people who run the studio apologize for now, because the Asian pirates aren’t the heroes. Ho hum.

Across the Bridge has an expanded plot compared to the short story (duh), which includes more of a backstory for the main character. There is a fascinating byplay between the ostensible villain, played by Steiger, a Scotland Yard man sent to fetch him from Mexico, played by Bernard Lee, and the Mexican police chief, played superbly by Noel Willman. Both policemen are like the married man who is propositioned by a particularly fetching prostitute. He protests, “I’m happily married, and I don’t fool around. I will, however, hold still while you do.”

There are many reversals in the plot, but none of them feel forced. It’s interesting to note that every single person in the movie, more or less except one, is behaving badly the whole time. They are all trying to get what they want, no matter how sleazy or corrupt the methods they have to stoop to to get it. Everyone’s connivances come a cropper when the worst of them performs what is no doubt the only decent thing he’s ever done in his whole life, and wrecks it for everyone.

So I’m not sure if I can tell you that Across the Bridge is a great movie. I can report we watch it about once a year. We enjoy watching desperate people doing desperate things, while a bunch of people who think they’re honest forget what honesty is. We might watch it to see Dolores, the abused pooch with the sad eyes, as she teaches the human race a little lesson.

I’ll leave it to you to tell me if it’s any good. I guess it can’t be great, because instead of pasting a clip from the movie here, I’ll just paste the whole thing. If it was great, someone would still be trying to make a buck off it.

 

Back to the Future

October 2, 2025 3 Comments

Dawn has come to Millwood, the city where Richard Anderson lives—a city neither small nor large, simply a normal community where people live together, work together, and do things for each other. This is the story of one day in Millwood—just any day.

The story begins at daybreak. All is quiet in the Anderson home; everybody is asleep. It is still some time before Richard has to get up for breakfast, but while most people are still asleep, many are at work doing things for others—things which mean a great deal to the community, including Richard himself. While Richard sleeps, men at the dairy are filling bottles with fresh milk, and long before daybreak, Richard’s milkman picks up the milk and delivers it to the Anderson home in time for breakfast. All night long, the bakers have been baking bread for the day—bread which the delivery man now takes to stores and homes. Long before stores and schools open, trucks are bringing food for Richard’s dinner into town from nearby farms and distant places. From a refrigerated truck, the butcher is already unloading meat—some of which will be on Richard’s table today or tomorrow.

Richard’s community is always at work. All night in the telephone building, operators have been busy at the switchboards, putting through calls—perhaps to a doctor or fire station. In the city’s water plant, pumps run day and night to keep Millwood’s reservoirs filled, and men check gauges so that Richard and others always have water. At the power plant, engineers keep watch so there is electricity whenever it’s needed. At the post office, workers sort mail throughout the night so Richard’s mailman will have the letters ready in the morning. Meanwhile, at the newspaper office, men and women work to meet the deadline for Millwood’s morning paper. As getting-up time approaches, the newsboy is already on his route, delivering the paper to Richard’s home.

For Richard, the day is just beginning. On his way to school, he sees people in his community at work—like the linemen who keep the electric lines in good repair. Richard has never really stopped to think about how much people in his city depend on one another. His mother shops at the grocery store, and he often buys things there too, but he hasn’t thought about what the city would be like without stores—no groceries, no shoe stores, no furniture stores. The people who work in these places do important jobs for their neighbors. A community needs many kinds of workers—ways for people to get from one part of town to another. Some go by taxi, some walk, others use their own cars, and many use buses. Buses are slower than taxis but cost less and are easy to use. Bigger buses take people to many parts of the country, stopping in Millwood too. Trains come and go from the railroad station, carrying people and goods. Trucks carry mail from the station or from the helicopter field, which brings mail from nearby suburbs and towns. Helicopters need little space to land on, unlike airplanes, which require large airports on the city’s outskirts. Many people come and go by airplane daily.

Though Richard may not realize it, he has an important job too—going to school to learn the things that will help him become a good citizen, ready to take his place in the community. No matter what someone does for a living, many people depend on them—and they, in turn, depend on others. People who work in factories make goods for stores to sell; people in offices write letters and keep records. Some are craftsmen, some professionals like doctors and lawyers, some are storekeepers, and many are housewives who manage homes and care for children. Whatever a person does, it helps—whether in big or small ways—to make the community a better place.

