Riding with Strangers 2022 – Trails to Rails Scavenger Hunt Part 1

Posted on May 31, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

Trails to Rails 2022 Grand TourFor the last several years, each summer I do a national-scale motorcycle scavenger hunt run by a  motorcycle club out of Minnesota known as Team Strange. Each year it has a theme. This year’s Grand Tour is called Trails to Rails and has us looking for steam locomotives. We get one point for each locomotive on exhibit and five points for ones actually running.

There are also a few other sites that are worth more points, such as Golden Spike National Historical Park in Utah where the Central Pacific  and Union Pacific railroads came together.

I collected my first images for this tour during a recent visit to my family up in the Twin Cities area. (Strangely enough, this is the home of Team Strange!)

These first two come from small towns I passed through in Minnesota on my way north and east. (Taking these photos was a bit challenging because I left the clip-on weight that’s supposed to go on the bottom of my rally flag at home. Thanks to the awesome Hammy Tan for my Hammy Stick used to hold my flag!)

Currie, MN 5_15_22

01 – End-O-Line Railroad Park, Currie, MN, 5/15/22

02 Tracy, MN 5_15_22

02 – Wheels Across the Prairie Museum, Tracy, MN 5/15/22

I then picked up a couple of images in St. Paul, not far from where my brother lives. The first of these was easy to get – parked in front of a urgent care clinic with a handy parking lot.

03 Bandana Square St Paul MN 5_18_22

03 – Bandana Square, St. Paul, MN 5/18/22

And then there was engine hiding at the Minnesota Transportation Museum. One of the rules for the tour is that your motorcycle, rally flag and locomotive all have to be in the same photo. The problem is that the locomotive is largely hidden behind a passenger car. But I spent too much time circling the buildings and rail yard where this train was parked, and I was going to find away to get this picture.

Technology to the rescue.

With a panoramic photo on my iPhone I was just able to get them all into a single image. You will have to click on the photo below to really be able to see it all.

04 Minnesota Trasportation Museum St Paul MN 5_18_22 Panoramic Photo

04 Minnesota Transportation Museum St Paul MN 5_18_22 – Click on photo to see full sized.

My final locomotive of this trip was in Pawnee Park in Columbus, NE. (For those of you with good memories, that’s also where I got a photo of the Higgins Boat Memorial for last year’s tour.)

05 Pawnee Park Columbus NE 5_19_22

05 Pawnee Park Columbus NE 5/19/22

Many more to come…

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Questions Worth Asking (Maybe) – Smartphone privacy, SCOTUS leaks, scholastic censorship, COVID-19 & stress release

Posted on May 6, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

Lots of questions need to be asked and answered this week:

Would your smartphone know if you had an abortion?
Quite possibly, and that information would likely be for sale. 

Is this week’s leak of the potential Roe v. Wade reconsideration really unprecedented?
SCOTUS leaks are rare, but they have happened occasionally over the years. Details from media law professor Jonathan Peters:

Why do school administrations censor high school newspapers?
Because they can get away with it. (H/T to Adam Steinbaugh for sharing this.)

Are we still vulnerable to super spreader events when large numbers of people get together without masks?

And finally – what does NPR political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben do for stress release?
You’ll need the sound up for this one.

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8, 10 & 39 – Numerical titles cover a variety of sins over the years: A Year In Movies 2021 – Part 8

Posted on May 5, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

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.

I sometimes have to stretch to have a theme to connect the movies together that I’m going to talk about, but this batch was pretty easy to bring together under the banner of numeric titles – in fact, these could all sound like they came together in an episode of the rather strange and wonderful TV series LOST. (Remember 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 & 42?)

We watched these movies in reverse chronological order but forward numerical order. So enough of this nonsense – let’s look at the movies.

