The Big Knife (1955)

Film: The Big Knife (1955)

Stars: Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Jean Hagen, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Everett Sloane

Director: Robert Aldrich

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

Film noir in the mid-to-late 1950's, in my opinion, gets a bum rap.  Yes, at this point we are seeing less of the biggest names in show business doing the genre (not like in the 1940's when stars like Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, & Barbara Stanwyck were regularly appearing in the genre), but you still get really good movies like Odds Against Tomorrow, The Wrong Man, and perhaps the greatest film noir of them all (my opinion changes depending on the day on who deserves that title) Touch of Evil.  In 1955, Robert Aldrich, most well-known today as the guy who dealt with Bette Davis & Joan Crawford on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (if you watched Feud's first season, he's played by Alfred Molina) made two of the most-revered film noirs of the era.  The first, Kiss Me Deadly, we profiled in a previous season (check out the review at the bottom of this page), but is a proper masterpiece (if you haven't seen it, you must, and also put down your damn phone during it as it's the kind of movie you need to immerse yourself into), but his second was far more infamous at the time it was made, and while it's not as good, that doesn't mean it's not a very strong follow-up picture from Aldrich.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place largely in one house (other than a cutaway to a party, I don't recall a scene that doesn't take place in the main character's home...which is how you can tell it was adapted from a play by Clifford Odets).  Charlie Castle (Palance) is a leading man living in a mansion, and is about to sign a contract with his studio to continue to make movies, even though he's not interested in such a contract because he keeps getting saddled with commercial garbage from the studio.  He's also worried about the impact it'll have on his marriage to wife Marion (Lupino), who is separated from him and seeing another man.  Things to come to a head when the studio chief Shriner Hoff (Steiger) basically blackmails Charlie into signing the deal, as he has knowledge of a vehicular homicide that Charlie caused that ultimately his friend Buddy went to jail for.  Charlie signs it, and in the wake sleeps with Buddy's wife (Hagen), but there's a problem-a woman was there the night Charlie had his hit-and-run, a struggling starlet named Dixie Evans (Winters), and she's threatening to go to a gossip columnist (clearly modeled after Hedda Hopper) to destroy Charlie's career.

The movie continues on, but we'll stop here for an intermission.  The Big Knife is one of several films that happened in the wake of the success of Sunset Boulevard that showed the uglier side of Hollywood.  We saw more of this with pictures like In a Lonely Place and The Bad and the Beautiful, but The Big Knife is one of the nastiest in this subgenre.  First off, it's at least somewhat based on a true story, and even more so off of a famous Hollywood legend.  In the early 1930's, John Huston was arrested (though ultimately absolved) of a hit-and-run involving a dancer who ran in front of his car.  Huston, unlike the character in the movie, was the actual person behind the wheel and unlike Charlie, wasn't drunk when it happened.  The legend involving Huston's accident is that he took the blame for Clark Gable, even in 1933 a major star for the studio and more valuable than Huston, and whose career couldn't handle the scandal (this is rebutted by pretty much everyone in retrospect as untrue as Gable was nowhere near the accident, but it's become enmeshed in both the Huston story and in the making of The Big Knife).

Then again, no one gets away scot-free here.  Rod Steiger is really good as Hoff, playing him as a malevolent monster, willing to destroy Charlie's life if it helps his bottom line.  It's also a clear homage to Harry Cohn, then the head of Columbia, who was furious when he saw the film.  In fact, despite a starry cast (Palance & Hagen had recently gotten Oscar nominations, Lupino & Steiger were still pretty big names) no studio would touch this film other than United Artists.  That was largely to do with the film's subject matter (tearing apart the star system), but also could've done with the film's bleak ending.  Winters' character dies (Winters, for the record, aces this part, which feels written for her as she gets to be drunk, lascivious, & downtrodden, which are all onscreen skills she perfected in the wake of A Place in the Sun), not from murder (as some expected), but getting hit by a bus.  Charlie, at that point, could find reprieve...but when his wife finds out about his affair with Jean Hagen's Connie, he can't take it.  He has no control in his life, and he kills himself offscreen.  

This is when maybe the most dastardly thing in the movie happens.  Ida Lupino wails in sorrow, and the camera zooms out, showing us first the apartment, and then the sides of a screen, implying (in a Twilight Zone-style twist) that we've been watching a fictional movie-within-a-movie.  The end credits roll before they do much with it, but it's a bitter note to end the picture on, with Aldrich/Odets commentating on us enjoying the sorrows of these beautiful people as entertainment in a meta way.  The film is sometimes a bit too heavy-handed, but the performances from Lupino, Steiger, & Winters are so strong (Palance is fine, but maybe a tad miscast...William Holden or Kirk Douglas would've been a better choice here since they were more convincing leading men) you won't care.  And of course, as is evidenced by this month, I love me a ruthless film noir, which this is.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Call Northside 777, Caught, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, The Naked City, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, Side Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach, A Woman's Secret

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, Kansas City Confidential, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps, Whirlpool

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai

The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

Film: The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

Stars: Edmond O'Brien, Frank Lovejoy, William Talman

Director: Ida Lupino

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

During the first 35 years of the Directors Guild of America, only three women were admitted as members. The first was Dorothy Arzner, whose musical drama Dance, Girl, Dance has since been hailed as a classic.  The third was Elaine May, who made her first feature film in 1971 after decades of appearing alongside Oscar-winner Mike Nichols in a comedy tour (she'd go on to make some of the most singular comedies of the 1970's).  The second, though, is best known to most as an actress, not as a director.  We've talked a lot about Ida Lupino on this blog through the years, particularly in 2019 when she was honored as one of our Saturdays with the Stars.  We profiled her film The Bigamist that month, when she became the first woman to direct herself in a major studio movie.  But we didn't talk about arguably her most well-known film.  That would be The Hitch-Hiker, which doesn't feature Lupino at all behind the camera, and was made by her production company The Filmakers in 1953.  The movie was the first noir to be directed by a woman, and has since been hailed as something of a landmark thriller.  I was curious, given my total adoration, what I'd feel like when she totally gave up on the front-of-the-camera and immersed herself behind it.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Hitch-Hiker is largely a trio.  While there are other characters, they don't matter in this film, as we see friends Roy Collins (O'Brien) and Gilbert Bowen (Lovejoy), who pickup a hitchhiker on their way to a Mexican fishing trip.  Once he's in the car, they realize that the hitchhiker is noted serial killer Emmett Myers (Talman), who is trying to flee into Mexico & disappear from the law.  Along the way, the men start to become terrorized by Emmett, with him even forcing them to play a game of "shoot the tin can" while Roy holds the tin can & Gilbert shoots (and thankfully doesn't miss).  When their car breaks down, they have to take off on foot, with Emmett ridiculing Roy who hurts himself when they attempt escape, making getting away impossible for him.  At the end, the law finally catches up with Emmett, with the two men finally freed, but forever changed.