In City Hall, people work for the city itself. The mayor, elected by citizens, runs the government and oversees departments like the police, who make the city safe and direct traffic. They enforce laws made by the people for their own safety. The fire department is also part of the city government, ready day and night to respond to fires before they spread. The city hires workers to build and repair bridges, streets, and sidewalks, and to maintain streetlights for safety. It also helps protect public health by monitoring the water supply and inspecting food-handling places. Another department collects garbage and burns it, while a city dump holds non-burnable waste, keeping Millwood clean. The city provides playgrounds for children, ball fields, jungle gyms, and benches for adults to rest on. Recreation also includes tennis courts, a recreation center for parties and games, and a public library with books, records, and films for all ages. Richard and his family go to church, and there are other churches for those who worship differently.

Millwood has a radio and TV station, where programs are created by many people—from actors to technicians—ensuring Richard gets the right show at the right time. He enjoys watching television and sometimes learns a great deal from it. The family often goes to the neighborhood movie theater, and Richard’s father enjoys bowling once a week with friends. At night, when Richard goes to bed, he may not think much about what his community has done for him or what he has done for it—but the work of the community never stops. Bread is baked, milk is processed, newspapers are printed, electricity is generated, water is pumped and purified, and phone calls are connected—day and night. The work of the community goes on, with people helping and depending on one another, all partners in making Millwood a better place to live.

Before my time, but time-adjacent enough to recognize that the video is not exactly raging propaganda. No one is talking about running roughshod over the whole world or anything. Little Richard isn’t being brought up to be much of an ideologue, although a stretch in college in the 1960s should take care of that deficiency.

At any rate, a lot of America was just like that back in the day. The parts that weren’t, weren’t. They refused, or were unable to act the way the people in the video were acting. The suburbs and exurbs served the same purpose as the frontier once did. When cities became corrupted, people reassembled themselves out in the landscape and started over. A republic, if you can keep it, over and over. It has as many obligations as benefits, and anyplace with benefits eventually attracts people who want them without toting the knapsack of obligations that everyone else is carrying. Eventually the free riders get a quorum, and a new frontier is necessary. Lord knows where we’ll find one now. Perhaps the bombed out numerous remains of Free Rider City will be the new frontiers, after the locusts move on.

People like to point to traditionally minded people, with horrified looks on their nose-ringed faces, and screech that trads want to take us back to the 1950s. I can assure you that I’m fairly conversant in all sorts of history, and that the 1950s you fear and trads want isn’t reachable by putting the Caddy with the big fins in reverse. It was way, way more sophisticated, challenging, and complex than life is today, and it would take a lot of work to achieve it. Going to other planets would look easy compared to assembling the modern version of Millwood again, and making it at least common, because people being people, universal is not possible.

This sentence punched me in the face:

In City Hall, people work for the city itself.

Pull the other one. It has bells on.

Ginger vs. Mary Ann? Please

August 8, 2025 11 Comments

Ginger or Mary Ann comparisons are so over. The Bailey Quarters vs. Jennifer Marlowe contest isn’t much better. C’mon, Wilma Flintstone vs. Betty Rubble is more interesting than those two. You can have your Beatles vs. Stones arguments all day long for all I care. There’s only one, real, true way for me to get judgey about your judgment:

Perez Prado vs. Esquivel!

Perez didn’t write the first tune in that medley, Guaglione. It’s a Neapolitan song with music by someone named Giuseppe Fanciulli. I’ve heard Italian names before, that one about takes the cannoli. The song has words, too, by Nicola Salerno, a name that sounds like a guy with bodies in his trunk. Anyway, it got covered by everyone from Claudio Villa to Dean Martin, but it wasn’t until Perez Prado put some mambo afterburners on it that it really took off.

So there’s contestant Numero Uno. A mambo king. But in this corner, weighing in at 97 pounds (if he has rolls of quarters in his pocket), we have Esquivel!

Cher and Madonna and Elvis think they’re so cool because they only need one name, but Esquivel! puts them all in the shade. Those other pretenders don’t have an exclamation point in their names. Case closed.

So now we’re really getting down to it. Prado’s Mambo King act, vs. Esquivel! and his Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music. Fight!

Of course truly major decisions like this one require careful assessments of the essential differences. So let’s go straight to the heart of the matter. You’re going to have to choose between Prado’s pencil-thin moustache and Esquivel!’s gamma-ray-resistant eyeglasses.

Perez has made this decision even tougher by occasionally sporting both the pencil-thin moustaches and uber-cool sunglasses.

