A Bitter-Sweet End To 'Breaking Bad'

The good news is that there's going to be a Season 5 of "Breaking Bad." The bad news is that those 16 episodes will be the last.
It's hard to complain, because the ongoing hair-raising, death-defying antics of Walt White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkham (Aaron Paul), business partners in the methamphetamine trade, have been insanely fun and nail-bitingly tense to watch.
Wisely, to maintain a sense of credibility, I think, the story is going to conclude. I'm not sure whether cast members wanted to end it or if producer Vince Gilligan decided it was time to bring the curtain down. Whatever. The timing seems right.
Both Walt and Jesse crossed a critical line at the end of last season (I'll spare you the spoiler) and from here on it's going to be increasingly difficult to root for them. The wrap-up will come at a perfect time. It shows that, unlike so many other cable franchises, the folks running it are more interested in producing a good story rather than milking a cash cow.

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Third ‘Noir City: Chicago’ Festival Opens

Diabolical twins, obsessed journalists and jail-breaking thugs are heading their way to the Music Box Theatre. The Film Noir Foundation’s third installment of “Noir City: Chicago” features no less than sixteen restored 35mm prints of must-see cinematic rarities. Ten of these noir classics have yet to land a DVD release, thus making this festival all the more essential for local cinephiles.
The week-long festival kicks off Friday, Aug. 12, and includes criminally overlooked performances from Hollywood legends such as Humphrey Bogart, Anne Bancroft, Barbara Stanwyck, Olivia de Havilland, Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters and Burt Lancaster. Acclaimed noir historians Alan K. Rode (“Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy”) and Foster Hirsch (“Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir”) will be presenting the pictures while offering their wealth of historical and filmic insight.
Among this year’s most priceless treasures is “Deadline USA,” starring Bogart as a newspaper editor who refuses to stop chasing a vital story despite the impending death of his paper. That film is scheduled to make a superb double feature with “Chicago Deadline,” a long lost mystery-tinged melodrama that was shot on location in the Windy City over sixty years ago. Two Alan Ladd/Veronica Lake pairings are included in the mix, as well as two films headlined by the underrated character actor Broderick Crawford.

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Robert Ryan Gets Film Forum Tribute

"BORN to play beautifully tortured, angry souls, the actor Robert Ryan was a familiar movie face for more than two decades in Hollywood’s classical years, his studio ups and downs, independent detours and outlier adventures paralleling the arc of American cinema as it went from a national pastime to near collapse."

So begins Manohla Dargis's New York Times profile of Robert Ryan, "Robert Ryan’s Quiet Furies." Ryan played numerous tough guys and villains in noirs, war films and westerns throughout his career. His memorable crime dramas include “The Racket,” "Clash By Night," "The Set-Up," "Crossfire" and "House of Bamboo," among others. He is also remembered for his role in Sam Peckinpah's 1969 high-body-count western, "The Wild Bunch."
The paper profiled Ryan in advance of a Film Forum series that will feature two dozen of the actor's movies.


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Criterion Discs Ladle Out Raw Doses Of Sam Fuller's Tabloid World

It took me a while, meaning a couple of viewings of both movies plus additional time spent watching the extended features of Samuel Fuller's movies, "Shock Corridor" and "The Naked Kiss" before I began to get into them. Fuller, who was a wild-man director idolized by the upstarts of the European New Wave in the 1960s and later by Quentin Tarantino, started out life as a copy boy and then a reporter on New York tabloid newspapers. His movies look like the kind of stuff an ink-stained wretch might have cooked up. They're sort of raw, sometimes brutal in their depiction of violence, and often controversial for the topics they delve into -- violence, prostitution, child molestation. Fuller's movies bring to mind the sensationalism of Roger Corman's midnight movies. Criterion has come out with freshened new prints of both films. Check out the special features, especially for the interviews with Fuller, which alone are worth the price of the DVDs.

Brit Slated To Step Into Big Al's Shoes

English actor Tom Hardy, top right, is reportedly set to play notorious Chicago mobster Al Capone. The rising actor, who will be playing Batman's arch nemesis Bane in "The Dark Knight Rises," has reportedly signed on to star in "Cicero." The film, which Warners is hoping will spawn a trilogy, will focus on the early beginnings of Al Capone, bottom right, the America gangster who ruled Chicago's crime scene in the '20s and '30s.
Hardy has been seen in the hit film "Inception." He's also expected to appear in a "Mad Max" reboot.
Warner Bros. is hoping that "Harry Potter" director David Yates will helm the crime epic.
Al Capone was famously played by Robert De Niro in "The Untouchables" (1987), by Rod Steiger in "Al Capone" (1959) and more recently by Stephen Graham in HBO's "Boardwalk Empire."
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to Italian immigrants, Capone connected with gangs after being expelled from school at 14. In his early 20s, he moved to Chicago to take advantage of a new opportunity to make money smuggling illegal alcoholic beverages into the city during Prohibition. Despite his profession, Capone became a highly visible public figure. He made various charitable endeavors using the money he made from his activities, and was viewed by some as a modern-day Robin Hood. He died in 1947 in Miami Beach, Fla.

How Bugsy Became A Hollywood Fixture

Here is the final resting place (above) for one Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (left), who ruled L.A.'s underworld until one fateful night in 1947 when his reign came to an abrupt end. Siegel is credited with envisioning Las Vegas, then a dusty desert outpost, as a world-class gambling empire.
But his luck ran out before he could cash his chips.
On the night of June 20, 1947, as Siegel sat with his associate Allen Smiley in his girlfriend Virginia Hill's Beverly Hills home, an unknown assailant fired at him through the window with a .30-caliber military M1 carbine, hitting him many times, including twice in the head. No one was charged with the murder, and the crime remains officially unsolved.
Visit him at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, located conveniently close to Paramount Studios.
The Flamingo Hotel (Below), Las Vegas, 1946 -- Siegel's last big project. The joint failed to bring an immediate profit, and it was the end for Bugsy.

Bogart Still Center Stage As American Screen Idol

I talk about film here for the most part, but I would be shirking my duty as a reporter if I didn't mention a book that I finished reading some time ago that deserves to be noted in this forum. It's Stefan Kanfer's biography of Humphrey Bogart, "Tough Without A Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart." A side note: I didn't even receive a review copy of it. I paid full price. I'm just saying ...
The author traces Bogie's life as a child of privilege growing up in a wealthy Manhattan family that later fell into economic hard times, and his ascent from New York theater to an extraordinary career that saw his trajectory shift from character actor to Hollywood leading man.
The title comes from Raymond Chandler's comment upon learning that Bogart was to play Philip Marlowe in the screen adaptation of Chandler's novel, "The Big Sleep." Chandler said he approved of the casting choice because Bogart is "tough without a gun."The book is a clear, balanced history of one of the country's truly great actors. It also looks at how Bogart's reputation diminished sometime after his death, until the next generation again discovered his movies. He's remained an America film icon ever since. For Bogart fans and anyone else interested in film it's a very good read.