The movie is based on the real-life criminal Billy Cook, who killed five people and then took multiple people hostage as he tried to flee.  It's violent, though probably not as violent as you'd expect.  The movie is 71-minutes long (considering The Filmakers was producing it on a shoestring budget, this makes sense), and I suspect giving it another 20 minutes you might have had a classic on your hand, given how good Talman is as Emmett.  A longer runtime would've allowed Lupino time to flesh out Collins & Bowen, who at the time would've read as pretty different to the public (O'Brien being a well-known character actor), but decades later, they almost register as Rosencrantz & Guildenstern given how little O'Brien's cultural cache has remained.  This results in the movie being a bit misbegotten.

But it does show the talent of Lupino that she clearly did all she could with an undercooked concept and no money.  Lupino's name as a director was largely made in women's pictures, melodramas that were similar to the ones she made when she was a headliner at Warner Brothers in the 1940's.  Lupino spent much of that decade being overshadowed by Bette Davis, never getting the career she hoped for even though she definitely had the talent.  Lupino would make The Bigamist later that year, but wouldn't make another film for 13 years when she made an unlikely switch to make the family flick The Trouble with Angels with Rosalind Russell & Hayley Mills (her final picture).

Previous Films in the Series: Murder My Sweet, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, The Killers, The Big Sleep, Daisy Kenyon, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Woman on the Beach, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, The Asphalt Jungle, Night and the City, They Live By Night, Gun Crazy, In a Lonely Place, Sweet Smell of Success, The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, The Killing, The Long Goodbye, Body Heat

OVP: Hollywood Canteen (1944)

Film: Hollywood Canteen (1944)
Stars: Joan Leslie, Robert Hutton, Dane Clark, Janis Paige...and enough star cameos to fill the Dorothy Chandler
Director: Delmer Daves
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Original Song-"Sweet Dreams, Sweetheart," Scoring, Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Weird coincidence time.  Yesterday we discussed Mr. Dodd Takes the Air, a largely forgotten musical picture that was nominated for Best Original Song and features Jane Wyman.  Today, we look at another largely forgotten musical picture...that was nominated for Best Original Song and features Jane Wyman.  Hollywood Canteen, though, isn't lacking for star power in the way Dodd does.  While Dodd's only recognizable face today is Wyman's, she'd be lucky to make the first page of the call sheet for Hollywood Canteen, a Hollywood propaganda (come on-I know that has pejorative connotations, but that's what this is) movie about the film community's contributions to the war effort, specifically Bette Davis & John Garfield's creation of the Hollywood Canteen.

(Spoilers Ahead) For those unfamiliar, during the war, Davis & Garfield helped lead a war effort that would include people from every single studio coming together and giving out dances, food, and entertainment to men that were about to ship out overseas to fight in World War II.  The canteen was ahead of its time in some ways (it was desegregated) and while it was totally publicity for the Hollywood stars who went there (and admittedly had a darker side, as seen in the unsolved homicide of Georgette Beaurdorf), it was genuinely something that stars actually worked at.  All of the actors in this film were people who in real life were helping to keep the lights on at the actual restaurant, so if a GI came to the Canteen, they'd be able to see proper movie stars right up close, potentially serving them dinner.

In this film, we have two GI's returned from the South Pacific, Slim Green (Hutton) and Sergeant Nolan (Clark) who are looking for a good time and, in Slim's case, the girl of his dreams, Joan Leslie.  Of course, when they get there, Slim meets Leslie (played by the actress herself) and he wins first a kiss with her, and then a weekend date with the actress (in real life this would have been strictly forbidden-there were rules about the girls going home with the soldiers).  They fall in love, while Nolan continually strikes out until he falls for a tour guide (played by Janis Paige in one of her very first roles), with Slim shipping out, but Joan promising they'll meet again after the war.

The movie is shameless in the way it tries to glamorize the dangerous aspects of the war.  There's literally a scene where Nolan claims that he could walk without a cane all thanks to meeting Janis Paige's character at the Hollywood Canteen.  The film's plot is flimsy, a little creepy (it sure feels like Joan Leslie is being forced, while not into prostitution, at least into uncomfortable situations with a man who borders on stalking her), and more-than-once feels like it's simply Hollywood trying to justify itself during a time of great moral duress & uncertainty.

Here's the thing though, you're not going to care, because the film in the first half is about as much fun as a classic film fan can have (the second half is where it makes the mistake of trying to have a plot).  You see more stars than I could count, some of the highlights being Davis, Garfield, Wyman, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, Jack Benny, Sydney Greenstreet, Ida Lupino, Alexis Smith, and Roy Rogers all showing up in clever cameos, with Crawford arguably getting the best one (you can see her scene here), and it is divine.  This isn't like Around the World in 80 Days where you have to guess-the stars are very much introduced in ridiculously expository ways, but it's magical.  Never mind that some of these actors probably hated each other and weren't this nice & naturally charming in real life...it's bliss every time a new personality comes on to show us the star power going on at Warner Brothers during this era.

The film won three nominations, all of which are fine, if not groundbreaking.  The best of the three is Scoring, as a host of musicians and notable bands make cameos & bring us great numbers, including Rogers, the Andrews Sisters, Joan McCrackon, and the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra.  It's not all original, but it's a blast.  The nominated song (sung in the film first by Leslie, and later by Kitty Carlisle), is kind of maudlin, and a bit too schmaltzy for my tastes, but all of the film with that music and the frequent crowd scenes handle the sound well.  All-in-all, this isn't a great movie, but man is it one I'd highly recommend for anyone who loves old cinema, as it's the closest you'll probably ever get to walking onto a backlot.

Saturdays with the Stars: Season 1 Recap

Ida Lupino & Ann Sheridan, two of our
stars kicking their heels!

With yesterday's sojourn into the South Pacific, we have finished our first season of "Saturday with the Stars!"  I'm not much for naval-gazing (mostly because I am aware this blog is not read by swaths of people), but I am really, really proud of this past season.  When I came up with this idea, I mostly wanted to see if I could do it for a year, and with one exception (you won't be able to tell this unless you were paying really close attention because I pre-dated the article, but when I was suffering from a 103-fever & pneumonia, I published one article on a Sunday), I did!

