Today we launch headlong into the erotic thriller genre with a very deep dive into the 1992 box office smash, Basic Instinct. Starring Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone, written by Joe Eszterhas and directed by Paul Verhoeven, this gaudy and controversial Neo Noir has many strong links to Hitchcock's Vertigo. To discuss this film and more, Sergio is joined by very special guest, Rebecca McCallum.

N.B. The podcast, recorded in February 2025, includes huge spoilers - and gives away the ending to Basic Instinct and Vertigo too!

Rebecca is a writer, speaker and creator/host of Talking Hitchcock, a podcast that explores the work and the world of her favourite director. The podcast covers deep dives on Hitchcock’s films as well as topic driven discussions on everything in the Hitchcockian universe. She curates, hosts and speaks at Hitchcock screenings and festivals up and down the UK and has written about the director’s films both online and in print for many publications including Fangoria, Grim Journal, Hemlock Books and MovieJawn. She has presented at Hitch Con, the largest international Hitchcock conference of its kind and co-hosted a Hitchcock programme on BBC Radio.

Talking Hitchcock Podcast:

Listen to Talking Hitchcock Podcast here: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/rebecca-mccallum/

Instagram/Bluesky: @talkinghitchpod

Linktree https://linktr.ee/PendlePumpkin to Read/Listen to Rebecca's Work: Rebecca McCallum | Twitter @hitch_pod

Find and Follow Rebecca

Instagram: @pendlepumpkin

James Harrison of Film Noir UK joins Sergio to preview the 2025 Film Noir Fest, which is taking place from 31 October to 2 November at the Plaza Cinema in Weston-Super-Mare. This year's theme is heist movies and highlights include screenings of:

Kubrick's KILLER'S KISS (1955) and THE KILLING (1956), Huston's THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), Siodmak's CRISS CROSS (1949), Dassin's RIFIFI (1955) and Tarantino's RESERVOIR DOGS (1992).  

There is also a retrospective dedicated to crime films starring Ida Lupino, including HIGH SIERRA (1941), ROAD HOUSE (1948), ON DANGEROUS GROUND (1951), BEWARE, MY LOVELY (1952) and WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS (1956). In addition there will be a silent Heritage Noir double bill with a live score by Neil Brand and screenings of British thrillers courtesy of Talking Pictures TV / Renown.

For full details about the festival and tickets, visit the homepage of Film Noir UK: https://ti.to/film-noir-uk/filmnoirfest2025

Sergio is joined by blogger Aidan Brack, of Mysteries Ahoy, for an in-depth look at Akira Kurosawa's classic 1963 suspense thriller, High and Low. This seems like the perfect time to look back at the film with the release of Spike Lee's remake, Highest 2 Lowest, starring Denzel Washington.

Adapted from King's Ransom - the tenth volume in Ed McBain's series of police procedurals featuring the cops of the 87th Precinct - Sergio and Aidan look at the original book, its 1962 American TV adaptation and Kurosawa's extraordinary film version. 

Aidan Brack is a public librarian with a love of mystery fiction. He started his blog, Mysteries Ahoy! in late 2017 as a way to connect with other fans of mysteries and to catalogue his experiences with the genre. Since then, he has shared his thoughts on over 600 books, 100 film and television productions, as well as the occasional radio drama. His father is crime novelist, Graham Brack.

Aidan enjoys reading and writing about many different types of mystery fiction, including works in translation. He has a particular interest in inverted mysteries - stories in which the culprit's identity is known to the reader from near the start.

You can find his writing at www.mysteriesahoy.com

For more info on author Graham Brack, visit: https://grahambrackauthor.com/

To watch the 1962 TV version of King's Ransom, visit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5sTB0_UyEc

Following on from the first part last week, Sergio and Sheldon Hall reunite for a second bout of Film Noir scepticism. How well does Sergio stand up to Sheldon's stinging and relentless criticism?

The genres being considered include Westerns, Horror, Science Fiction and the work of Alfred Hitchcock. 

