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.

Will the real "Mr Arkadin" please stand up?

For the podcast's first foray into audio noir, we tip our hat to Orson Welles - whose birthday it was this past week - and look at the strange case of his noir maudit, MR ARKADIN. Also released as CONFIDENTIAL REPORT, we will consider the many iterations of the film (following in the path of Jonathan Rosenbaum's seminal essay, The Seven Arkadins, first published in Film Comment magazine in 1992). Incredibly, the various versions - including radio dramas and novelisations as well as variant edits of the film, has now risen to a total of 10 separate Arkadins!

We will also present the full audio drama from which the film was primarily derived, Man of Mystery, one of 8 (or 9) episodes that Welles was known to have written for his The Lives of Harry Lime radio series (first heard round the world from 1951 to 1952). 

The entire Harry Lime series of 52 half hour episodes is available for download from the Internet Archive at this link: https://archive.org/details/TheLivesOfHarryLime

To read Rosenbaum's original essay, please visit his homepage at this link: jonathanrosenbaum.net/

David Fincher's seminal neo-noir thriller SEVEN is now thirty years old. A surprise commercial success and critical hit, this dark, powerful, densely-layered and genuinely scary and challenging thriller proved to be a hugely influential Neo-noir.

And then, there was that box ...

To celebrate, Sergio is joined by Dr Laura Mee, Principal Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Hertfordshire. She primarily researches horror cinema and adaptation and is the author of two books: Reanimated: The Contemporary American Horror Remake (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and a book on THE SHINING in the Devil's Advocates series (Liverpool University Press, 2017). Dr Mee has written on films including AMERICAN PSYCHO, ROOM 237, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE and The Conjuring series.

She is the co-founder and co-convener of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies' Horror Studies group, a UK network of horror scholars who host regular online events on a wide range of horror topics - you can find more information at baftsshorror.weebly.com. With colleagues Shellie McMurdo and Kate Egan, she is the co-editor of the Hidden Horror Histories book series from Liverpool University Press. (https://liverpooluniversitypress.blog/2023/10/27/hidden-horror-histories-call-for-proposals/)

Dr Laura Mee research profile: https://researchprofiles.herts.ac.uk/en/persons/laura-mee

Before such monstrous miscreants as  Ernst Stavro Blofeld, The Joker, Hannibal Lecter and Bellatrix Lestrange besmirched page and screen, perhaps the greatest supervillain of them all was Dr Mabuse. Hell-bent on world domination, his devilish plans were chronicled in books and movies throughout most of the 20th century. And now he's back in a brand new box set bringing together his six dastardly movie appearance from the 1960s, courtesy of Eureka video in their Masters of Cinema series.

https://eurekavideo.co.uk/movie/mabuse-lives-limited-edition-box-set/

To celebrate I am joined by David Kalat, the world's foremost authority on the mad doctor and his schemes, in a special edition of the podcast spanning some 100 years of movie mayhem.

David Kalat is a film historian and a forensic technologist. He has contributed audio commentaries to the home video editions of numerous classic movies, written extensively for Turner Classic Movies and other publications. In 1997, he founded the independent DVD label All Day Entertainment, to rescue and promote motion pictures whose artistic value, historic importance, and all-around entertainment value merit a second-chance in the commercial marketplace. David Kalat also partners with other media companies such as Eureka, Kino-Lorber, the Criterion Collection, Classic Media, and others to bring the same attention to important films from around the world. He is the author of numerous books on film history, including The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse.

https://www.alldayentertainment.com/publications

Our offices will be closed during the Easter period so we can take a small holiday and recharge the little grey cells. But we won't be gone for long and we have lots of special episodes all lined up and ready to go. 

To whet your appetite, here are previews from some forthcoming episodes including ones dedicated to boxing movies, Westerns and Noir scepticism, the various versions of BLADE RUNNER (and its sequel, BLADE RUNNER 2049), the radio origins of Orson Welles' MR ARKADIN ... and much more!

Tipping My Fedora will be back on April 27th with an edition featuring Dr Laura Mee, who will be taking a deep dive into David Fincher's 1995 neo-noir classic, SEVEN.