This year has taught me about the careers of twelve amazing artists, and I hope you learned some things about them too.  I had never really done something like this with actors, focusing instead on genre or something arbitrary like Oscar nominations, but getting to see the progressions in these women's careers was eye-opening, noting the similarities as well as the differences in their journeys.  I am struck by how expansive the universe of classic film is still to me some 25 years after I first started to delve into it. This year we watched movies that I'd never even heard of until I included them in the project, and made a bunch of "deep cut" discoveries.

We'll begin our second season in a few days (click here if you want to learn more about it), but before we go I am a lover of lists, and wanted to rank a few of the movies we watched this year.  I'm appreciative to all of these actresses for the education & cinematic pleasure they gave me during this journey, so I'm only focusing on the positives (no "worst of" lists).  If you have enjoyed this series, please feel free to comment or tweet this post-I'd love to have more people joining us in Season 2.  And if you have opinions on these actresses (or further research I should do), share in the comments as well!

Favorite Performances from Each Star
January: Ann Sheridan-Woman on the Run
February: Virginia Mayo-Along the Great Divide
March: Cyd Charisse-The Band Wagon
April: Alice Faye-Hello Frisco Hello
May: Linda Darnell-A Letter to Three Wives
June: Lizabeth Scott-Too Late for Tears
July: Rhonda Fleming-While the City Sleeps
August: Ruth Roman-Lightning Strikes Twice
September: Esther Williams-Bathing Beauty
October: Hedy Lamarr-Ecstasy
November: Ida Lupino-The Hard Way
December: Mitzi Gaynor-Les Girls

5 Favorite Actresses of the Year (Alphabetical)

Linda Darnell
Alice Faye
Rhonda Fleming
Ida Lupino
Lizabeth Scott

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Linda Darnell, A Letter to Three Wives
Alice Faye, Hello Frisco Hello
Ida Lupino, The Bigamist
Ida Lupino, The Hard Way
Lizabeth Scott, Too Late for Tears

10 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

The Band Wagon
The Bigamist
Brigadoon
It's Always Fair Weather
Les Girls
A Letter to Three Wives
The Man Who Came to Dinner
My Darling Clementine
Strangers on a Train
Too Late for Tears

10 Favorite Performances of the Year in these Films (Not By Our Leading Ladies)

Humphrey Bogart, High Sierra
Kirk Douglas, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
Nanette Fabray, The Band Wagon
Patricia Hitchcock, Strangers on a Train
Van Johnson, Brigadoon
Kay Kendall, Les Girls
Janis Paige, Silk Stockings
Ann Sothern, A Letter to Three Wives
Robert Walker, Strangers on a Train
Monty Woolley, The Man Who Came to Dinner

The Bigamist (1953)

Film: The Bigamist (1953)
Stars: Joan Fontaine, Ida Lupino, Edmond O'Brien, Edmund Gwenn
Director: Ida Lupino
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Ida Lupino-click here to learn more about Ms. Lupino (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

This week we will conclude our month-long look at Ida Lupino.  Lupino has been a discovery for me throughout November, someone who I had heard of but never really followed, and only seen in a smattering of things like her TV spots on Batman and The Twilight Zone.  This month, I've really enjoyed finding an actress that genuinely didn't get her do in her era but was a particularly fine performer who frequently got saddled with less-than-inspiring scripts and storylines that were beneath her talents.  It's difficult to imagine what might have been if Lupino had been, say, given one or two the iconic roles that went to her peers Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, & Barbara Stanwyck, as she was clearly up for a Mildred Pierce or Double Indemnity if it suited her.  Unlike most actresses we've profiled who started to migrate away from screens when the parts got lousy, Lupino took her fate into her own hand, becoming the only significant female film director of the Classical Hollywood era.  We likely could have devoted a whole additional month to Lupino's work behind-the-camera, but this is a series that is focusing on stars in front of the camera, so we will only profile one of her directorial achievements: The Bigamist, a 1953 picture that made history as the first Hollywood studio film to have the same woman both on the screen and in the director's chair.  As a result, Lupino was a trailblazer for women such as Barbra Streisand, Jodie Foster, Angelina Jolie, & Diane Keaton who would also star in their own directorial achievements.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film gives Fontaine & Lupino top billing, but the titular and main character is Edmond O'Brien's Harry Graham, a seemingly mild-mannered salesman who is trying to adopt a child with his confident, businesswoman wife Eve (Fontaine).  While investigating them for whether they'd make good parents, the adoption officer Mr. Jordan (Gwenn) discovers that Harry has been leading a double life, and is in fact married to another woman named Phyllis (Lupino), with whom he has a young son.  Repulsed, Mr. Jordan initially wants to contact the police, but Harry insists that he hear his story, and in it we learn that he is a man who was in a stilted marriage, and who genuinely fell in love with another woman, got her pregnant, and then married her to "do the honorable thing."  Despite Mr. Jordan forgiving him, Harry feels the need to come clean, and the film ends with an unusual amount of ambiguity, as while the judge is sympathetic to Harry, he passionately calls out that it will be the women in his life who will decide his ultimate fate, and both women don't show their leanings before the end card scans (and for the record, neither does the judge as we don't know what he'll sentence).  We're left with a lot of heartache, but no answers from Eve or Phyllis if either will take back the man who lied to them, but lied because he genuinely loved them both.

The movie is short, and was a blip of a picture when it was first released.  RKO was initially going to release the film, but dropped out (perhaps because of the movie's touchy subject matter, a trait of Lupino's as a director as she'd also discuss rape in Outrage and serial killers in The Hitch-Hiker, both of which caused her headaches with censors), and so Lupino's production company had to release the film themselves.  Even with several big name stars, that's a tall task for a minor studio with a pioneering director.

It probably helped Lupino, though, in selling the film that it's really good.  The Bigamist handles its subject matter with a calm, level-headed demeanor, proving that while there are complicated feelings and attitudes here, there are no villains here.  Harry never blames Eve's infertility or her ambition for being the reason he stepped out on her (he tries on occasion, but the movie is quick to deter him from blaming his wife for her own career).  The movie also doesn't make Phyllis out to be a harlot or some sort of gold-digger; if anything, they underline that she didn't want to get married and is willing to have their baby as a single mother, not wanting to "marry him that way."  It feels a bit sexist of me to attribute this care to Lupino's gender, the way that she is able to have both Eve and Phyllis be real, fully-fleshed women who have their own pursuits but still are in love with the same man.  After all, other directors like Nicholas Ray were able to have this sort of sensitivity for their characters.  But it's perhaps more telling the way that Lupino handles the behind-the-screen scenes as a director with a long history as an actor, as she makes sure to use her performer's natural gifts (O'Brien's everyman lunkheaded charm, Fontaine's casual elegance, Lupino's brash initial standoffishness) to aid her story.  The Bigamist is proof that Lupino was a damned fine director, and it's hard not to imagine what she would have accomplished given a bigger budget and more sway from the powers-that-be.