Ocean’s 8 is the fourth movie in the Ocean’s “trilogy“…

Hold on a minute before we go any further. There was never an “Ocean’s 11 Trilogy.” Just having three films in a series does not make it a trilogy – It just means that the first two movies in the series were successful enough to lead to a third movie. Now, obviously – Lord of the Rings was a trilogy — A connected series of three films that told a coherent story. The Hobbit was a bad collection of three movies that tried to tell a mostly coherent story – it too was a trilogy. What really drives me crazy is after labeling a three-movie series as a trilogy, the filmmakers go back and make a fourth movie in the series, which simply makes them all… a series.

Ok, where were we, oh yes, Ocean’s 8  (2018) is the fourth movie in a fun heist series originally anchored by George Clooney as the freshly released-from-prison Danny Ocean who wants to rob a casino. O8 takes the premise that Sandra Bullock plays Danny’s sister Debbie, who has just been released from prison and wants to… Yeah, you get the picture.

Only this time it’s told with an all-female core cast of Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Awkwafina, Rihanna, and Helena Bonham Carter. The film tells a really familiar story but with this all-star cast of incredibly talented women performers, it’s an absolute hoot. It’s not about originality, it’s about all the fun we have getting to the end of the story.

Ten Little Indians (1965/66) is an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None directed by George Pollock that includes teen heartthrob Fabian in the cast. This is one of five movie and television adaptations of the novel, along with one stage version, in which the guests at a remote house are killed, one by one. It’s a fun movie with a runtime of under 90 minutes for those who are Christie (or Fabian) fans.

I think that movies with a runtime under an hour-and-a-half are a whole genre to themselves. There’s a lot to be said for telling mystery/thriller story quickly, without any excess. Among my favorites in this category are the original Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell, the German thriller Run Lola Run that manages to tell the same story three times in 80 minutes, and the American shark thriller The Shallows.

The 39 Steps (1935), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is an early thriller by Hitch (who is likely the most viewed director for us during 2021) that tells the story of an ordinary man getting caught up in an elaborate plot to steal British intelligence secrets by a shadowy group known as the 39 Steps. This movie has all the elements we have come to expect in a Hitchcock thriller – the everyman caught up in extraordinary events, a mysterious McGuffin that everyone seems to want, and a cameo by the director that fans watch for carefully.

Coming Attractions: A Shakespearean musical, King Kong meets Apocalypse Now, and a classic detective story.

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What is the DeSantis v. Disney battle really about?

Posted on April 25, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

Note: See bottom of post for updates on this story.

It’s been hard to miss the recent battle going on between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s largest employer – Disney Corp.  Gov. DeSantis wants to take away tax management privileges from areas developed by Disney over the last 50 years because Disney has been critical of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation promoted by the governor.

There are multiple levels to this battle that are worth digging into as we try to understand what’s going on.

The core of this fight is that Disney CEO Bob Chapek was forced by employee pressure to speak out forcefully against a new Florida law that forbids talking about issues related to sexual orientation and identity in kindergarten through fourth grade classes.  This has been known by critics as the “Don’t say gay” law. These critics say that the law could prevent grade school teachers from talking about their same-sex spouse if a student asked who they were married to.

The Florida legislature, under prompting from Gov. DeSantis, responded quickly by passing a bill that strips Disney of its ability to self-govern a huge area of property surrounding the  company’s theme parks in retribution for being too “woke.” (Disney has a diverse work force and has a long history of having gay pride days and events at their parks.)

 

Headline from LA Times about Disney and Anaheim.Now, one doesn’t have to love Gov. DeSantis to believe that perhaps Disney has too much control over the areas they operate. After all, Disney was involved in a fight with the government and local media of Anaheim, Calif. a few years back over special property taxes. Hint: It didn’t end well for Disney. In this case, Disney was trying to control what local news outlets were publishing about a property tax deal by keeping LA Times critics from attending the studio’s movie screenings. The Times refused to back down and got support from news outlets across the country. In the end, Disney quit trying to control what the paper had to say about the company and its taxes. Please note that this was settled not on legal grounds; Disney simply didn’t have enough power to bend the press to their will.