To listen to the first part of the podcast, visit:

The titles being considered, in chronological order, include:

THE SEVENTH VICTIM (Robson, 1944)

WHISPERING SMITH (Fenton, 1948)

ROPE (Hitchcock, 1948)

WINCHESTER 73 (Mann, 1950)

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (Siegel, 1956)

VERTIGO (Hitchcock, 1958)

Sheldon Hall is an Emeritus Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. A former film journalist and lecturer, he is the author of Zulu: With Some Guts Behind It (2005/2014) and Armchair Cinema: A History of Feature Films on British Television, 1929-1981 (2024), co-author of Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (2010), and co-editor of Widescreen Worldwide (2010) and Film Critics and British Film Culture: New Shots in the Dark (2025). In addition, he has contributed chapters and articles on British and American film history to numerous books and journals and interviews to many Blu-ray special editions of films including, most recently, Sirk in Germany (1934-35), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Black Tuesday (1954), H.M.S. Defiant (1962) and Juggernaut (1974)

At the beginning of every podcast, Sergio asks his guests to give their definition of Film Noir, a notoriously difficult assignment. This week, in the first of a two-part episode, Dr Sheldon Hall, long-time friend to Sergio and the podcast, picks holes in the host's own attempts to define the term. 

They consider two genres, screwball comedy and the gangster movie, and look to see how well they overlap with Film Noir, along with the 1931 version version of The Maltese Falcon, starring Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade.

The films under discussions, in chronological order, include the following:

UNDERWORLD (Von Sternberg, 1927)

THE MALTESE FALCON (Del Ruth, 1931)

TWO SECONDS (Le Roy, 1932)

THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK (Sturges, 1944)

WONDER MAN (Humberstone, 1945) 

Sheldon Hall is an Emeritus Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. A former film journalist and lecturer, he is the author of Zulu: With Some Guts Behind It (2005/2014) and Armchair Cinema: A History of Feature Films on British Television, 1929-1981 (2024), co-author of Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (2010), and co-editor of Widescreen Worldwide (2010) and Film Critics and British Film Culture: New Shots in the Dark (2025). In addition, he has contributed chapters and articles on British and American film history to numerous books and journals and interviews to many Blu-ray special editions of films including, most recently, Sirk in Germany (1934-35), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Black Tuesday (1954), H.M.S. Defiant (1962) and Juggernaut (1974).

Next week, in part 2 of our conversation, we look at Western, Horror, Science Fiction, and Hitchcock varieties of Film Noir. 

The 1988 live action and animation hybrid, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, can certainly lay claim to being the most unusual Film Noir yet featured on Tipping My Fedora. A 1940s murder mystery set in a parallel universe in which humans and cartoons co-exist, it was a huge gamble for the studio and its director, Robert Zemeckis, hot off the success of the first Back to the Future movie. The gamble paid off however, both critically and at the box office, but how well does its technical wizardry stand up today?

Joining me to discuss this highly unusual Neo-Noir is my very good friend Simon Brown, an independent scholar who specialises in early film history, horror, adaptation studies and film technology.

He is the author of Cecil Hepworth and the Rise of The British Film Industry (Uni of Exeter Press, 2016) and Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television (uni of Texas Press, 2018). He is currently working on a book about director Robert Zemeckis.

The great film composer and songwriter David Shire turns 88 today. To celebrate, I am joined by film music historian John Leman Riley to look at some of Shire's classic 1970s Neo-Noir music scores, including:

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (Sargent, 1974)

THE CONVERSATION (Coppola, 1974)

FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (Richards, 1975)

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (Pakula, 1976)

For more information about the life and work of David Shire, please visit his homepage at: http://davidshiremusic.com/

John Leman Riley’s career has embraced photography, librarianship, archiving, teaching and lecturing, academic writing and editing, as well as journalism, reviewing, exhibition catalogues, CD and DVD notes and the like. Often focusing on film and film music, classical music, and Eastern European culture, he has been published by Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh University Presses, Routledge, Greenwood, BFI, Rough Guides and others.

Highlights include Dmitri Shostakovich: a Life in Film (Tauris), Discover Film Music (Naxos) for which he curated two accompanying CDs of excerpts, Sound at the Film Society, (“The Sound of the Silents in Britain”, OUP), Keeping the Icons on the Wall: Shostakovich’s Cinema and Concert Music (“Dmitrij Šostakovič tra Musica, Letteratura e Cinema”, Leo S Olschki), Soviet Cinema: Between Art and Propaganda (Cité de la Musique, Paris, and Caja Madrid), Stalin (and Lenin) at the Movies (“Contemplating Shostakovich: Life Music and Film”, Ashgate), and Live Cinema: Silent Film, Orchestral Accompaniment and the Special Event (“Archival Film Festivals”, Edinburgh UP).

He regularly writes for and is Reviews Editor of the DSCH Journal (www.dschjournal.com) and was the English Language editor for Apparatus Journal (https://www.apparatusjournal.net/index.php/apparatus).