Instead, The Bigamist would be Lupino's penultimate directorial achievement, and the last one of the 1950's.  She'd continue starring in the occasional noir film (including While the City Sleeps which we looked at for Rhonda Fleming's month), but mostly migrated to television as an actress and a director.  She'd only make one more feature film, the 1966 Columbia movie The Trouble with Angels with Rosalind Russell & Hayley Mills.  Next month, we will conclude our first season of "Saturdays with the Stars" with one last starlet, a Hollywood actress who also turned her stint in the movies into more memorable success in other fields.

On Dangerous Ground (1951)

Film: On Dangerous Ground (1951)
Stars: Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan, Ward Bond
Director: Nicholas Ray
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Ida Lupino-click here to learn more about Ms. Lupino (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We continue on with the work of Ida Lupino this week with On Dangerous Ground, considerably later in her film career than last week.  By the early 1950's, Lupino's career from the outside looked like it was on the wane.  Her contract with Jack Warner had expired in 1947, and as an actress she was largely doing freelance work in forgettable noirs and dramas at pretty much every other studio about-town.  However, personally it feels like Lupino was at the peak of her powers in Hollywood, as she was enjoying the fruits of her many suspensions of Warner Brothers, where she learned about the behind-the-scenes work of directors and writers, and had begun to direct films herself, including Outrage with Mala Powers and The Hitch-Hiker with Edmond O'Brien.  While our focus this month is on an actress's career on the big screen, rather than in the director's chair, we'll be focusing next week on one of the few films that Lupino made where she actually starred, so we'll have the great joy of seeing Lupino in front-of-and-behind-the-camera in a movie where she became the first female star of any renown to actually direct herself.  First, though, let's take a look at one of the movies she decided worthy of her starring in that took her away from her groundbreaking behind-the-scenes roles, and perhaps the one that looks most interesting on-paper considering it's directed by someone as celebrated as Nicholas Ray: On Dangerous Ground.

(Spoilers Ahead) In the film, Jim Wilson (Ryan) plays a cop-in-the-city who has clear anger problems.  He gets results, but does so through violence and intimidation of his witnesses and suspects.  He's assigned a crime in the country to investigate the death of a young girl whose father Walter Brent (Bond) basically threatens to beat Jim to "enacting justice" on the man who killed his daughter (he's going to kill the murderer himself).  While they are investigating, they eventually realize that the man who killed Brent's daughter A) likely has some sort of mental disability and B) is the brother of a beautiful blind woman named Mary (Lupino) who lives alone except for her brother, and is cautious but protective of him.  She makes a deal with Jim that she'll convince her brother to give himself up for the law in exchange for his protection from Brent, and that trust eventually gives Jim something of a change-of-heart about his "city ways."  Despite that, her brother still dies in an accident during the chase, and Mary is left alone...until in the film's final moments Jim decides to go back to her, as he's clearly fallen in love.

The movie's noted for a few reasons.  For starters, it's hard to pinpoint the genre of what this picture actually is.  The film obviously has the tenets of a noir, with the central death of a young woman driving so much of the plot, but it feels more like an intimate character study.  Though it clocks in at only 82 minutes, the plot is short for a noir (a genre noted for throwing in a number of curveballs and misdirections), as we know who the killer is almost from the onset, and thus it's really the interactions between Jim, Brent, and Mary that drive the catalyst of the story.  Lupino is quite good as Mary, finding aspects of the character that aren't in the script, like her rigidity both in her principles & simply in the way she walks.  This is the sort of role that had won Jane Wyman an Oscar three years earlier, and while I doubt Lupino would have had such illusions for On Dangerous Ground (it's hardly the big-studio showcase that Johnny Belinda was), she gives more subtlety than Wyman did in the biggest moment of her career.

The movie's most marked characteristic, though, is its score.  For anyone who has ever seen, say, Citizen Kane or Psycho or Taxi Driver, you're familiar with the work of Bernard Herrmann.  This film is composed by Herrmann, and was considered one of his favorites.  The movie is the original source of the famed Have Gun Will Travel theme, and has a gorgeous recurring theme surrounding Lupino's Mary featuring the viola d'amore, a set of the music that Herrmann was so smitten with he gave the musician who played the instrument, Virginia Majewski, credit on his own title card.  Combined with a plot that's interesting enough to keep you guessing (even if you know the ending a mile away) and the always consistent actorly sensibilities of Lupino & Ryan, Herrmann's score is another way for me to recommend this picture-it's genuinely lush, the sort of gemlike work that you don't expect to find in a seemingly throwaway B-movie of the 1950's.

The Hard Way (1943)

Film: The Hard Way (1943)
Stars: Ida Lupino, Joan Leslie, Dennis Morgan, Jack Carson, Gladys George
Director: Vincent Sherman
Oscar History: The film received no Oscar nominations, but Lupino won the New York Film Critics Circle Award, and was clearly close to being an Oscar nomination.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Ida Lupino-click here to learn more about Ms. Lupino (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Our "Saturdays with the Stars" series this season has focused on actresses who were major names in their era, but never received the blessing of Oscar-women that couldn't quite translate their names above the title into at least one citation from AMPAS.  That doesn't mean, however, that these women didn't come close to getting nominated.  Our series features three Golden Globe nominees (Cyd Charisse, Ruth Roman, and the woman whom we'll feature next month), as well as Linda Darnell, who was in serious conversation for a nomination at least twice (for Fallen Angel and A Letter to Three Wives), but none got quite as close as Ida Lupino in The Hard Way.  Only six women have ever won the NYFCC Award for Best Actress and not been an Oscar nominee eventually (and four are still alive, so they could well shorten that list)-one of them is Lupino.  She was widely assumed at the time, in fact, to be Warner's best shot at a contender in the Best Actress race, but a surprise nomination for Joan Fontaine in The Constant Nymph robbed Lupino of her only real shot at a nomination.  Let's see if Oscar got it wrong, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is centered around two sisters Helen (Lupino) and Katie Chernan (Leslie).  The movie watches as Helen wishes of getting out of a loveless marriage by any means necessary, and views her beautiful younger sister's show business dreams as a way to get there.  They cut a lucky break when Katie marries Albert Runkel (Carson), one half of a vaudeville duo who, along with the handsome Paul Collins (Morgan), whom Helen is drawn to, welcome Katie into their act and eventually Katie has eclipsed both of them, thanks to Helen's guiding hand.  The movie continues with Helen driving her sister further into stardom but in more nefarious ways, sacrificing her romantic happiness (twice) and once even ruining the chances of an alcoholic former starlet (played in a terrific little part by Gladys George) at a comeback.  The film ends with Katie finally giving up her sister to pursue Paul (long after first husband Albert has died from suicide), and Helen attempts suicide herself, realizing that she's given up so much of her life for a sister who wants nothing to do with her.