I know, tough choice, huh? Esquivel! was a visionary, of course, and not just for music. He correctly surmised that his taste in eyewear would become so universally accepted as cool that even plagiarizing presidents of Ivy League colleges would be wearing them eventually. So he tried to steal a march on history, and perhaps on Perez, by upping the ante and barging into the seventies with a wispy Van Dyke beard, suitable for a modestly dangerous villain on the old Star Trek.

Ah, the Engelbert Humperdinck “polyester lasagna” shirt, the Vitalis hair, the bow tie suitable for manned flight, the doughy Abba-looking chicks. Esquivel! truly had it going on.

You’re going to have to decide if Mucha Muchacha or Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White (the latter half of the first video) is the happiest song ever recorded. This may be impossible, because they basically both are in some sort of Heisenberg dead cat/live cat in the box situation. They both can’t be Numero Uno, but they are. Maybe you’ll just have to decide if you like The Big Lebowski or Office Space better than the other. But that invites a temptation to settle the challenge by dragging in Henry Mancini from Jackie Treehorn’s house, and “third man in” is considered bad taste in street fights like this one.

The first person that says, “Neither. Xavier Cugat,” I’m coming looking for you. And not with binoculars, either.

The Sixties Never Happened

July 25, 2025 4 Comments

Hear me out: The sixties never happened.

No, really. The idea that generational shifts happen in neat, tectonic fashion, bang-on the first day of each decade, is useless for encapsulating eras. So I’m gonna fix it. Well, at least the years between 1952 and 1982. Those thirty years were split into two parts, not three: The Fixties, and The Endless Bummer. The thing everyone calls The Sixties never happened.

The hinge point was 1966, or thereabouts. The no-mans land that opened up between the two eras was brought into stark relief in about 1965, when you could go to the cinema and see the last gasp of the Fixties, The Sound of Music, an honest to god musical, then go back in the evening and see the dawning of the Endless Bummer in Help!, an entertaining but disjointed and irreverent slapdash affair. When you went home to your split-level ranch in the suburbs, mom and dad put Sinatra’s  It Was a Very Good Year on the living room credenza record player.

But now the days are short, I’m in the autumn of my years

Indeed. Meanwhile, the kids went down in the basement rumpus room and used the portable hi-fi to play the Rolling Stones doing Satisfaction.

When I’m driving in my car
And a man talks on the radio
He’s telling me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination

It was a baton pass, and the baton wasn’t just dropped, it was thrown into the shrubs. We went from everything’s Technicolor to everything sucks, and barely noticed the change. All of a sudden it’s the Endless Bummer, one that lasted until about 1982.

I wasn’t alive or anything interesting like that, but I have a library card and relatives: The Fixties were the greatest time in the history of the United States, so probably the greatest time in the history of the world. You can fight me on this if you’d like, but I’ll be showing up to the debate in a giant two-tone convertible with more horsepower than a B-25, spangled with enough chrome to reflect Telstar signals back into space, with Technicolor Marilyn Monroe on the bench seat next to me, and a trunk full of penicillin. That beats everything that came before, easily, and everything after, even if you do favor FM radio over AM.

The real Fifties didn’t start in 1950 anyway. Truman was still president in 1950, and I can’t think of a less Fifties-ish person than Harry. He was pure Roosevelt hangover. He looked and acted more like Woodrow Wilson’s haberdasher than a modern person. He stumbled into the Korean War because he missed World War II. It was all he knew. Harry had olive drab hemoglobin.

Harry was so brain-dead that he offered to run as Eisenhower’s vice-president after the big war. It’s a testament to Ike’s probity that Harry had no idea he was a Republican, or even a normal human being. Ike was an American first, a concept that a machine politician like Truman couldn’t understand, never mind get behind. It suited the coming Fixties. It’s useful to remember that the political yings and yangs of Joseph McCarthy and JFK were both considered staunch anti-communists.

And JFK had nothing to do with the traditional take on the 1960s. Flower power would have no appeal for a lace-curtain Bostonian Irishman like him. Ike was an old general, but presided over a young, civilian boomtime. JFK was the hood ornament on Ike’s era. It hit a big pothole in Dealey Plaza, but the vibe allowed it to coast for a few years before Johnson was able to drive the car all the way into the fiscal, moral, and military ditch. Then it rolled downhill pretty fast, and right into the lake where Jimmy Carter was trying to beat a bunny to death with a paddle. So The Endless Bummer started out with the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, and ended up with another sort of Kool-Aid test in Guyana. They cheaped out and used Flavor Aid, of course, but they didn’t skimp on the cyanide.