In From the Woods to the Cosmos, on the Severin BluRay release of Viy, he discusses Russian and Soviet horror and sci-fi cinema.

Commissioned by the South Bank Centre, he wrote, produced and directed Shostakovich: My Life in Film, telling the story of the composer’s film career with an orchestra playing the scores to film clips. Shostakovich was played by Simon Russell-Beale in London and, at the Komische Oper, Berlin, by Ulrich Matthes (Goebbels in Der Untergang).

He writes at https://johnlemanriley.substack.com/

Film and music historian John Leman Riley is back and joins me for a discussion of some of the great Neo-Noir scores composed by Ennio Morricone, Michael Small and Jerry Goldsmith.

In this episode we focus on four great films and their soundtracks:

THE SICILIAN CLAN (Verneuil, 1969) - music by Ennio Morricone

THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (Argento, 1970) - music by Ennio Morricone

KLUTE (Pakula, 1971) - music by Michael Small

CHINATOWN (Polanski, 1974) - music by Jerry Goldsmith

John’s career has embraced photography, librarianship, archiving, teaching and lecturing, academic writing and editing, as well as journalism, reviewing, exhibition catalogues, CD and DVD notes and the like. Often focusing on film and film music, classical music, and Eastern European culture, he has been published by Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh University Presses, Routledge, Greenwood, BFI, Rough Guides and others.

Highlights include Dmitri Shostakovich: a Life in Film (Tauris), Discover Film Music (Naxos) for which he curated two accompanying CDs of excerpts, Sound at the Film Society, (“The Sound of the Silents in Britain”, OUP), Keeping the Icons on the Wall: Shostakovich’s Cinema and Concert Music (“Dmitrij Šostakovič tra Musica, Letteratura e Cinema”, Leo S Olschki), Soviet Cinema: Between Art and Propaganda (Cité de la Musique, Paris, and Caja Madrid), Stalin (and Lenin) at the Movies (“Contemplating Shostakovich: Life Music and Film”, Ashgate), and Live Cinema: Silent Film, Orchestral Accompaniment and the Special Event (“Archival Film Festivals”, Edinburgh UP).

He regularly writes for and is Reviews Editor of the DSCH Journal (www.dschjournal.com) and was the English Language editor for Apparatus Journal (https://www.apparatusjournal.net/index.php/apparatus).

In From the Woods to the Cosmos, on the Severin BluRay release of Viy, he discusses Russian and Soviet horror and sci-fi cinema.

Commissioned by the South Bank Centre, he wrote, produced and directed Shostakovich: My Life in Film, telling the story of the composer’s film career with an orchestra playing the scores to film clips. Shostakovich was played by Simon Russell-Beale in London and, at the Komische Oper, Berlin, by Ulrich Matthes (Goebbels in Der Untergang).

He writes at https://johnlemanriley.substack.com/

Sergio is joined today by podcast buddy Brad Friedman to discuss two of Alfred Hitchcock's first engagements with American Film Noir: the Gothic romance Rebecca (1940) and the dark small-town psycho-thriller, Shadow of a Doubt (1943).   

Brad blogs about Golden Age mystery books and movies at Ah Sweet Mystery: https://ahsweetmystery.com/

Spoiler alert: the plots for both these films, including their respective endings, are explored in great detail. 

Boxing features in more Hollywood movies than any other sport - and this was certainly true in the era of classic Film Noir. Where does this fascination come from - and how have Noir boxing movies rung the changes over the decades?

Sergio is joined by Steve Hunt, host of the superb Boxing Movie Podcast and author of the new book, Heavyweight Title Fights of the 1980s: A Complete History. Together they look at five of Steve's favourite noir boxing films. 

KID GALAHAD (Curtiz, 1937)

THE SET-UP (Wise, 1949)

CHAMPION (Robson, 1949)

KILLER'S KISS (Kubrick, 1955)

THE HARDER THEY FALL (Robson, 1956)

To listen to Steve podcast, please visit: https://boxingmoviepodcast.alitu.com/

You can find his homepage at this link: https://www.stevehuntboxing.com/

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-boxing-movie-podcast/id1742325024

Steve's book, Heavyweight Title Fights of the 1980s: A Complete History, is now available in paperback and on Kindle from Amazon in the UK (https://shorturl.at/h02Bc) and from McFarland (https://shorturl.at/8i5ll) in the US.