The film is fascinating even if it's heavy-handed.  The movie is a thinly-veiled (but still fictional) look at the early career of Ginger Rogers, with Lupino taking on the role of Rogers' notoriously ambitious mother Lela.  It'd have been more interesting if they'd stuck to Rogers' real-life, however, as the film's first half is considerably better than the second half, when the movie decides to treat Lupino like a villain rather than how she'd be treated today, as a cutthroat businesswoman who is determined to succeed (which, admittedly, some men would still consider a villain but I'm gay so I had more of a "YASS KWEEN!" reaction to Lupino throughout this movie).  In real life, Rogers didn't give up her career for a man-she in fact had one of the most storied, sustained careers in Hollywood for most of the Golden Age, but was never lucky in romance-she was married five times, and all marriages ended in divorce, and without children.  Rogers was by pretty much anyone's definition one of the most successful women of her era, but this movie's anti-feminist leanings toward the end would have indicted her in real life (by way of Katie) for choosing her flourishing career over a man who wanted her to be his maid & cook, and celebrate only his victories.  It's really disappointing that this is how this movie ended up, rather than emulating a film like All About Eve a few years later where the main character got to be both successful and have a love life, but the writers insist that we laud Katie for wanting marriage more than a career, and attempt to kill off Helen for doing the same.

That being said, the acting is swell here.  I already lauded George, but Leslie is good in her naive (but not fully naive) role as Katie, always willing to look the other way even when she knows what her sister is doing (still-one wonders what someone like Judy Garland, a more singular talent, would have done with this role).  Best of the bunch, though, is Lupino.  I'm still deciding who my favorite stars are of the women we've profiled in this series, but I can say without much hesitation that Lupino is the best actor of the bunch.  She knows what she's got with a complicated, complete role like Helen, and she nails it, finding nuance, verve, and just enough melodrama to elevate the movie in ways the script can't seem to understand.  This is the best performance we've seen from her, and while I haven't completed the 1943 Oscar lineup list, Lupino would have been a really worthy inclusion as a nominee.  It's hard not to think of what that would have meant for her career (considering how much Warner Brothers was dominating that particular ceremony with Casablanca and Watch on the Rhine, she might even have won!).  Instead, her acting career would begin to wane soon after this, and her cinematic career would take a decidedly different turn...but we'll get into that next week.

High Sierra (1941)

Film: High Sierra (1941)
Stars: Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart, Alan Curtis, Arthur Kennedy, Joan Leslie, Henry Travers, Cornel Wilde
Director: Raoul Walsh
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Ida Lupino-click here to learn more about Ms. Lupino (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We continue on with our month of Ida Lupino this week with the film that is almost exclusively associated with someone else's legend, even though it's Lupino who earned top billing for the picture.  High Sierra is the final film that Humphrey Bogart ever made where he received less than top billing until his death in 1957, because as hard as it is to believe, at the time Ida Lupino was the bigger star for Warner Brothers.  Her career was on an upswing after They Drive By Night, and the studio wanted to capitalize on that by re-teaming her with George Raft, but Raft turned down this role, which would become one of the bigger mistakes of his career (he would go on to turn down The Maltese Falcon, and if urban legend is to believed, Casablanca, so it's clearly not the biggest mistake of his career).  Instead Raoul Walsh cast Humphrey Bogart in the lead, and though Bogart was resentful of Lupino getting the top spot on the poster (the pair did not like each other, and would never work together again despite two hits in a row), this film cemented him as a leading man in the eyes of audiences, as well as High Sierra's screenwriter John Huston, with whom Bogart would make most of his best pictures.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a film noir, but one that weirdly doesn't center on the inner city, but instead takes place for long stretches in the outdoors.  Roy Earle (Bogart) is a gangster recently out of jail, is asked to take part in a heist at a luxury hotel, and agrees despite his recent pardon from the governor granting him a new lease on life.  He holes up in the country with three small-time criminals (Kennedy, Curtis, and Wilde), and one of their girlfriends, Marie, who is about as close to a prostitute as 1940's censors would have allowed (she worked at a "dance hall" before the movie).  They also live near a kindly family, the daughter of whom, Velma (Leslie) Roy takes a shine toward despite her clubbed foot.  He pays to have it fixed, but she spurns his advances and so he ends up with Marie, who adores him but he seems largely ambivalent toward even if he eventually finds he loves her.  The crime goes south when someone is shot during the holdup, and two of the three small-timers die in a car accident during the police chase, with the third squealing on Roy & Marie.  The film ends with Roy, on the run, climbing into the Sierra Nevada Mountains but of course because of the Hays Code at the time, he dies in a gunfight, surrounded by a sobbing Marie and an adorable dog named Pard who has been sweet on Roy the whole movie.

The film is engaging if a bit dull for a noir.  It's always hard to tell for a formative movie like High Sierra, which in a lot of ways invented a genre (along with other movies like The Maltese Falcon and Laura)-how do you judge something that was so inventive then but feels dull to modern eyes because so many people have borrowed from it?  But High Sierra has its attributes-the outdoors shots in the actual Sierra Nevada Mountains are breathtaking (there are even shots of the movie near Mt. Whitney, California's highest peak), and the love triangle is actually quite intriguing.  Roy never seems to entirely get over Velma's rejection, clearly picking up Marie as a rebound who ends up being the last love of his life, and while the ending wants them to be the "true soulmates" of the movie, Bogart's performance informs the audience that this isn't the case; either Roy was incapable of ever finding a true love, or his true love had to be someone like Velma, who made him feel like he was better than he was.

Bogart's mesmerizing in the role, and clearly understood the part in a way that Raft probably would have lacked (Bogie, despite his tough guy bravado, was always best playing guys with a rough outer shell but a soft heart).  He'd rarely play criminals after this, but it's a great role to go out on, and he gives the movie's best performance.  This isn't a knock on Lupino (who is only a borderline lead here despite her billing-Bogart gets considerably more screen-time), who is great as a lover who knows she's not his first choice, but Bogart really comes into his own here, and shows the greatness that would eventually lead to him taking on fascinating, complicated work in pictures like Casablanca and Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  Next week we will turn to what might be the most critically-acclaimed work of Lupino's career, and certainly the role for which many (including Warner Brothers) assumed she'd get that Oscar nomination that eluded her her entire career.

