THE MOVIES OF MY LIFE PHASE ONE: Candidates for 1970

Welcome to the Seventies, my friends!  I’m still living on Norwood Avenue in Brooklyn, two blocks from Highland Park and a section of pavement that still was cobblestone and contained old trolley rails in it!  I’ve started going to therapy in downtown Brooklyn, as my Explosive Mood Disorder started expressing itself; if I was particular good with my therapist, Mrs. Boeing, my parents would take me to Zum Zum, a chain of German-style sausage restaurants, for dinner.  I’ve started spending my Saturday afternoons watching Creature Feature on WNEW, and Saturday evenings watching Chiller Theater on WPIX.  I am already deeply into monster movies, especially kaiju films thanks to the frequent Godzilla Weeks on WABC’s The 4:30 Movie, and  comic books thanks to repeats of the 66 Batman series and the 67 Spider-Man cartoons,  My life-long allegiance to 60‘s spy culture begins to solidify after watching The Avengers on WWOR  and the James Bond films on WABC.  I am pretty sure I’ve been to the Sunrise Drive-In, the Oasis Theater and the Crossbay Cinema by now.

So here’s what I chose and why I chose them...

LE CIRCE ROUGE
I absolutely adore Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Le Samourai, and feel that Alain Delon’s character in that flick is a major league Icon of Cool...so I am really enthusiastic about seeing this film, which reunited Melville and Delon for another hard boiled crime thriller.  I am willfully going in knowing nothing about it, wanting to experience it as freshly as possible.  I imagine it will have the same kind of Cool that Le Samourai had, but I won’t know for sure unless you pick it!

FIVE DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON

If there’s one thing you may have learned about me in the past year, it’s that I really like Mario Bava as a director.  I also really like giallo movies.  This film--which was never released in America, which is probably why I haven’t seen it--marks Bava sort of transforming the sub-genre he created with Blood and Black Lace, a transformation that will lead directly to A Bay of Blood and the creation several years later of the Slasher subgenre.  The trailer looks glorious in its goofiness, and I want to see what Bava trying to do a drawing room mystery is like.

ADIOS SABATA

What do you people have against spaghetti western? 

Seriously, the last two times I put up one of these bad boys up as a candidate, no one voted for them.  Well, maybe if I tease you with a weird connection to my fictional Chimera Falls Universe you’ll consider this sequel to the Lee Van Cleef film you snubbed so aggressively last time.  You see, before director Gianfranco Parolini decided to reframe this as a sequel to Sabata, the character Yul Brynner played was named Indio Black.  When my pal Derrick Ferguson (maybe you've heard of him...heh) mentioned this fact to me, it inspired me to create the cult leader Indio Blaque for my second Shadow Legion book, Nightmare City.  So I’m curious to see what inspired my inspiration, you know?

THEY CALL ME MISTER TIBBS

Everybody knows the Sidney Poitier/Rod Stieger suspenser In The Heat of The Night, right?  But I think the other films in the Virgil Tibbs series--this is the second of three--are long forgotten.  I’m curious to see if their assignment to pop culture oblivion was justified.  It doesn’t look like it on paper--this flick is directed by the amazing Gordon Douglas and features an impressive cast of character actors.  It’s also one of the few Hollywood features that has a capitalized word in its title.  So it would be interesting to visit this artifact.

There are you candidates for 1970.  Head over to my  Twitter Page starting tomorrow and let me know which of these four bad boys you want me to experience for the first time and report on!