Now, the Fixties are often maligned as a cultural wasteland, mostly by people with rings in their intellectual noses. Well, the Fixties gave us Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and the atypical Dave Brubeck’s Take Five in the same year. Wes Montgomery was inventing smooth jazz right in front of your eyes. There was the birth of bossa nova. Broadway theaters were heaving with musicals. And they didn’t call it the Golden Age of movies for nothing. The industry had to compete with the television all of a sudden, and managed it just fine by giving much more to look at. There was something for everybody, too. From ’52 on, you could sit with your feet stuck to the floor and your eyes glued to the screen in a big, gaudy movie house and see The Quiet Man, Shane, Roman Holiday, The Big Country, and watch the most exciting twenty minutes in movies, ever — the chariot race in Ben-Hur.

They made thoughtful movies about regular people back then. I mean regular regular people. How about Ernest Borgnine as Marty? David Lean reeled off the greatest string of movies ever: The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago.  You could even take a girl to that last one, and she’d like it. Frank Lloyd Wright was building Usonian houses while Royal Barry Wills held down the trad suburban fort with his elegant colonials and Capes in New England while Googie style spangled the west coast and Midcentury Modern filled in everywhere else. Women wore Dior and pencil dresses and pillbox hats.

In the late sixties, the studio system fell apart, and the Hollywood New Wave took over. For a while, Warner Brothers was owned by a casket manufacturer that had a sideline of parking lots. That had predictable results on the output. Eventually auteurs got the upper hand, and they made a bunch of popular movies that made big money. But do you notice anything about this list of the top ten American New Wave classics?

  • Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

  • The Graduate (1967)

  • Easy Rider (1969)

  • Midnight Cowboy (1969)

  • Five Easy Pieces (1970)

  • The Last Picture Show (1971)

  • Taxi Driver (1976)

  • Chinatown (1974)

  • Nashville (1975)

  • Apocalypse Now (1979)

Yep. Great cinema. But. Uniformly bleak, ambiguous, cynical, mostly violent and nasty. It’s what happens when nihilism takes over from the sunny optimism of the Fixties. You get the Endless Bummer. Throw in The Godfather, and you’ve got the entire zeitgeist encapsulated: Why bother trying? Everything is crooked.

Let’s take a look at a tale of two cities, as it were: Anne Bancroft.

Anne seems pleasant enough, so I won’t be ragging on her personally, just using her to point out how the worm turned just from 1962 to 1967. First, she won an Oscar for The Miracle Worker. She played Anne Sullivan, who through dint of perseverance and affection teaches a deaf, dumb, and blind Helen Keller to interact with the world. It’s typical of movies from the Before Times. It’s based on real, important things, tough sledding emotionally, perhaps, but uplifting and inspirational in its final effect.

Then 1967 rolls around and Anne is Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Whoah, there’s a tectonic shift. No one is going to help a disabled girl in that one. Benjamin Braddock is maybe the Ur-self-absorbed college grad. Dustin Hoffman played the shrimp that launched a thousand Lloyd Doblers, guys who don’t know what they’re for, only that they’re against everything on offer. Middle-aged Anne slept with her neighbor’s kid, and then turned into a bunny boiler when he started dating her daughter. It was supposed to be an evisceration of suburban life, but it’s closer to what people who rub elbows with Woody Allen think the suburbs is like. The heavy fog of disillusionment, generational enmity, unexplained ennui, and a full Peter Pan outlook on life was the Long March Through the Endless Bummer in a nutshell. The movie is funny in its satirical way, but for the life of me I’ve never understood the idea that it’s romantic. I guess I have to quote myself here:

Now, many people think Romeo and Juliet is a love story, instead of a cautionary tale about teen infatuation that ends up with everyone dead. These same people also think The Graduate is a sweet love story, and that it has a happy ending. Not hardly, if you’re paying attention. Here’s the final scene of the movie: Link to video.  In the back of the bus, it finally dawns on Benjamin Braddock that he has no idea why he was trying to woo fair maid. It was forbidden, so he wanted it. He’s already ambivalent about her. She looks at him and maybe wonders what she saw in him in the first place.

“It was forbidden so he wanted it.” If there’s a better encapsulation of the imbecile impetus behind the Endless Bummer, and the death of the Fixties, I haven’t seen it. And I had to write it myself.