They Drive By Night (1940)

Film: They Drive By Night (1940)
Stars: George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart, Gale Page, Alan Hale Sr.
Director: Raoul Walsh
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Ida Lupino-click here to learn more about Ms. Lupino (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We will start out our month-long look at Ida Lupino a few years into her career in Hollywood.  Lupino was an actress the movies always struggled to know what to do with-beautiful & talented, but not an actress that seemed to take off with critics at all, the closest she probably came to graduating from (to quote Lupino herself) "the poor man's Bette Davis" to a proper star was in 1940/1941, when she had back-to-back hits for Warner Brothers, both opposite someone who would graduate to Davis's level, Humphrey Bogart.  In what I believe is a first for this series, we'll be hearkening back to one of our former "Saturday Stars" today with the return of actress Ann Sheridan, whom we had as the very first star in our series in January, as she'll play opposite Lupino in this melodrama about truck drivers (no, that's not a typo).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on two brothers: Joe (Raft) and Paul (Bogart), both of whom are down-on-their-luck and always one day ahead of loan sharks.  Joe has big dreams for his trucking game, wanting to turn this into a major enterprise that'll show the guys who constantly put him down he is a big deal, while Paul seems to just want to get out of the business alive, and let his wife (Page) have the baby he claims they can't afford.  Joe meets a beautiful-but-sassy waitress named Cassie (Sheridan), and falls in love with her.  The only problem is his boss's (Hale) wife Lana (Lupino) is also madly in love with Joe, and doesn't understand why he doesn't return her advances.  After Paul is injured in a driving accident, losing his right arm, Joe is brought on to work in his office (at Lana's insistence) as she feels she can seduce him there.  When that doesn't work, Lana kills her husband, assuming that if she's not married Joe will fall for her, but it turns out he's just interested in working his way up in the business, and proposes to Cassie.  Afterwards, Lana claims Joe insisted that she kill her husband so that he could have the business (and her), but she breaks down and confesses on the stand, having gone mad, and claims an insanity defense.  As a result, Joe gets the business and Cassie, becoming the big shot he always dreamed of, while his brother Paul announces in the closing scene that his wife is pregnant, fulfilling his dreams.

The movie is odd-melodramas like this don't usually take place in such a hyper-masculine (particularly in the 1940's) industry as trucking but it totally works.  They Drive by Night is a well-written (four-time Oscar nominee Jerry Wald penned the script) and well-acted piece of dramatics, and proves a film's subject matter ultimately doesn't matter if the movie itself is strong (side note: I always get asked for my favorite genres or film subject matter-They Drive by Night is a good reason why I say "it doesn't matter as long as the movie is good").  It's a briskly-paced picture, and one that shows off in some ways why Bogart would be a future superstar, commanding the screen in every one he's in (he's decidedly a supporting player here, though, so don't be fooled).  Bogart would in the next year surpass Raft in the movie pantheon forever when Raft would turn down two of the biggest films of Bogart's career: High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, two decisions that would essentially cement his place in film lore as perhaps the actor with the worst taste in scripts (rumor has it that he also turned down Casablanca, another iconic Bogart role, but that feels more fanciful than the other two).

But what of our star, Ida Lupino?  She's awesome in this movie.  At first I was kind of curious if Sheridan would overpower her (Sheridan's also good...in fact other than Raft who feels a bit dry as the stoic lead, everyone is putting in a winner here), but Lupino steals the picture.  As a jealous, bored housewife she's frothy & campy, giving the best performance Joan Crawford never gave when she kills her husband and then has to confess in a manic fit of laughter on the stand that she did it.  The movie's ending is cute and sweet, but it hardly matters because at that point Lupino has committed grand theft robbery as our now-absent villain.  She's arguably third lead (I could see this going either direction), but in our modern, more "category fraud"-friendly era, she'd certainly be getting a Supporting Actress nomination at the Oscars for this work, and it'd be well-earned, though it'd preclude her from this series (which only focuses on actresses Oscar forgot).  November is one of those months with five Saturday's, and if this is what Lupino can deliver, I'm excited I pencilled her in for the extra title.

Saturdays with the Stars: Ida Lupino

Each month of 2019 we will be looking at the careers of leading ladies of Classical Hollywood who were never nominated for an Academy Award as part of our "Saturdays with the Stars" series.  Last month, our focus was on Hedy Lamarr, a Hungarian actress  who worked briefly at MGM & was once considered, literally, "the most beautiful girl in the world."  This month, our penultimate month of this year's theme, we will turn to the actress my brother has been guessing would be the "Star of the Month" every month of this year, an actress who had a run as a leading lady for Warner Brothers even if she was never a major commercial success, but would later become one of the few women to have a career as a film director in the 1950's.  This month, our star is Ida Lupino.

Lupino seemed destined to end up in show business.  Her father was a comedian, and part of a famed theatrical family, while her mother was a British stage actress.  She longed to be a writer, but her father insisted she become an actress instead, and she showed a great aptitude for it, being a traveling performer in a theatrical troupe.  She eventually made it to Hollywood in 1933, but was in bit parts until a supporting role in The Light That Failed finally brought her to the attention of producers that she should be taken seriously as a dramatic actress (Lupino, notoriously witty, once claimed she was "the poor man's Bette Davis" since would frequently get the parts that Davis refused).

Her career in the 1940's was consistent leading work, but her star never approached someone like Davis's.  She would frequently charm critics with movies like They Drive By Night and The Hard Way, for which she won the New York Film Critics Circle Awards (Lupino, along with Tallulah Bankhead, Linda Fiorentino, Cameron Diaz, Hope Davis, & Regina Hall, is one of only six women to have ever received this distinction and not eventually gotten an Oscar nomination in their career, though the latter four are all still alive so they could remove themselves from this rarefied list).  Her biggest success, and the film that if she's known for anything as a film actress she's remembered still today, was High Sierra, which along with The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, in that same two-year time frame, made Humphrey Bogart into a proper movie star (at the time Bogart wasn't even famous enough to get top billing over Lupino).

