We’ve seen many attempts at transferring Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and its variants onto the screen, but none of them capture the spirit of the original quite like Excalibur, John Boorman’s 1981 film that can be called, without insult, “aggressively two-dimensional.” Join us for a conversation about how Boorman makes the experience of watching a film like the experience of reading the legends. We also talk about the two best portrayals of King Arthur: Nigel Terry and Graham Chapman.

If the conversation makes you want to read the original material, you can find a great edition of Le Morte d’Arthur here.

Incredible bumper music by John Deley.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Check out Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day.

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In a film in which the audience buys its tickets knowing who will play the title role, what happens when you don’t have him enter the frame until a solid hour has passed? How does the focus shift from the horrific villain to the horror felt by his victims? Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler (1968) isn’t a faithful retelling of Albert DeSalvo’s crimes or an explanation of his compulsion: he’s not Raskolnikov or Buffalo Bill. Instead, the film masterfully involves its viewers in the procedure of the hunt before throwing them into what feels like a separate one-act play, a conclusion in which nothing is concluded.

Gerold Frank’s The Boston Strangler was the basis for the film: you can find the book here.

Incredible bumper music by John Deley.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Check out Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day.

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Flannery O’Connor said that stories about pious children tend to be false. She’s right, of course, but she doesn’t even say the half of it: stories about children in general tend to be false. The kids are always too brave, self-aware, or smart; they’re like the children in medieval paintings who look like miniature adults. If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952) by the Argentine director Carlos Hugo Christensen is the exception: it’s one of the best portrayals of childhood in film history as well as a truly disturbing thriller.

If this film has piqued your interest in Argentine noir, check out David George and Gizella Meneses’ Argentine Cinema: From Noir to Neo-Noir to read more about this fascinating genre.

Incredible bumper music by John Deley.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. You can also check out Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day.

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Our episode on Moonstruck (1987) was almost never made: as with Manchester By the Sea, Dan harbored an irrational suspicion against it–but when he finally saw it, he sought forgiveness for the errors of his ways. That’s an appropriate theme to consider in light of a film saturated with Italian Catholicism that explores themes of sin and redemption, but with a light touch and in a celebratory mode. It’s a terrific film that couldn’t be made today; listen to the show to learn why.

Ira Wells’s Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life is the 2021 biography of the director who worked with almost every A-list star but who also had to often battle the studios to pursue his projects.

Incredible bumper music by John Deley.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network.

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Love and Mercy

A film by Bill Pohlad

Love and Mercy (2014) is a film that shows how the sausage is made, in terms of both the music and the man. We get to see Brian Wilson’s Kubrick-like devotion to getting Pet Sounds exactly like he wants it, as well as his becoming a whole person through the force of his future wife.

The film is a nightmare version of Peter Pan, examining a boy who won’t grow up until he finds the two things mentioned in the title. We all know from history that he does, but the film still keeps us in suspense over whether or not Wilson will make it out of a prison he has unwittingly helped to create.

Brian Wilson’s 2017 memoir, I Am Brian Wilson, is a perfect companion piece to Love and Mercy.

Incredible bumper music by John Deley.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network. 

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American Gangster (2007) is Ridley Scott’s homage to The French Connection: it’s got the right cars, clothes, and colors and is based on another true story of an obsessed cop trying to take down a drug kingpin. The feature (or the bug, depending on how you look at it) is Denzel Washington in the title role. Is an actor so charismatic that everyone talks as if they are on a first-name basis with him actually a liability in a movie that wants to tell a story of a large-scale heroin dealer who, in the movie’s first scene, burns a man alive? Can an actor’s star power ever backfire?

John McCarty’s Bullets Over Hollywood (Grand Central Publishing, 2005) traces the gangster film and explores the enduring appeal of the genre.

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Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network.

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The eighth installment in one of the most entertaining franchises ever made, The Final Reckoning is Tom Cruise’s Return of the King. Whether it suffers from too much exposition is a matter of taste (and debated by the hosts), but both agree that the movie does what only its star can do: deliver thrills that derive from both the plot and the knowledge that what they are seeing is, in some sense, real. Buster Keaton, Jackie Chan, and Tom Cruise all make themselves as much of a character in the films as the fictional people they are portraying, which puts the viewer in a strange and wonderful place. Tom Cruise has saved the world yet again, and may (as Steven Spielberg told him) have saved the industry.

Want to read about the first film in the franchise? Renowned film editor Paul Hersch’s memoir, A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away: My Fifty Years Editing Hollywood Hits–Star Wars, Carrie, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Mission: Impossible, and More details his working with Brian DePalma on the first of the eight MI films.

Incredible bumper music by John Deley.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network.

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Caper movies aren’t like others involving criminals: there’s an aesthetic to a caper that’s as important to the thieves as it is to the viewers. Heist is David Mamet’s 2001 caper film that stands as his Singin’ in the Rain—an apt comparison, since “caper” meant “to dance” long before it took on its criminal meaning. Join us for an appreciation of one of Gene Hackman’s best yet least-discussed performances and of Mamet’s highly unrealistic dialogue. (Yes, you read that correctly–and we love David Mamet.)

David Mamet’s short book On Directing Film is a great companion to Heist.

Incredible bumper music by John Deley.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find our over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network. 

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It’s our 300th episode and we honor a listener request for this milestone. The Fisher King (1991) could not be made today–not because of politics or cultural changes, but because it’s impossible to neatly classify. A love story, a tale of redemption, a disturbing study of psychosis, a romantic comedy, and an Artthurian quest, the film combines genres in ways that some audiences–or at least producers–might not appreciate. But the film is hilarious, frightening, and ultimately affirming of its two lead characters’ decisions to abandon their despair and find meaning in their lives.

Interested in reading about Terry Gilliam? Check out this collection of interviews from the University of Mississippi Press.

Incredible bumper music by John Deley.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find our hundreds of episodes here on the New Books Network or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies.

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“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” So said W. H. Auden and so we see demonstrated in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), which boldly employs every convention of the horror film in order to achieve a stunning, authentic portrait of a disturbing mind at work. But Mark is no ordinary slasher: he’s an artist who is also a perfectionist and whose compulsion to destroy is like the compulsion to create. As Mark gives his all for the sake of his art, so did Michael Powell, whose reputation never recovered from the scandal of this film. It was released in the same year as Psycho, which it resembles, yet the two audiences across the Atlantic had very different reactions to their homegrown killers.

The University Press of Mississippi offers an excellent series of collected interviews. Here’s their volume on Michael Powell.

Incredible bumper music by John Deley.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find our hundreds of episodes here on the New Books Network or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies.

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