I've offered President Obama quite a bit of political advice on the Retro Daddy blog—absolutely free, I might add.

I pointed out how movie director John Ford had detected a possible weakness in his opponent, Senator McCain. I also brought to Senator Obama's/… Read full post »

The latest series of the British science fiction television series Torchwood—Children of Earth—has been acclaimed in the UK and the United States. I haven't seen it, but what I've read about the story reminds me of two other classic British movies about children who pose/… Read full post »

In 1975, film critic Pauline Kael wrote that the 1974 film noir Chinatown, written by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski, was originally supposed to have a different ending.

In the script by Robert Towne (who also wrote the screenplays for The Last Detail… Read full post »

Karl Malden and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire

Karl Malden was the kind of actor whose whose voice would make me stop flipping the channels and watch whatever he was on. Especially if it was a movie from the fifties and sixties, before he made… Read full post »

Saboteur, starring Bob Cummings and Priscilla Lane, is Alfred Hitchcock's film about twenty-first century terrorism, even though it came out in 1942.

The evil terrorist mastermind is Charles Tobin, played by Otto Kruger, an actor you sort of remember from other roles in forti… Read full post »

The Toronto Globe and Mail reports that Archie Andrews is getting married!

The self-absorbed red-headed teenager, until now unable to decide between smart blond Betty Cooper and intellectually lazy brunette Veronica Lodge, will propose to . . .

. . . VERONICA!!!… Read full post »

Christopher Lee, Actor

Today is the eighty-seventh birthday of Christopher Lee. If you understand why this is worthy of commemoration, I don't have to go into a lot of biographical detail about Lee's life, or tell you how he and Peter Cushing (along with hundreds of other… Read full post »

In the 1978 film American Hot Wax we first see “Teenage Louise,” a skinny Brooklyn girl with long curly hair, stuffing Kleenex down her sweater. She's on her way to ambush Alan Freed, the most popular disc jockey in America, to pitch him her songs. Louise is… Read full post »

Do you have to have gone to Catholic school to appreciate nun movies?

First, let's get this one out of the way. I'm sure it's the first one you thought of. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that it's everywhere—on TV, on… Read full post »

Actress as Medusa

First, you have to keep Barbra Streisand away from the script and not let her produce. Otherwise she won't be able to resist the temptation all movie stars have to make their character likeable at all times.… Read full post »

Tomorrow my favorite movie will be a different film, but tonight it's The Godfather, for the following dialogue:

“I love America.”… Read full post »

“You don't waste time, do you?” John Oldman's friends ask him as he's loading his pickup truck, getting ready to leave his friends and his job teaching history.

The film The Man from Earth (written by Jerome Bixby) will seem familiar to connoisseurs of Rod/… Read full post »

John Drake, Secret Agent

Patrick McGoohan was more than just the unnamed spy in The Prisoner who was kidnapped and taken to the Village after resigning from the British Secret Service. He was more than the agent named John Drake in Secret Agent, the only realistic… Read full post »

The murdering “performance artist” Sardu in the the film Bloodsucking Freaks said it all:

“To display sadism and discipline alone would only lead to imprisonment. But . . . simply disguising it with a story, a minimal plot, and a score will re… Read full post »

3-D in the 1960s: The education of a young film critic

 3-D in the 2000s: Harry Potter's friend Luna Lovegood

3-D movies are getting a lot of attention lately, but they go back at least fifty years to the Warner Bros. horror film… Read full post »

It's a Wonderful Life (1946), directed by Frank Capra

I want to thank Stellaa for suggesting I write about director Frank Capra's Christmas fantasy, It's a Wonderful Life. I watched it on Christmas Day, for the first time in twenty years.

Film critic… Read full post »

Inside Daisy Clover (1965): Directed by Robert Mulligan, Starring Natalie Wood

When I read that movie director Robert Mulligan had died, I checked the Internet Movie Database to see how many of his films I had seen. (I remembered that Mulligan directed To Kill a Mockingbird, an… Read full post »

The Compromiser or the Idealist: Claude Rains and Jimmy Stewart in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

The story goes that someone came to movie producer Jack Warner with the idea for a movie where Ronald Reagan plays the president of the United States. “No, no,”… Read full post »

I've been reading more books than seeing movies out at the theater lately. I've also been watching old VHS tapes of movies from the 1980s, like John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China and Eddie and the Cruisers.

These are the days when Retro Mama… Read full post »

Gene Siskel, Roger Ebert's late reviewing partner, asked him, “When are you going to write your Scorsese book?”

He hasn't written it yet.

My problems with Scorsese by Ebert are (1) it's too short and repetitious, (2) it's not a… Read full post »

An undercover draw 

Before Mike Connors played a violent detective on Mannix (which got complaints from viewers and warning memos from the network), he played a violent detective on Tightrope (which got complaints from viewers and a cancellation from the network in 1960 after… Read full post »

“Where am I?”

“In the Village.”

“What do you want?”

“Information.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“That would be telling. We want information.”

“You won't get it.”

&n… Read full post »

Who am I and what movie was I in?

The first Open Saloner to identify me will receive a guaranteed timeslip to travel back to my film's premier and live out his or her life in a time when giant ant nests mutated in the desert, and radiation from nuclear tests… Read full post »

Imagine John Ford's The Searchers set in a neon collision of the 1950s with the 1980s, set to rockabilly music. That is Walter Hill's “rock and roll fable” from 1984, Streets of Fire.

As The Blasters sing, “If he wants your baby, you can kiss your baby goodbye.&… Read full post »