Lupino's real claim to fame to modern cinephiles, though, happened in the 1950's, when she and her husband created an independent production company and Lupino became a film director, arguably the only significant female film director in Hollywood during this time period.  She hit a number of landmarks through doing this, becoming the first woman to direct a film noir (The Hitch-Hiker), the first woman to direct herself (The Bigamist), and the only person (man or woman) to both star in an episode of The Twilight Zone ("The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine") and direct one ("The Masks," one of my favorites in the series).  Her career eventually subsided, with her final directorial effort being the Hayley Mills picture The Trouble with Angels, and she died in 1978.  This month, we will focus on Lupino's career more as an actress, though we will also be watching The Bigamist to see her as both star and director, and looking at what critics celebrated (but audiences were largely ambivalent toward), and what ultimately financed the career of one of the few major female filmmakers of Hollywood's Golden Age.

While the City Sleeps (1956)

Film: While the City Sleeps (1956)
Stars: Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders, Howard Duff, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, Sally Forrest, John Drew Barrymore, James Craig, Ida Lupino
Director: Fritz Lang
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Rhonda Fleming-click here to learn more about Ms. Fleming (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We continue on with our look at the career of Rhonda Fleming with a second noir film for RKO.  By this point in her career, Fleming's fame had largely passed, or at least was nearing its tail-end.  She'd continue to headline films for the rest of the 1950's, and we'll get to one of the final films that she starred in next week, but after several years as the Queen of 3-D, she was no longer at Paramount and RKO wasn't putting her in gigantic epics.  You can see that here when, rather than being the main character (or at least his love interest, as the billing order suggests), she's largely sixth or seventh in terms of actual screen credit, and doesn't even share the screen with the film's proper star, Dana Andrews.  Still, though, While the City Sleeps is an impressive and rather frank look at serial killers in the 1950's, focusing on a fictionalized version of the real "Lipstick Killer" William Heirens.

(Spoilers Ahead) After the death of his father, spoiled media heir Walter Kyne (Price) is pitting three key figures in his dad's news organization (Jon Day Griffith (Mitchell), Mark Loving (Sanders), & Harry Kritzer (Craig)) against each other for essentially the job of "CEO" of the organization while Kyne enjoys all of the wealth and privilege of being the titular head of the conglomerate.  Essentially he's using a recent string of murders of young women perpetrated by an unknown assailant (whom the audience knows from witnessing one of the crimes in the opening scene to be Barrymore's Robert Manners) as a proxy fight to see who is worthy enough of snagging the story and getting Kyne more sales.  Each of these men have a key asset in their fight: Griffith has Edward Mobley (Andrews), a savvy former crime beat journalist who now hosts an Edward R. Murrow-style nightly news program and recently has become engaged to Nancy (Forrest), Loving has Mildred Donner (Lupino) a lascivious and ambitious newspaper columnist, and Kritzer has Kyne's own wife Dorothy (Fleming) with whom he's having an affair.

The film progresses with each of these men and their allies duking it out, all-the-while trying to suss out Barrymore's killer.  The film is very much an ensemble piece (though Andrews is decidedly the lead), and this makes it easy to compare and contrast the different performances.  By far the best one is Lupino, playing up her sexuality to the hilt (she flirts with anyone that moves, particularly Mobley, getting him to kiss her while he's engaged to Nancy), and getting all of the best lines.  Barrymore is, well, not great as a mama's boy killer who seems to have no real reason other than his own adoption to hate the world and the women in it.  But the film keeps humming with us genuinely guessing who might end up on top in the newspaper fight, and watching Thomas Mitchell of all people try (unsuccessfully) to be corrupt when he's really just a good guy (as are all of Mitchell's characters).

Fleming's role is small (she's in more of the back half than the front half, but regardless she's got a relatively small part, especially compared to Forrest or Lupino).  She's good in it though-Fleming got her start as a character actress, and makes the most of the work she does here.  There's that great scene where she instinctively puts on her sunglasses to not give away any tells that she's lying, or the way that she speaks to Lupino's Mildred with the confidence of a woman who knows she'll never really be caught as long as she's beautiful.  It's not really a lead performance at all, but it's solid work, and she does a great job in the ensemble, even if Lupino is the one stealing the film.

John's Favorite Shows #5: The Twilight Zone

We’ve gotten a bit off-track, but I’m resuming our rundown of my favorite shows of all time by highlighting my ten favorite episodes of each.  If you’ve missed any of them, check out the links at the bottom of this post for all of the past roundups.

The Twilight Zone stands out amongst my favorite series for a multitude of reasons.  For starters, it’s the only show that I wasn’t alive and watching it live for at least part of its run on this list.  I have encountered the series (and for the record, I’m just counting the Rod Serling 1950’s/1960’s portion of the series, not the reboots) through reruns.  As a result, there was no true waiting week after week, pondering what would happen next.  I had the commercial breaks to go through that, but there was not building with these characters over the years.

Of course building with characters isn’t really necessary here, as this is the only anthology show on this list (Alfred Hitchcock Presents wasn’t far off, though).  Though Rod Serling’s narrator makes appearances in every episode, he’s hardly a recurring character, and other than abstract characters like God, the Devil, and Death, there’s no recurring characters to latch onto.

As a result of my viewing habits and the fact that this is an anthology show that doesn’t push you to see every installment (what happened before…) this is the only show on the list where I haven’t seen every episode.  I’d like to, but the DVD collections have always been either wildly expensive or not comprehensive, and so there may be a treasured jewel or two out there that could crack this Top 10 that I haven’t seen.  If you have one that you love in particular that you aren’t seeing listed, the comments section is ready and willing (I’d love to get some tips).  Until that time, though, here are my absolute favorites (for the record, this is one of the hardest lists I’ve had to make so far-I’m not looking forward to the Top four after the Sophie’s Choice I had to make once I got to fifteen finalists).

10. “A Nice Place to Visit” (#1.28)

The Twilight Zone has a way of making even the most predictable of episodes creepy and stirring, as is the case with “Nice Place to Visit.”  Here we have a small-time crook who is shot named Rocky Valentine, and he is taken to a place where he is given whatever he wants by a man named Pip (wonderfully played by Sebastian Cabot, who of course would enjoy his greatest fame as Mr. French on Family Affair).  The episode wears on with Rocky becoming bored with everything being predetermined and given to him on a silver platter.  All the time Rocky assumes that this is heaven, but in the end, Pip, with a menacing cackle proclaims, “Mr. Valentine, this is the other place!”  Rocky tries to escape from his own personal hell, and we get a trippy and nasty sense of what The Twilight Zone has to offer.