So how is Florida retaliating against Disney to punish them for opposing this  anti-LGBTQ+ bill? To answer that requires us to go back in time a bit. Sarah Rumpf, writing for the MediaIte blog, tells the story of how in the mid-1960s, Disney was proposing building a giant new theme park in Florida. The company quietly bought up 39 square miles of space that would come to include “the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Animal Kingdom, plus numerous Disney hotels, restaurants, and retails stores.”

This space would become the Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID). A 1967 Florida state law created the district to give Disney essentially all the powers of a local government. They could collect taxes (and pay some of them to the state) as well as develop infrastructure like roads, fire protection, power plants, sewage treatment and the like. (Allegedly Disney even had the right to build a nuclear power plant! They never even considered doing so, but still…) They could also take on debt for development of the area and collect more taxes than would normally be allowed to pay for all of these. (Disney would essentially be taxing itself in order to pay for infrastructure.)  While I would never want to argue about the ethics of Disney’s behavior, they clearly have done a good job of taking care of their property.

In other words, the Reedy Creek project follows a standard conservative model of allowing private industry to take over functions of government in the name of more efficiency. And regardless of what you think about these partnerships in general, this one seems to have worked relatively well. While RCID is the most prominent development district in Florida, it is far from the only one – the state has literally hundreds of them, though few are as big as Disney’s.

Now one could argue that Disney doesn’t deserve this special treatment because it’s bad for the Florida economy or for business competition. But Gov. DeSantis has made it abundantly clear that he is doing this specifically to punish Disney for being critical of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. In fact, Republican legislators have offered to rescind the bill if Disney were willing to back off from its opposition. (It doesn’t take effect until 2023.)

There are a number of questions raised by this case:

  • Does taking away the right to govern themselves violate Disney’s corporate free speech rights? 
    Hard to say. Florida clearly has the right to revoke special tax districts. But can they shut one down to punish the company for speaking out against the governor? That’s a whole ‘nother question.
  • Team Rodent, by Carl HiaasenHaven’t progressives been critical of Disney, too? 
    They sure have, especially when it comes to real estate development. Long-time Miami Herald columnist and comic novel writer Carl Hiaasen wrote critically about Disney’s real estate dealings in a short book called Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World.
  • Is Disney going to pack up and leave Florida over this? 
    I don’t see how. A theme park is not a fungible asset. You can’t just move it somewhere else.

Updates

4/27/22

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Movies on Twitter: Representation, Nimona Rescued from Disney, & Respect for Animation

Posted on April 13, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

I know, I know, this is my third consecutive post on movies, and the next one is likely to be about movies, too. Little obsessed with them lately. We’ll get back to exciting media corporate mergers soon, I promise!

Why representation matters – You can’t cover a culture with one movie.

Really interesting thread on diversity and inclusion in the movies – in this case – Asian American/Canadian… One movie can’t carry the load of a whole culture. We need little movies like The Farewell and big movies like Ten Rings.

Disney turns Nimona loose to Netflix for completion.

Nimona has been rescued from Disney’s shutdown of Blue Sky Studios and has found a new home at Netflix. (Blue Sky was an edgier animation studio that belonged to Fox before Disney bought the studio out.) I know nothing about it other than everyone on Animation Twitter has been going nuts about it. As for me – I’m excited based on this one frame that is circulating.

One last commentary on how Oscar mistreated animation (again) this year.

I’m not complaining about the winners. While Encanto might not have been my first choice, it was a worthy winner for best feature animation. And The Windshield Wiper’s mediation on love was a great choice for short animation.

What bothered me was how the animation presenters mocked the genre they were supposed to be honoring. Here’s a great post about Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Mitchells vs. the Machines) on how Hollywood could treat animation right.

And finally… here’s Oscar-winning animated short The Windshield Wiper

The Windshield Wiper

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1952’s The Narrow Margin is a noir thrill ride: A Year in Movies 2021 – Part 7

Posted on April 6, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

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.