Is Niagara (1953) a Good Movie? Beats Me

April 18, 2025 9 Comments

We have a very large collection of movies, many of them old. The movie business isn’t ancient. It’s possible to be fairly conversant with its entire history if you have a big enough hard drive, and skip Fletch movies and similar shallow puddles of pixels. I used to think that the average person must have seen every movie and TV show ever made, simply based on the amount of time they spent going to the movies, watching television, cable TV, VHS, DVDs, and then streaming stuff. But I learned later that most people just watch the same things over and over again. We’re just as likely to re-watch things as the next person, I guess. We just re-watch different things, and fewer. Our relatives have a tradition to watch Christmas Vacation every year, ye gods. We watch It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve long since come to terms with the fact that for many people, anything older than about 1990 might as well be silent movies.

But we like the older stuff. It’s not vegetables we choke down because they’re healthy. They’re entertaining, and often illuminating. They understood the concept of spectacle better than the CGI mavens do now. Part of the appeal of old movies is survivor bias. We have lots of good movies from the 1950s, but I’m sure there were just as many bad ones made as good back then. It’s just that no one bothered to put the dreck out on VHS or DVD or load it up for streaming. Stuff disappears. Nothing you see on Tubi will still be around 50 years from now.

An exception is when dreck becomes exalted simply because it’s widely available. Do I really like the Three Stooges, or do I like them because they were the only thing on TV when I got home from grammar school? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. I think way too many people who are in charge of making entertainment these days watched Kimba the White Lion instead of Moe, Larry, and Curly while eating their Handi-Snacks. They could use a few  good blows to the head.

Many movies are interesting enough to watch multiple times, with an appropriate interregnum. I’ve noticed that anything that has Netflix, or Apple, or the Amazon logo in the opening credits is never worth a second look. Most don’t deserve even a first look. Their descriptions alone are generally enough to elicit a hard pass. What, exactly, qualifies a streaming service, or company that buys telephones from the Chinese, or an online dollar store, to make movies? It’s especially silly for streaming services. In 1950, Louis B. Mayer didn’t hire projectionists and ticket booth girls to direct movies, and for good reason.

In the re-run department, we’ve watched Niagara (1953) multiple times over the years. I’m not sure why, exactly, but we have.

It’s a straight noir plot, if a little muddled. Scheming temptress wants to throw over her slightly shellshocked hubby for a hubba-hubba guy with two-tone shoes. Everything except hilarity ensues. It breaks the cardinal rule of noir without losing anything in the bargain. It’s in Technicolor. I don’t know why more directors didn’t try to adapt noir plots to Technicolor. The three-strip process had a way of making colors look way more lurid than any black and white movie ever accomplished in the yeah, see genre. And there can’t possibly be anything more lurid than a closeup of Marilyn Monroe in Technicolor after Ben Nye got done with his brush and roller work.

Niagara was the first movie that gave Monroe top billing, and from watching the trailer, you can tell the producers figured Marilyn’s butt on the screen would put butts in the seats. They weren’t wrong. Niagara was a money-maker when it was released, even though reviews of the film were somewhat mixed. Jean Peters, who was once Miss Ohio, and married to Howard Hughes, was cast as the plain Jane wife of about the goofiest character ever set to celluloid, played by Max Showalter. Max exuded tons of sexuality, don’t get me wrong, but not the kind of sexuality that was going to do Jean Peters any good. So how do you make Jean Peters look average-y? You slam the battleship Monroe into her side.

I gather that the generations that followed my parents and mine don’t “get” Marilyn Monroe in quite the same way. She entered the pantheon of weird notoriety that Fat Elvis and Michael Jackson and Santa Claus reside in. Andy Warhol’s paean to her cemented that status way back in 1962, with the Marilyn Diptych:

It’s not an accident that Warhol’s literally reverential treatment of Monroe was cribbed from a publicity still from Niagara:

That look, there. Sleepy eyes, a smile that could mean anything. She perfected it. Her face is a circus poster pasted on a brick wall. God only knows what goes on in the building itself. But it’s a brick shithouse, that’s for sure.

It’s beyond my ability to explain the appeal of Marilyn Monroe. Whatever recipe she’s using was more closely held than Colonel Sanders ever managed. I think Lawrence Oliver, who hired her to star in The Prince and the Showgirl, and maybe wished he hadn’t, is the only person who truly understood what was going on. And even he, completely aware of how acting works, how actors behave, how notoriety works, and constantly surrounded by the most attractive female humans in the world, admits he was flummoxed by her.

Some movies like Niagara make excellent cultural artifacts. By watching them, and trying to immerse yourself in the time and place they sprang from, you can understand the vibe that produced them. Niagara is modestly entertaining as a story. It’s got Niagara Falls for a backdrop, which is monumental. It’s fun to watch. And Marilyn Monroe is in it. I have no idea why that matters. But it does.

Tag: 1950s

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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