I was born a poor black child…” After being a stand up comedy sensation in the late 70s, Steve Martin decided to take his funny ideas into a new arena: film. In 1979, Steve Martin’s debut “The Jerk” was released and it was a smash hit, opening the doors of […]
M. Emmett Walsh
4 posts
Karel Reisz’s 1974 drama The Gambler looks at the obsessive compulsive sickness of gambling addiction. James Caan stars as Axel Freed, a highly intellectual college professor who teaches classic literature. What’s most intriguing is his dual nature which has him explaining the writing of Dostoyevski one minute then carousing with […]
To celebrate the month of Noirvember I wanted to delve into the first wave of film noir and its post-modern form that is every bit as exciting. Neo Noir is the (usually) colorized counterpart to the classical black and white films of the 40s-late 50s. They often feature the same […]
In Ulu Grossbard’s crime film/character study Straight Time (1978) Dustin Hoffman stars as Max Dembo a career criminal who is newly released from prison. Max tries to stay on the straight and narrow, he even starts a relationship with a woman (Theresa Russell) he meets at an unemployment office but […]