Dear Wife and I love older movies, especially the film noirs of the 1940s and ’50s. Film noir means literally “black film,” and these are typically black & white crime dramas with lots of shadows that take place at night in the dark places of men’s and women’s hearts.

Things never turn out well for our anti-heroes and heroines, in large part because the Production Code (also known as the Hays Code) said that criminals could never get away with their bad behavior – they always had to pay. In some of the movies we will look at in later editions of this series we’ll see that the writers and directors sometimes had to go to elaborate (and fascinating) lengths to come up with an ending that would satisfy both audiences and the Code rules.

This time I’d like to talk about one of our favorites from our year of movies:

The Narrow Margin, 1952, directed by Richard Fleischer; starring Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor and Jacqueline White. We saw it, as we so often do, on Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley program with an introduction and afterword from host Eddie Muller, one of the leading writers on noir.

Narrow Margin is the story of an LAPD detective sergeant who is assigned to protect a mob boss’s widow who is traveling by train from Chicago to Los Angeles to testify in a trial. Throughout the movie the detective, his colleagues, and the widow are all menaced by assassins who will do anything to stop her from testifying. If you are going to watch this movie, don’t do any digging about the plot before watching. You don’t want to spoil any of the numerous twists and turns it takes.

The film goes at a breakneck pace, with much of the action taking place within the narrow confines of a transcontinental train. It also moves quickly because it has a running time of only 71 minutes – impossible to believe today in this age of bloated, over-long movies. Narrow Margin was considered a “B movie” with a low budget, fast shoot, and a cast of relative unknowns, but it rises above its humble roots to be one of the most exciting movies we saw in 2021.

In March of this year Dear Wife and I also got to see the 1990 remake of The Narrow Margin by thriller director Peter Hyams; starring Gene Hackman, Anne Archer, James B. Sikking, J.T. Walsh and M. Emmet Walsh. The plot is roughly the same as the 1952 original, but it’s moved up north with much of the action taking place in the Canadian Rockies.  Although the movie bombed in the box office, we still thought it was a lot of fun. And with a 97-minute run-time, it mostly maintains the tight pace of the original.

Coming up next: 8, 10, 39!

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1976’s King Kong to 2019’s Godzilla King of the Monsters: A Year in Movies 2021 – Part 6

Posted on March 22, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

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.

No fancy introduction this time. Just an assortment of four movies framed by a pair of prominent monster stories.

1976’s edition of King Kong, directed by John Guillermin, starring Jeff Bridges, Charles Grodin and Jessica Lange. For whatever reason — nostalgia, watching it for the first time at age 16, some great actors (it was Jessica Lange’s starring debut!) — this is my favorite of the Big Monkey movies. It also has added poignancy from featuring a very early look at the recently completed World Trade Center’s twin towers. It carries an emotional wallop now that the film maker never could have anticipated. But I won’t call it a guilty pleasure movie given that even the ever-acerbic New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael liked it. (Watched this with my dear Mum-in-Law, who liked monster movies, too.)

Witness to Murder, 1954, directed by Roy Rowland; starring Barbara Stanwyck, George Sanders and Gary Merrill.  This is of the woman-sees-a-murder-and-no-one-believes-her genre, an is a fun film noir. It also includes the ever-popular “denazified Nazi” bad guy. Unfortunately for Stanwyck and the rest of the cast, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window came out at about the same time and  likely took away audiences. Still, it’s a fun little period thriller.

That Hamilton Woman, 1941, directed by Alexander Korda; starring Viven Leigh and Laurence Olivier. Most Americans will have heard of Trafalgar Square and might know that it has something to do with the Napoleonic Wars era. A more engaged person will know that it’s a memorial to Admiral Horatio Nelson. But you might need to be a bit of Napoleonic-era nerd to know about Nelson’s scandalous affair with Lady Emma Hamilton. This film tells the story through flashbacks of the rise and catastrophic fall of Lady Hamilton. It also functioned as a World War II propaganda film to make people more sympathetic toward Britain. More than a bit soapy, but a lot of fun. (Again, one that was just for Mum-in-Law and me.)