But until then ... take it easy and don't lose your heads down those dark streets of Noir City. 

And as Patrick McGoohan used to say, be seeing you!

Sergio is joined by novelist, blogger and podcaster Jim Noy to enthuse about the work of writer Jim Thompson, the sui generis maestro of 50s and 60's Noir. We explore some of Thompson's major themes, his often psychopathic protagonists and his horrifying and frequently surreal endings - and look in detail at such classic books as The Killers Inside Me, A Hell of a Woman, The Grifters, After Dark, My Sweet and Pop. 1280 (all of which have been filmed)

Jim Thompson's crime fiction bibliography includes the following novels:

Jim Noy is a maths supremo and a novelist - he made his debut with The Red Death Murders, which was published during the Covid lockdown and is a highly imaginative whodunit set sometime in the past during the plague imagined by Edgar Allan Poe for his classic story, 'The Masque of Red Death.' It is available in print and e-book editions via Amazon: 

www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Death-Murders-Jim-Noy/dp/B09SKY58WV

He also blogs about crime fiction at The Invisible Event: 

https://theinvisibleevent.com/.

He also hosts his own podcast, In GAD We Trust:  https://theinvisibleevent.com/category/in-gad-we-trust/

Welcome back for the second half of Sergio's conversation with Simon Brown about the Michael Winner / Charles Bronson Death Wish trilogy - today's focus is on the first two sequels, produced by Cannon in the 1980s.

We look at what the sequels added to, and detracted from, this popular cycle of revenge films extending the success of the first and most distinguished entry in  the series. 

The first part of this podcast can be found at this link: https://tippingmyfedora.podbean.com/e/14-death-wish-1974-with-simon-brown/

Simon Brown, currently lecturing in film at Northumbria University, is 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 (University of Exeter Press, 2016) and Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television (University of Texas Press, 2018).

Spoiler warning - we pretty much give away the endings of both the films being discussed.

Sergio is joined today by Simon Brown for the first of a two-part look at the trio of Death Wish films that were directed by Michael Winner and starred Charles Bronson.   

One of the key releases of the 1970s, Michael Winner’s 1974 box office smash, Death Wish, starred Charles Bronson as a man driven to murderous reprisals after a violent assault that left his wife dead and their daughter an emotional wreck. Adapted from the 1972 novel by Brian Garfield, it crystallised an emerging trend of films featuring disillusioned individuals who turn to violence as a way to deal with the chaos in which they find themselves.

Joining me to discuss this seminal and highly controversial work is 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 (University of Exeter Press, 2016) and Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television (University of Texas Press, 2018).

Spoiler warning: please note, we do explore the film, and its ending, in considerable detail. 

As a tribute to the late David Lynch, Sergio is joined by special guest Dr Lindsay Hallam, Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of East London to discuss his work in the Noir context.

Dr Hallam is author of the books Screening the Marquis de Sade and a Devil's Advocates volume on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and has written several articles and book chapters on the works of David Lynch.

She has also contributed audio commentaries and essays for Blu-Rays released by such labels as Arrow, Severin, Second Sight, Umbrella, Eureka, 88 Films, Indicator and Vinegar Syndrome. She is also the co-host of SciFrights, a movie podcast from the Interzone where horror meets science fiction

https://rss.com/podcasts/scifrights/

We explore the way that Lynch used the motifs, tropes and visual signifiers associated with Film Noir in so many of his films. Those discussed include: 

BLUE VELVET (1986)

WILD AT HEART (1990)

TWIN PEAKS (1990-91)

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

LOST HIGHWAY (1997)

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

For more information on Dr Lindsay Hallam, please visit:

www.uel.ac.uk/about-uel/staff/lindsay-anne-hallam

https://lindsayhallam5.wixsite.com/website

Screening the Marquis de Sade: Pleasure, Pain and the Transgressive Body in Film www.amazon.co.uk/Screening-Marquis-Sade-Pleasure-Transgressive/dp/0786462965/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=

Twin Peaks: Fire Walks with Me (Devil's Advocates series): www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781911325642