9. “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (#5.3)

Here’s where the truth really hurts-yes, my friends, William Shatner can act.  Quite well when given the chance, in fact.  This episode, which also features Christine White as Shatner’s forlorn wife, is one of the most iconic of the series, and while the other Shatner episode (the terrific “Nick of Time”) has a more terrifying and twist-y ending, this one is more exhilarating in the moment.  The final scenes, with Shatner opening the airplane door amidst certainty that the creature is going to take down the plane-you will be on the edge of your chair.  One of the truly wonderful things about anthology television is that the rules of the show (that the main characters cannot die or be wildly discredited) are gone, and you’re left with a petrifying reality: the crazy man you scoff at may just be telling the truth.

8. “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” (#3.14)

The good Twilight Zone’s now how to land that gut-punch final moment where we say, “ohhh” and realize what has been in front of us the whole time.  The great Twilight Zones, though, manage to create something real before we get to the twist, and make no mistake, “Five Characters” is one of those great episodes.  We get to know a clown, ballerina, army major, tramp, and bagpiper throughout the episode as they are trapped in a large metal container, not knowing how they got there.  Theories abound as to where they are, including their dreams or even Hell (this is such a fun wink to the Twilight Zone, since both options would totally be plausible within the context of the series).  Instead, though, we discover that they are all toys in a bin, abandoned and left for an orphanage, doomed to forever be passed around without any connections.  It’s a heartbreaking ending, and a testament to all five actors involved that they have made such an impact in twenty minutes.

7. “The Eye of the Beholder” (#2.6)

One of those episodes we all know the ending of, and probably figured out to begin with, but it’s such a cool concept and such a wonderful spin on a story that you cannot help but fall in love with it.  I adore the way that the story really tries to keep you convinced that you are waiting to see the hideous nature of the patient’s face, at least at first.  Had you not known to expect the unexpected (it is the Twilight Zone, after all), you might not have realized that it was beautiful Donna Douglas underneath the bandages (kudos to the filmmakers for not using her recognizable voice to give away the ending).  The final moments, where we see the thinly veiled prejudice metaphor-chilling.

6. “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” (#2.28)

A classic whodunit, and largely a bottle episode for the show, we get a handful of people abandoned in a diner, with one of them clearly an alien.  Throughout the episode, which is almost entirely dialogue and little action, we see accusations fly throughout, with each person coming under suspicion.  The great thing about The Twlight Zone is that the clues are all there as to which person is the Martian, but they’re subtle enough that you don’t catch them.  The truly great scene at the end, though (parodied to death since, but who can blame them thanks to the cheeky visuals?) where we learn that there is not one but two aliens in that diner, is classic Twilight Zone-twisty and still vastly entertaining throughout.

5. “The Masks” (#5.25)

First off, trivia time: legendary actress Ida Lupino directed this episode, making her the only person to both star in and direct different episodes of The Twilight Zone.  It’s also (probably) the least known of these episodes, and appropriately seems to be the installment that rings in midnight during the New Year’s Eve marathons.  The reason it feels essential is because it is petrifying in the absolute way it handles the evils of the characters.  You don’t feel for the Harper family as they sit back and wait for their patriarch (played by Robert Keith) to die, hoping to get all of his money.  They are, of course, boorish, cruel, vain, and flighty.  And yet when the masks come off and they are hideously deformed, pity and shock overtake you as an audience.  That’s what The Twilight Zone does best-it knows how to mess with your emotions and gives you a concept that you rarely see in television: a lack of escape.

4. “Time Enough at Last” (#1.8)

Like all of the great Twilight Zone episodes, it’s been parodied to death and even parceled through scientifically.  That being said, this is better than “To Serve Man” (the other quite iconic episode, and one that just misses this list) thanks to the way that it sets up the entire episode.  So simple is the story (one man’s quest for self-acceptance-that’s really what it’s about) that the devastating ending hits even harder.  With his glasses on the ground and his entire life ruined (and that gun too close by for comfort), Burgess Meredith screams, “there was time now!”  It’s a message that holds true in real life-that happiness, like all things, is fleeting and we don’t know when it will leave us next.

3. “It’s a Good Life” (#3.8)

If you want to go for full-on horror, there’s no beating little Anthony Fremont.  There’s something petrifying about a little boy who is in charge of the world, and we see that in this episode, as Anthony, given absolute power, wreaks havoc on the entire town and tortures people into thinking only happy thoughts.  The episode gave us the illusion of being sent into the corn, and gave a young Cloris Leachman a great role as Anthony’s mother, but the best part is the final moments, when someone has the courage to stand up to Anthony in hopes that someone else will kill him, but the people are too petrified to move (Rod Serling’s symbolism, once again) and Anthony is left to destroy another day.  Modern horror films would kill to have such simple evil onscreen and such terror elicited from their audience.

2. “The Obsolete Man” (#2.29)

While Numbers three through about twelve on this list are fairly fluid, the top two are written in granite.  This episode, somehow even better than Burgess Meredith’s previous one, is something you would never see on television today, at least not without more niceties (the reality is that this show could never exist today on television in any form-it’d be WAY too controversial, and how sad is that?).  Meredith plays a former librarian who has been deemed obsolete by the state.  Throughout the half hour, we see him argue with a totalitarian member of the state, going into the philosophical need for art and freedom of religion and speech.  The final moments are easy to see coming if you’re thinking about it, but Serling spends too much time making you ponder your own government and your own life to think about what is going to predict the next moves.  It’s a groundbreaking installment in the series, and one that never really loses its potency-it may be more relevant now than when it first aired.

1. “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” (#1.22)

So tragically real, it’s one of the only major episodes of the series that has not been lampooned in a Treehouse of Horror, perhaps because it’s too frightening to mock.  A simple enough setting-the power is out after a giant flash, and a little boy speculates that it may be something more sinister than a meteor-perhaps an alien?  The next twenty minutes is a frightening look at mob mentality, and the way that people begin to justify their increasingly violent and inhumane actions in the face of approval from the person standing next to them.  As I’ve alluded to above, realism is what truly makes this series petrifying-it’s the fact that this sort of reaction to an unknown is completely plausible, if not likely.  Later in the episode we see panic, and then a riot break out, and all the while the aliens on the hill watch as the humans destroy themselves.  An allegory for our reaction to change?  Nuclear war?  Prejudice?  It’s a story so universal it works on almost every level, but the one it works best on?  Damn riveting television.

And those are my Top 10 Twilight Zone episodes-do you have a favorite that was missed?  Would you have rearranged the order?  And what would be your number one?  Share in the comments!

For more of my favorites: Girls, Pushing Daisies, How I Met Your Mother, Game of Thrones, The Office, Ally McBeal, Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, South Park, Mad Men,