Family Plot, 1976,  directed by Alfred Hitchcock; staring Bruce Dern, Barbara Harris, William Devane and Karen Black. A late-career black comedy from Hitchcock, it features a post-Jaws, pre-Star Wars score from John Williams – the only score he would do for Hitch. (I don’t have a count of how many Hitchcock films we saw in 2021, but his films would almost certainly be the most frequent director for us.) BTW, this has one of those fun Hitchcock-hosted trailers. You want to see this.

Sealed Cargo, 1951, directed by Alfred L. Werker; staring Dana Andrews, Claude Raines, and Carla Balenda. A fun World War II story of about an American fisherman (Andrews) going up against a German U-boat in a rather far-fetched story that also involves a square-rigged Danish ship. Along with seeing a lot of Hitchcock movies, we also saw a lot of fighting-the-Nazis movies as well.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters, 2019, directed by Michael Dougherty, staring Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Bradley Whitford, Sally Hawkins and Charles Dance. Part of the Titan series of monster films set in the common universe of the 2014 Godzilla reboot. There have been a number of films in this series, and we’ll be watching more of them before the year is out. I first saw King of the Monsters in the theater and wasn’t overly impressed. Then I listened to the audiobook of the novelization of the movie, and I started liking it a lot better. It has a fun cast with Vera Farmiga from Bates Motel, Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things, Bradley Whitford from Tick, Tick…BOOM!, and Charles Dance from Game of Thrones. Stupid fun, if you aren’t expecting too much from it. And with that, we are back to roughly where we started with 1976’s King Kong.

Coming up next: One of the most exciting noirs we saw in 2021

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What does the 1st Amendment and Freedom of Speech Really Mean?

Posted on March 18, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

The New York Times is getting a fair amount of static for the opening paragraph of their editorial about the First Amendment and free speech this morning. Here’s the headline and first two paragraphs:

America Has a Free Speech Problem

For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

This social silencing, this depluralizing of America, has been evident for years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear. It feels like a third rail, dangerous. For a strong nation and open society, that isdangerous.

There are certainly a lot of concerns today about free speech, but the central policy claim that we have a fundamental right to say what we want without “fear of being shamed or shunned” is something I would have hard time accepting from my commentary students.

Dr. Rosemary Pennington (who recently wrote a guest blog post here about media framing of the Russian war against Ukraine) points out that this is not at all what the 1st Amendment has to say:

Defense attorney and legal commentator Ken White, who tweets under the handle @Popehat, gives a scathing analysis of just the first paragraph of the Times’ editorial:

@popehat /12 In other words, it's nonsensical to say that an audience's response should be evaluated for decency, proportionality, fairness, kindness, and "speech encouragement," but the initial speaker's speech shouldn't be.

 

 

 

 

Dr. Jeremy Littau of Lehigh University points out the absurdity of the editorial by looking at things the Times has written in the past:

Alissa Wilkinson, a senior culture reporter and critic for Vox.com and a tenured associate professor at King’s College in New York City, points out the absurdity of the Times’ arguments:

And for those of you, like me, who do not have James 3 from the Bible memorized, here would seem to be the relevant portion:

James 3: 5-12 NIV

5 Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. 6 The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.

7 All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by mankind, 8 but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.

9 With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. 10 Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be. 11 Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? 12 My brothers and sisters, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water.

So if you use this NY Times editorial in either a commentary or media literacy class, here are some discussion questions to start with:

  1. What protection does the 1st Amendment provide us with?
  2. Does freedom of speech imply freedom from criticism? Why or why not?
  3. Why should someone speaking critically be protected from responding criticism?
  4. What responsibility do we have for what we say in public? In private?

What are your thoughts on this editorial?

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Media News on Twitter: Journalist killed in Ukraine, disinformation, Disney v. Employees on gay rights & TV news

Posted on March 14, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

American journalist/documentarian killed covering war in Ukraine

Disinformation on war in Ukraine being presented as fact checking

Disney top management and Disney employees have very different outlooks on Florida’s “Don’t say gay” law.

