In December of 2020, when it became clear we were not going to be returning to normal life any time soon, we purchased a big honking 55-inch 4K TV and settled in for a year of watching movies at home. By Dec. 31, 2021, we had watched 236 movies either together or separately. This is one of series of blog posts about those films.
It’s been several months since I last posted to this series – I hope to be more regular with it in the months to come. But we return with a vintage Sherlock Holmes story, a documentary, and a couple thrillers from the latter portion of the 20th Century.
#33 – The Woman in Green, Sherlock Holmes (1945), directed by Roy William Neill; starring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce and Hillary Brooke. Rathbone made 14 Sherlock Holmes movies, his most prominent character in more than 70 films. This one was based on a pair of Arthur Conan Doyle stories: The Adventures of the Empty House and The Final Problem.
#34 – Hearts of Darkness (1991), directed by Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, & Eleanor Coppola, starring just about everyone involved with making Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
This is a documentary on the brilliant madness that was the filming of Apocalypse Now, including a typhoon, star Martin Sheen’s heart attack during the filming, and a script that never seemed to never be complete. The core of the film is based on behind-the-scenes footage shot by Eleanor Coppola, Francis’s wife. Hickenlooper and Bahr then edited that footage with new interviews to create the documentary. Highly recommend this for you after you’ve seen Apocalypse Now. I purchased my copy of this as part of a two-movie package from Apple with the latest cut of Apocalypse Now.
#35 – Avalanche (1979), directed by Corey Allen, starring Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow. An utterly unmemorable film produced by low-budget movie king Roger Corman about an avalanche at a ski resort.
#36 – Midnight Run (1988), directed by Martin Brest, staring Robert De Niro, Charles Grodin, and Yaphet Kotto. A fantastic road trip thriller starring De Niro as a bounty hunter bringing in a mob accountant played by Grodin. Kotto is the FBI agent chasing both of them. The less you know about the film beyond this, the better. One of the great entertaining movies of the 1980s.
Coming up next: The movie that led to Bewitched along with one of the most successful movies of all time.