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.

The Twisted Ways of 'Good Neighbors'

A twisted film noir with two or three very sick characters, the exact number dependant on your point of view, Good Neighbors takes supreme advantage of its grim setting —Montreal in the dead of winter. As any native will tell you, winters there can drive a person crazy.
Although the film’s writer-director Jacob Tierney makes it pretty clear that the tenants of a multi-story apartment complex in the Notre Dame de Grace area are mentally shaky in the best of times. Good Neighbors is a film of acquired taste. If one is willing to accept humor in a movie about a serial killer, if one likes a thriller than emphasizes character over thrills, if one is susceptible to a cast of characters that includes three cats, then the movie has found its very selective target audience. The Canadian film will receive solid reviews and modest box-office returns in south of the border play dates, but Good Neighbors heralds a promising although by no means new talent in actor-turned-writer-director Tierney.
The title is, of course, ironic. The surface friendliness of many of the residents of this aging but well appointed apartment building is mostly a façade. So when three of them seemingly hit it off, there is still general awkwardness all around since everyone feels uncomfortable in one another’s company.
Then there is that serial killer, who menaces young women in the neighborhood. Louise (Emily Hampshire), who works as a waitress in a nearby Chinese restaurant, has become obsessed with the story, scouring Montreal newspapers for any and all stories about each victim. The latest one is a co-worker. Her wheelchair-bound downstairs neighbor Spencer (Scott Speedman) shares her predilection up to a point.
But he mostly likes to keep to himself. Then a new tenant moves in, an elementary school teacher Victor (Jay Baruchel), recently returned to the city from a sojourn in China. Victor eagerly wants to make friends with the other two. Louise and Spencer reluctantly do so but remain wary of the newcomer. To their way of thinking, he is only a tad more agreeable than the crazy, drunken, foul-mouthed tenant (Anne-Marie Cadieux), who hates Louise’s cats. As the trio’s relationships develops, it is soon clear each is a troubled character. Louise’s life is oriented more to her felines, Mozart and Tia Maria, than to humans. Indeed you have to go back to the first 10 minutes of Robert Altman’s classic The Long Goodbye to find a movie where cats figure so prominently.
Victor is almost a benign stalker, a little creepy in his keenness to ingratiate himself to the other tenants, especially Louise on whom he clearly has a crush and soon develops an imaginary love life. Oh, yes, he talks to his mirror too, which in certain movies is always a bad sign. Outwardly Spencer seemsthe best adjusted of the trio despite his handicap. But there is something about his false smile that you instantly distrust. Maybe Spencer is a little too easy-going.
These three live above one another on three separate floors and the walls are paper-thin. In other words, it’s hard to keep secrets in this apartment complex although its manager, Mme Gauthier (veteran actress Micheline Lanctôt), will find herself completely in the dark when a murder takes place in the building itself. Tierney lets his cameras —and those cats, which expand to three when Victor’s cat from China, Balthazar, rejoins him —prowl all over the building from its lobby, stairway and hallways to the fire escape and snowy frontage on a surprisingly deserted street. The place is eerier than a haunted house.
The tensions within the trio’s insular world and then outside their uneasy circle with a crazy neighbor and vicious killer on the loose mount steadily in Tierney’s well orchestrated script, based on a 1982 novel by Chrystine Brouillet. An American might not immediately realize it, but this is a period piece as the story is set in 1995 when all of Quebec was caught up in the referendum about whether the province should sucede from greater Canada. Thus, signs are everywhere urging citizens to vote Oui or Non, which the filmmaker clearly sees metaphorically as a question each character faces in his or her secret life.
This also, as the director makes clear in press notes, puts his story outside the era of DNA and the Internet, which he calls the “death of noir.” Tierney more or less pulls off his elaborate and clever juggling act of elements macabre and disturbing within the seeming normalcy of domestic cats and friendly neighbors. The whole affair is very tongue-in-cheek, a kind of deconstruction of noir atmosphere and its tropes into a meditation on the treachery of the human heart. Working on a modest budget and taking advantage of its very limitations, he brings great vitality and ambiance to a paucity of sets and locations.
Meanwhile his actors deliver wonderfully ambiguous performances. For this isn’t one of those movies where clarity only comes at the end. You’re aware of the identity of the killer before too long. What keeps you guessing is how everyone will react to what they know, or what think they know, about one another. None of which Tierney would have accomplished if it weren’t for animal wranglers Josée Juteau and Raymond Ducasse. Who says you can’t train cats? Opens: July 29 in Los Angeles.
-- Hollywood Reporter

'Gangster Squad' Targets Stone

Emma Stone is reportedly in negotiations for a role in "The Gangster Squad," the highly anticipated feature about the reign of L.A. underworld kingpin Mickey Cohen. Sean Penn is slated to portray the mobster.
The 22-year-old Stone has been in the business for a good amount of time but got everyone's attention with breakout role in last summer's "Easy A." She's also expected to appear in the next "Spiderman" reboot.
Stone has been offered the "Gangster Squad" role of Jean, a woman romantically attached to two men: the gangster Cohen and the police officer who is chasing him down.
Ryan Gosling is playing Sgt. Jerry Wooters. Josh Brolin and Michael Pena also star.
The movie is about Cohen, the Brooklyn-born gangster who was sent to Los Angeles by Meyer Lansky to keep an eye on Bugsy Siegel. Cohen became a mob kingpin himself in the 1940s, and at one point fired rounds from two .45-caliber handguns into the ceiling of the Hotel Roosevelt lobby.
"Gangster Squad" is based on a series of articles by Paul Lieberman. "L.A. Rex" author Will Beall wrote the script.
Ruben Fleischer is directing and Dan Lin and Kevin McCormick are producing.

Let There Be 'Brighton Rock'

Some great news: "Brighton Rock," the acclaimed new adaptation of Graham Greene‘s classic novel, will be seen in U.S. theaters August 26, thanks to IFC. The film depicts the story of Pinkie, a lowly gangster who romances a naive, lonely waitress, Rose, after she discovers evidence he committed murder.
Fans of British cinema will certainly remember the beloved 1947 version, starring Richard Attenborough as Pinkie, Carol Marsh as Rose, and the fine Hermione Baddeley as Rose’s motherly protector, Ida.
In the new version, Control‘s Sam Riley, Andrea Riseborough, and Dame Helen Mirren step into the roles, with Andy Serkis and John Hurt rounding out the excellent cast. The film is 28 Weeks Later screenwriter Rowan Joffe‘s feature-film directorial debut.
Carey Mulligan was slated to play Rose but decided to do "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" instead. Whether or not that was a wise move is up for debate, but Riseborough’s performance in the film is said to be “star-making.” The Guardian declared the film “masterpiece” and singled out Riseborough’s acting as particularly skillful. “To say her achievement deserves an Oscar would be somehow to demean it,” raved David Cox. Riseborough was one of our 5 British Breakout Film Stars of 2010, as well as one of our Top 5 British Actresses of the year.