Big Three TV network news shows get far more viewers than cable news

And finally – The perfect live shot story from Poland

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Old movies don’t always seem that old: A Year in Movies 2021 – Part 5

Posted on March 1, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

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.

Casablanca

Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, perhaps the most perfect movie ever made.

I always think of “old movies” being movies from the 1930s or 40s – the ones that were old to me when I first got really interested in films in the 1970s or 80s. I mean, my Dear Wife and I had our second date at a campus movie series showing of Casablanca back in the spring of 1981. Casablanca came out in 1942, so it was 39 years old when we first saw it. Which seemed pretty old to 21-year-old us. The movies we’re going to look at today date from 1937 until 1981 – So they will all be older now than “old movie” Casablanca  was on that second date… (I guess since Dear Wife and I will have been married 40 years this summer, we are also old…)

When we left off last time, we had been watching an adaptation of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. And we will start off this time with another Kipling story – 1937’s Captain’s Courageous, directed by Victor Fleming and staring Spencer Tracy, Lionel Barrymore, and Melvyn Douglas.

Freddie Bartholomew plays the snotty rich kid who falls off a steam ship crossing the Atlantic while getting sick after drinking too many milkshakes. He is rescued by a Grand Banks cod fishing boat that doesn’t have a radio on it. The boat, of course, can’t take him to port until it’s full up with fish. Tracy won an Academy Award for Best Actor for playing the fisherman who teaches Bartholomew’s character how to be a human being. Mum-in-law watched it with me but thought it was way too sentimental. I, of course, loved it. (I listened to an audiobook of Kipling’s original story not too long ago as well.)

Next up, we have 1981’s Eyewitness, directed by Peter Yates; starring William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, and Christopher Plummer. Dear Wife and I likely saw this first when it was new, but it’s now 41-years old, so … officially an old movie. Eyewitness is a mystery/thriller, and it doesn’t bear looking too deeply at the plot, having little connection with reality. But it does have a horse stampede in downtown Manhattan, so it’s all good fun. (There is not a current home video version as far as I can tell, but it shows up occasionally on Turner Classic Movies.)

White Christmas, 1954, directed by Michael Curtiz (of Casablanca fame); starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen. It also stars the songs of Irving Berlin. Wonderful silliness about a pair of song-and-dance men who meet up with a couple of song-and-dance women who decide to put on a show together. It is in many ways a remake of the Bing Crosby flick Holiday Inn, but unlike Holiday Inn, White Christmas isn’t afflicted by an incredibly racist minstrel show. Great songs, great dancing, enormous fun.  (For those interested, it was shot in larger-format VistaVision.)

Bell, Book & Candle, 1958, directed by Richard Quine; starring Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak, Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs, Hermione Gringold, and Elsa Lanchester. Novak plays a witch who casts a literal spell on Stewart in this supernatural romantic comedy. The joy of this film comes not so much from the silly plot as from seeing all these great performers come together in a story that helped inspire the 1960s TV series Bewitched (as did the 1942 I Married a Witch that we’ll get to later).

We close out this group with the 1976 mystery/comedy Murder By Death, directed by Robert Moore. It was written by playwright Neil Simon and has an all-star cast of Eileen Brennan, Truman Capote, James Coco, Peter Falk, Alec Guinness, Elsa Lanchester (whom we just saw in Bell, Book & Candle!), David Niven, Peter Sellers, Maggie Smith and Nancy Walker. If you’ve seen 1985’s Clue, you’ve essentially seen this movie. Strangers arrive at a house for a mysterious weekend and end up getting murdered one by one. It’s a movie that doesn’t call on you to think to deeply – just enjoy the silly ride. (Note: Contains one of the horrid yellowface performances Hollywood was so fond of.)

Coming Attractions: From 1976’s King Kong to 2019’s Godzilla King of the Monsters

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